Nick West wrote: does your 'Colour Grading Reel 2015' (which is most excellent by the way!) look the same to you as it does in Resolve when played back in Safari via Vimeo?
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Thank you! (I like my 2016 one better)
Do they match? No, not really. It's magnified by safari interacting with the colour profile I am using under system prefs / displays. I changed that profile to "Apple RGB" and they looked closer, but still not matched.
However they are much closer when I view the output of an Apple TV playing the file from vimeo on my broadcast monitor over HDMI, with the same file being played through Resolve over SDI (I tried to photograph this for comparison but it proved too tricky - I did manage to photograph the onscreen waveform - not having frame by frame stepping on the apple tv it was hard to match the frames of the video precisely)
Did they match perfectly? No. But considering the different processes the file passed through to get on screen, all with the possibility of lending their own slight interpretation of the image data (the Apple TV OS and how it handles colour rendering, the Apple TV vimeo app, the Apple TV HDMI out hardware, differences between how the monitor handles HDMI and SDI input) I was satisfied with the match.
The human visual perception system is very good at colour comparisons. Put two very slightly different images side by side, and anyone will be able to tell you that they are different. However, show them one after the other, with a a couple seconds of black in between, and even a professional colourist will be hard pressed to identify small differences. Colour memory over time is poor. Colour vision is adaptive. The brain is essentially always white balancing. Combine this with a colourist's passionate and precise understanding of what an image is meant to look like: you will find the small variations your images undergo infuriating. Moreso, you will not realise that this is happening all the time, to every image, because you don't have the same strong sense of what is correct, when viewing other peoples work.
I don't expect colours to match perfectly when comparing the outputs of different programs or delivery mediums or file formats or monitors side by side (within reason, I am still alert for major shifts that indicate serious problems). I do expect a match between different calibrated environments. I do like to standardise and test workflows (file formats and delivery approaches for web services) to ensure I am not adding any error to an already fraught and error inducing process.
I understand the feeling (that all colourists would be familiar with) that "something horrible has happened to my work" is a side effect of having a strong sense of what the image is meant to look like, in a perfect, accurate calibrated environment. I recognise that these shifts are happening to everyones work, even though I can't perceive it, and that its not a technical failing on my part.