Blackmagic Forum

Dear Blackmagic,

On behalf of Resolve users everywhere I am requesting that you release a free standalone player similar to the Quicktime, or VLC players. As someone who uses Resolve on a regular basis I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to see the long hours put into grading a project ruined in seconds when your client opens it in VLC player and sees hue shift, way more saturation, crushed blacks, etc. We as an industry need an easily accessible free player that will properly represent the work being done in Resolve by colourists everywhere. The Blackmagic Media Express player represents the colour perfectly. If only there was a standalone version everyone could use!

Thanks for listening.
Pete

That's a nice idea, but useless: at the end of the day that clip will be played either over a tv (and if does not match you have a problem) or in internet, where you want to see what's happening and see if there is indeed an error.

Yes, this would only be of value if you knew they had an adequately calibrated monitor on which to view it.

Scratch Play has a free version.

Tero Ahlfors wrote:Scratch Play has a free version.

Where? Cannot find it on site.

Should I download Pro version? And use it as free player?

Also, there is a Telestream Switch Player

pff, how can you demand something free...

unless you have viewers watching on a calibrated monitor, your control of what they see is completely out of your hands, and, even if bm provided the finest of fine players, you'd still have variations of everything unless of course, it was on a calibrated monitor.

i think this has been the case since i entered the tv industry in the late 60's.

Tero Ahlfors wrote:Scratch Play has a free version.

Answer from support: The Free Play is no more. These days we have Play Pro for $ 19,= a month.

Leslie Wand wrote:unless you have viewers watching on a calibrated monitor, your control of what they see is completely out of your hands, and, even if bm provided the finest of fine players, you'd still have variations of everything unless of course, it was on a calibrated monitor.

Missing the point entirely as usual on this forum (waiting for Marc to barge in any second suggesting some multi-thousand-$ solution). If there is colour shifting on the same system, on a calibrated monitor, imagine how much worse it is on a random uncalibrated monitor. You want to minimise error caused by factors you have control over, and buggy video players can be replaced by proper ones for a "less bad" net result.

Personally, I think it's a better idea to make sure Resolve sets all the right metadata bits in exported files, and then make sure VLC and QuickTime play those correctly tagged files, correctly. I have read posts where people have set certain QT metadata bits using external file manipulation after the fact, which indicates that to some extent Resolve isn't writing out all the metadata correctly. VLC is open source and Apple now has an entire division dedicated to figuring out what "pro users" need, so getting fixes into those players should, even if difficult, be possible.

But for the time being it might be beneficial to have a reference player that makes a "best effort" attempt at rendering colours accurately on client computers, and at the very least doesn't have the aforementioned bugs that VLC and QT do.