More with the Mac Gamma Shift and tagging video with the 2.4 gamma in DaVinci, following my post on color correction in Premiere Pro

So yesterday I had a post how Adobe’s new color correction feature in Premiere Pro 2022 didn’t do anything to fix the gamma shift issue on Mac on exports, and I posted a link to my post in a facebook group on Premiere Pro for Pro users.

Responses included finishing everything in DaVinci, which does nothing about Premiere’s handling of the issue, and people saying just work on a PC which will fix the issue, though it won’t if you have people viewing on Mac, because the gamma shift will happen then.

And then there were the responses about putting the Gamma 2.4 tag in DaVinci in fact tagging the clip wrongly to display correctly on Mac, and I decided to do a little test with Parallels to see how the clips show up in Windows. And I know that putting the Gamma 2.4 tag on your footage is ignored by YouTube, which ignores a 121 tag on footage and in fact forces 111 which will then have the gamma shift.

So to start this is short film I am working on, and the first part are the clip set with the DaVinci Gamma tag set to Gamma 2.4 on export.

This is the Gamma Tag I am talking about.

So I exported the show with this tag.

So the left is the 111 tag and the right side is the 121 tag on mac in quicktime. The 121 is much closer to what I am seeing on my external monitor
So this is the 111 on left and 121 tag on right, these look the same, and actually look better than the 121 tag in Quicktime,
So the left is the clip with 121 tag in quicktime and the same clip in VLC on the right, VLC looks like the correct look, so VLC is still the best solution.

Now I wanted to see about the tags and how they would look in Windows, so I have Windows 11 installed in Parallels, and I used both just Windows viewer and VLC in Windows, now I just used whatever size they opened at so I will scale down the other images to match framing. And the frame might be slightly different as I couldn’t figure out how to go frame by frame in Windows player. This is all on my iMac Pro, though screen shotting form mac, find it interesting that the 121 Gamma 2.4 tag matches on Windows to Mac, but VLC on Mac and WIndows doesn’t and VLC on Mac looks closest to what is on my external monitor.

So the 111 on the left and the 121 on the right tag look the same in windows.
So this is the 111 tag on the left and the 121 tag on the right in VLC in windows.
And this is the 111 tag on the left and the 121 tag on the right and to me the color correct looks the same.
On the left is the 111 tagged clip in Quicktime on Mac and on the left the 121 tag in VLC in windows to see the gamma shift.

And this one I don’t get at all, but here it is, VLC on the Mac vs VLC on windows, the mac version seems correct, and closest to what I am getting on my external monitor. If anyone can explain it, please contact me about what is going on here. Windows 11 is on the same display as the mac, though I am taking the screenshots from the Mac into the parallels Window.

On the left we have the 111 clip on Mac in VLC, and on the right the

I am very confused about this last one, I think the VLC on the mac looks most like what the image looks like on my external monitor, but on the mac at least the clips exported from DaVinci with the 121 Gamma 2.4 tag look closer to the image than ones exported with the 111 tag which completely show the weird gamma shift.

So for exporting from Premiere Pro, I guess if you can get people to use VLC is the best option, but if you can’t I would love if Premiere was able to add the 121 Gamma 2.4 tag to exported movies because it will look better on client machines.

I have also read the YouTube ignores the 121 tag and plays video at 111, so they will look blown out on YouTube. Does Vimeo do the same? I might have to do some tests and see what the results are when I have a chance.

If anyone has any thoughts please let me know.

EDIT:

So since there is such a difference in VLC, I decided to try another app that doesn’t do ColorSync on Mac and that is Firefox in Windows 11 and Mac.

The left is 111 on Firefox Mac and the right is 111 on Firefox Windows. The Windows one looks better to me, but the mac is better than quicktime

So strangely Firefox looks different on Mac and Windows. Better on Windows, but not as bad as Mac Quicktime for sure.

OK so I have posted about this at Adobe Uservoice to ask Adobe to add the ability to change the gamma of a clip on export. I know you don’t want to do this for final export, but for clients viewing copies, it would be nice to guarantee that those on Mac and those on Windows see something approximating what I see on my external monitor.

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