Huge loss of saturation on exports for Youtube!

Hi everyone

I'm exporting about 80 short interviews from resolve, everything looks good in resolve and when I check in VLC after. But I sent to the client and they said it looks washed out. Turns our they were playing it in Quicktime. So I checked and it's awful, people look like ghosts. Mostly much less saturation, but also less contrast

Then I remembered having this issue before. I'd compensated by adding some saturation/contrast before export, but now I've got 80 little videos I'd rather not do that with. And it seems like a bodge!

I've uploaded a test to youtube, and it is much less saturated. Much worse on my mac than on a friends PC and android phone. It varies so much, but once out of Resolve it only looks correct in VLC. Once on Youtube it looks vastly under saturated on everything, even if a bit better on a PC than Mac

I'm a bit stumped, and advice would be great.

Just to add - I've been down the rabbit hole today with colour management and it seems many people are frustrated and confused!

I did find many people saying in Preferences tick 'Use Mac display for colour profiles' and then set your colour management set Timeline and output colour space to Rec709A.

I did this and then everything looked under saturated in Resolve. It now matches what I see on Youtube and in Quicktime, but not VLC.

So now do I need to just regrade everything to look right with these new settings? It feels counterintuitive, but it will mean what I see in Resolve will be very similar to what ends up on YouTube. But then if I do that, it will also look very oversaturated in VLC! It feels like you can't win

Any help greatly appreciated

Fact 1:

Any Mac Retina monitor computer will use their ColorSync utility for managing color. Which will use the scene transform specified in Rec.709 of 1.96, rather than the standard display transform of gamma 2.4.

QuickTime Player, Chrome and Safari will allow ColorSync to control the image. VLC and Firefox may at times do their own CM. So the image can vary between apps on one machine.

Fact 2:

You cannot create an image file that looks the same when displayed at two different gammas.

That is the problem you are hitting, and there really isn't a perfect fix.

And realistically, all screens will vary anyway, the bane of the colorists trade. Which is why many colorists specify specific screens as the only ones to be used when judging the grade.

You can try explaining why QuickTime Player on a Mac is not displaying a correct image. Sometimes that works.

Oh ... if their Mac has HDTV as an option for display color, have them select that for Rec.709 media rather than the Rec.709 option. As with the HDTV option, ColorSync actually uses gamma 2.4.

Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk

The lesson I learned in school is that you can only judge the image on a calibrated display. How it looks anywhere else is beyond your control.

Sorry for my slow reply, things got a bit hectic

Yes I've been researching it all and it seems that you just can't trust what things will look like. Even if you have a calibrated display and it looks right, it will still look different on different players, browsers, hosting sites etc. It's very frustrating!

I did find out that VLC is not colour managed, and neither is Resolve unless you go to preferences and click the thing that says 'enable Mac viewers' or something like that. (this is only for Mac users), and then it lets the Mac control the colour. When I tick this, what I see in resolve is the same as what I see in Quicktime or preview, YouTube etc after. This is what all Youtube videos say to do

But I wasn't very happy with this, partly as I would have to regrade everything so it looked 'right', and if sharing a project with someone else it could get confusing.

I actually found one comment in a Youtube video that I have used for now, although I don't know if it's ideal. On the Deliver page, for colour space tag, I choose P3-DCI, and gamma tag I choose 'Rec709-A).

So the P3-DCI if basically what I'm seeing on my monitor. When I choose these settings the export looks very similar to what I see in Resolve, when in Quicktime, preview and Youtube etc.

So for now I'm doing this. But maybe there are pitfalls with this too! For now it works

Now I have to take another drink! Read these:

"Grading for Mixed Delivery: Cinema, Home, and Every Screen in Between" by Cullen Kelly
https://blog.frame.io/2019/10/14/gradin ... -delivery/

"How to Deal with Levels: Full vs. Video" by Dan Swierenga
https://www.thepostprocess.com/2019/09/ ... l-vs-video

and
"A Deeper Look at Consistent Color with QuickTime Tags From Resolve To YouTube & Vimeo on Wide Gamut Apple Monitors" by Dan Swierenga
https://www.thepostprocess.com/2020/07/ ... ktime-tags

and I think they cover the issues and the solutions very well. Understanding color management is also helpful:

"Color Management for Video Editors"
https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video ... o-editors/

My simple method: always export a second or two of SMPTE color bars at the very head of the project, and then check them on scopes in whatever player you're using to see how it looks. If there's a shift (video level or hue or chroma), you'll see it very quickly in bars.

Note that the same image will look different on different browsers, different operating systems, different laptops, and different desktop displays. It's even worse when the displays are not calibrated. Sound has similar issues.

We loan our client a (somewhat-) calibrated iPad Pro set to Apple's so-called "reference Rec709/BT1886" levels, and guarantee the project will look good on that and the calibrated displays in our room. Beyond that... it's a crapshoot. It won't look or sound like that anywhere else, which is the nature of delivery. This is all specified in our client contract.

This is the video I recommend when people state they get crazy colors on Mac