Resolve back to Premiere output issues

I'm still getting my feet wet re grading for clients and encountered a few problems in the round trip from Premiere to Resolve and back .

I just finished 2 jobs: One was a 30 min doc and the other just a 5 min industrial , but both were cut in premiere then sent to me for grading after which I returned the footage to the Editor to finish in Premiere.
Basically the grading went very well , but I encountered a few different problems with Premiere during this and I intend to get back soon with the editors to figure out what the issues were. Obviously I can't ask you guys to troubleshoot the Premiere setups that I haven't even looked at yet , but I'm wondering if anyone might have some ideas that could point me in the right directions when I do .

So here are the issues .
1 - Final Output from Premiere is flatter than my grade:
I like to grade in a timeline set to 709-A so that the images on my Mac look close to what I'm getting on my Flanders monitor. I find this comforting. The Flanders is being fed by the Davinci UltraStudio Mini Monitor so it is getting the correct 709 Gamma 2.4. Because many of my projects are just going to the web (youtube/Vimeo) I'm also in the habit of outputting to 709-A and sending that directly to the Web and that looks as I expect it it.

Since they were only going to the web I sent 709-A to my clients who then put it back in Premiere and added titles etc before outputting their shows. I don't know what their setups were in Premiere, but when I looked at the 30min doc on Youtube it looked terrible. It wasn't so much flat as the video levels were low as if you were watching through an ND filter.
Its not a final version yet so its not a big deal yet , but I want to figure out what's going on and suspect the editor won't know too much as he didn't complain to me immediately.
- Any iders about what could cause this? What settings in premiere I should look at?
-Is the problem that I sent him 709-A . Should I have sent him a version in standard 709 gamma 2.4 so Premiere would treat it as any camera original and let him worry about how to output for the web?

I might have a similar issues with the short industrial . Though I haven't seen it yet the editor told me that his export looked flatter than what I sent him .

Is Premiere perhaps setup already to export a lower gamma for the web so that we're basically flattening twice?

2 - The other issue is odder. The short industrial was shot properly in UHD 10bit slog3 on an A7siii by me and cut by the director who is experienced but not very technical. Before grading I requested an HD export of the finished edit in ProRes 422HQ including dissolves and fades but without titles just as I had with the 30 min doc. I used scene detect on the doc and it worked great. I also got an XML and a drive with copies of all the originals in case I needed it .
Well a few minutes into the edit I noticed that some of my images were breaking up badly on skies and large areas with solid colors and fall off. Then I noticed that the histogram peaks were very odd and jagged. I went back to the originals and the histograms looked much better and grading did not produce any breakup . Apparently the export from Premiere had been compressed. However the editor swore up and down that he had not compressed anything and simply exported his timeline as a ProRes 1920x1080 file. (He also sent me a UHD version which looked just as bad, but i think that came from the HD timeline.)

- Any ideas about what might have been wrong in the Premiere set-up that editor could have missed?

Ultimately I graded copies of the original UHD files with the XML and it worked out fine, but we will work together again and I want to figure what went wrong in the handoff.

On the first issue, I think a proper viewing environment is key. Darren covers this nicely below.

The Rec.709-A tagging not something you should send to Premiere, it needs straight Rec.709.

A properly setup Flanders should work perfectly in standard Rec.709. Perhaps for working with a Premiere editor, trust that rather than your Mac monitor.

For the other question, I'd need to know the color space of the original and any color space settings in the editor's Premiere setup. Including "timeline" color space, which might more clearly be called monitor color space.

Premiere now takes each clip color space individually, applies any color changes made, and processes this with any conversion needed to the "timeline" color space.

The way they have clip color space settings ... which were in the Project panel Interpret Footage menu, but are moving to the Lumetri panel's new Color Settings tab (currently in public beta) ... it's more than a bit confusing where you set what.

Let alone what happens with any X you apply to any specific Y.

Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk

Jim , I don't know why you would bring up the color viewing environment as I don't think that has anything to do with my issues here. I have paid a great deal of attention to that though . The problem is that the editors who are adding titles and music to the graded footage I send them are spitting out something that looks different . Its an issue that's happening in premiere but may well be due to what I'm sending them.

Maybe I was too verbose in my description of the problem . It probably has to due with color tagging and gamma issues though and is located in how Premiere is processing what I send. I don't know premiere very well.

rNeil, Thanks I do only trust my Flanders but know that if I send a standard 709 file out to Youtube/Vimeo or Quicktime it looks different there, so I typically export a 709-A ( gamma tag 1-1-1 I believe) which translates perfectly to the web, Hence that's what i sent to the clients but as you mentioned it mat be the first source of error here especially as I am sending them ProRes which is typically not tagged 1-1-1. I don't know what Premiere is doing with those files , but I imagine its not expecting 1-1-1 /709-A.

I can easily re export as standard 709 but want to know where to look around in Premiere for these mismatches - i,e where are the color space settings in premiere. Only in one place, or is there more than one place to look . I'm entirely happy with my grading system in Resolve.

I realize I'm asking a question about Premiere on a Resolve forum though.

Questions # 2 is Likewise wondering if anyone knows why my client could have sent me compressed files without knowing it from Premiere. Where might we look for what went wrong?

Thanks Lenny