[Chris Spencer-lowe]

I’m in the same boat too.
It’s VLC reading the video files the same as what I see in Premiere that really gets me. It feels like that is a big clue.

I’ve done two projects where I use my iMac’s P3 monitor full screen through Mercury Transmit ( yup, Mercury Transmit is buggy, yessir but it does work) and a rec 709 HDTV balanced quite flatly and a tad under saturated as a worst case scenario.

I have not seen these crazy differences when playing back out of QT vrs VLC on the other two projects and I did them both this way.

I really hate the idea of having to cluge together an adjustment layer ‘reckoning’ or a ‘fixit’ LUT but I see no choice at this point. Even if I do that, VLC will then play it back over the top. I’ve used VLC for live projection for years and often in tandem with Quicktime player and I have never seen such an image difference between the two. The closest thing I’ve seen to this is that short period of time when Quicktime wasn’t displaying the correct gamma with files out of FCP and you had to downgrade Quicktime to an earlier version to get exports to play back with the right gamma and sat.

I really suspect this is somehow to do with Adobe and Apple not coordinating. Again. There have been huge problems with all of the new versions of CC 2018 Premiere. I would not be surprised if there is some kind of header in the files that tells various software players how to interpret the colour space, or at least the gamma and saturation in the file. And somehow, that info is correct for VLC but not Quicktime or YouTube coming out of Premiere/Media Encoder? Perhaps I’m thinking too much.

I will definitively do any future grading work in Resolve. I may even try to do a ‘fixit grade’ for this problem now, If I can.