Not exporting Colour Grade and Glitches on export on MacBook M1 Pro

Question

I'm having some serious headache over this and I'm in need of help.

I've just recently upgraded to a MacBook 14 M1 pro - and the process of editing has significantly improved due to it's performance however I'm now facing a major issue where video export doesn't' apply the Colour Grade (not a lut) that I've made to the film. Nothing seems to work, from Rosetta to M1, Premier export to Media Encoder, it all ends up with completely different colours.

I've tried to downgrade the project file and Open it in 2019 version to see if this was an update problem but unfriendly it has the same issue and as well it ends up having glitches in the export across the video.

I'm really frustrated now as this is causing big issues in my work flow and while the editing performance is significantly better - if I'm unable to export videos, than what's the point I may have to switch software which I'd rather not do.

Any insight or help would be appreciate.

R Neil Haugen · Answer

If youre comparing the presentation of the file image within Premiere and through Chrome, Safari, or QuickTime player on a Mac ... that's an Apple-caused issue.

All Mac users first must check the Display Color Management option in the Premiere Preferences, so that Premiere does NOT assume you have a Rec.709/SDR compliant color management operative. Premiere will now check the OS/ICC profile, and remap the image as correctly as possible to Rec.709/SDR display standards.

But outside Premiere, VLC, and Firefox on a Mac, the Apple ColorSync utility color management takes over, and for some unknown reason Apple chose to ignore full Rec.709 standards.

They don't apply both required transforms, as they ignore the display referred transform function required for all Rec.709/SDR media in the standards. Further, they have an odd and unique gamma of 1.96, rather than 2.4.

Note, they do this to ALL media you watch via Chrome, Safari, or QuickTime player. So everything you're seeing on that Mac has the same problem as what you're getting with your media. It's got lighter shadows, and less saturation.

But you don't realize it because you don't see the original. And no, there's nothing Adobe can do about it.

If you don't care about how it looks on any non-Mac system, you can create a LUT to apply on export that drops shadows down and raises saturation. But of course, if you sent the file to me with my fully calibrated Rec.709 system, it would be too dark and oversaturated. Some blacks simply crushed.

BlackMagic's Resolve has a different option ... the export option of "Rec,709-A", and yes, the A is specifically for Apple. It puts a different second tag in the NCLC tags of the file header, which ColorSync sees and for some reason (though that tag is officially "unspecified" in the standards) applies correct Rec.709 CM.

However, outside of a Mac, most systems with that NCLC tagging will ... you guessed it ... show the file too dark with crushed blacks, and way oversaturated.

Some users try a medium fix ... making the shadows a bit deeper than they'd like and saturation a bit over much, but not horrid. Then it's sort of ok both on Macs and everywhere else.

Yea, it's a mess. Thanks Cupertino!

Neil

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