QuickTime Colour Management-With Resolve

[Matt Floryan]

I came across this very interesting video from Film Light, https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/training/resources/truelight/QuickTimeColour.php, which talks about how Baselight handles the video tagging within quicktime. For me, and many others I assume, the "gamma" shift in quicktime playback has always been the biggest headache. After watching this video it seems like so many videos render out the incorrect TAGS for QuickTime to transform them correctly, thus they look "wrong". Either to washed out and desaturated, or much to dark and contrast. Yes, many people say "don't use quicktime" but the reality is, so many devices are based around the quicktime platform, just ignoring the problem seems irresponsible. Baselight looks like they have solved this with the way it encodes its videos. 

My question is, is there a way to control the Tags in Resolve? Is there a way to manually tag the QuickTime after export? How have others handled the "quicktime issue"?. Thanks

[James Conkle]

I'd be interested to hear about how others deal with this as well. Recently I've been exporting ProRes masters from Resolve and taking that into Adobe Media Encoder and exporting another ProRes and h.265 file to deliver to the client. It's hasn't slowed me down too much (especially compared to explaining the "quicktime issue" to the client) and I'm fairly happy with the results. 

More recently, for my personal work, I go straight from Resolve to the web and found Instagram likes +68 points of saturation and an offset of 26.2. Vimeo: Saturation +60 Contrast 1.030 when working with a sRGB output. That's consistently matched what I'm seeing while grading.

 

... Video is so weird coming from a stills background. 

[Mazze]

You can manually tag Quicktime files using the BBC script from Filmlight's video.

Also there is a (GUI-driven) app that lets you modify atoms - it's called Apple Atom Inspector.
For this you need to make a developer account at apple.com in order to get access to it, though.

It's really a mess, that is (sadly) not completely fixed at writing the files... any player, browser, etc. has to read the colr atoms out correctly again (as some ignore them, or read them incorrectly, etc. etc.).
Keep that in mind when starting to mess with colr atoms 🙂 .