Overview
Tested in Resolve 17.2
We’ve all been there.
You work for countless hours on your project within resolve, render it out only to find either Quicktime or Web displaying less saturated/gamma shifted results ruining your finessed mood and feel of your film.
I’ve spent hours pulling my hair out trying to get to the bottom of this, often with unclear results from instructions on other blogs and YouTube videos, and finally found a workflow that allows consistent colour across Web, Quicktime, and TV.
I won’t dive into the science behind the problem, and instead just provide a solution that works for me on the 2020 iMac inside Resolve 16.
Step 1: Enable “Use Mac Display Color Profiles for Viewers” under general settings
This will make resolve visually match what Quicktime/Facebook/Youtube will display to you.
Step 2: Project Color Management
Dive into your Color management tab under Project Settings, and change Timeline Color Space to Rec.709-A. My understanding is that this Color Space comes with the inverse gamma shift you’re seeing in Quicktime/Web.
Step 3: Grade like normal
Get into your Color page and begin grading.
Step 4: Rendering
Sending your masterpiece to the web? Render with the default settings. Your outputs will appear mostly identical to how you’ve graded them on the color page (Less compression/codec shift).
Note VLC and other players will show a different image, so test online first to validate this is working for you. VLC in particular is expecting the standard Rec.709 & Gamma 2.4 tags which we’re not giving it.
Step 5 (Optional): Rendering for TV?
If your final grade is intended for the networks, as you’re using the Rec.709-A Color Space & Gamma Curve, it’s likely that your film/ad/show is going to appear extra vibrant with punchy contrast, and not a visual match to the project you’ve previewed back on your Mac.
To combat this, from your color page, what you want to do is select the dropdown from the top right where it says “clip”, and change this to “timeline”. This now makes any action you take affect your entire project, not just the scene you’re looking at.
Add a the OpenFX node Color Space Transform, and apply the following settings to shift your colourspace back to Rec.709 with Gamma 2.4.
Re render, send to the networks, and let the world enjoy your masterpiece.
Final Notes
This process was developed from trying the multitude of responses across YouTube, forums, and questions asked throughout the community, and has been the process I’ve found to give ME the most accurate results.
This may or may not work for you, in which case please provide your results in the comments below.