As the owner of a Mac, you've got a rig with a problem, sorry to say. And it doesn't have a solution most people like.
Virtually all 'standard dynamic range' or SDR video is created according to the Rec.709 standards in use for over 20 years now. The most recent update to those standards was in 2015. They call for:
- sRGB color primaries
- D65 white point
- 2.4 gamma (with 2.2 for "bright room" viewing environment)
- Rec.709 specified scene (camera) transfer function
- Rec.709 specified display transform function
- 100 nits brightness for the monitor.
Premiere abides natively by all those requirements.
When Apple came out with the Retina monitors and revamped their ColorSync OS color management utility, they chose to apply some of the standards required but not others. So the ColorSync "Rec.709" is the following:
- kept color primaries
- kept white point
- changed gamma to "sRGB" (?) which in testing is somewhere between 1.95 and 1.96
- kept the Rec.709 scene (camera) transform function
- does NOT apply the also required Rec.709 display transform function
- sets monitors to full brightness, typically between 200+ and 300+ nits.
So, outside of Premiere on a Mac, the system does not apply correct Rec.709 color management. Neither BlackMagic (Davinci Resolve) nor Adobe has any control over that whatever. That is a choice made by Apple.
For Mac users, Adobe added the "display color management" option in the Preferences. This tells Premiere to look at the ICC profile of the monitor and re-map the image to show as correct as possible Rec.709 image within Premiere's monitors. It can give you a pretty good image much of the time.
So on a Mac, with the "DCM" option set to on, you will see a far more correct image inside PrPro than outside of the same file.
For exports, there is of course the problem that the file will not look the same outside of Premiere Pro on a Mac. And for Mac users that are worried only about how their images appear on a Mac screen, Adobe developers came out with a gamma-modification LUT to be applied on export.
It will darken the image overall, and raise saturation. The image in say QT player on a Mac will look pretty close to within PrPro with the DCM option 'on'.
However ... on any normal or correctly setup color managed system, that file will be too dark and over saturated. Mac screens are under 15% of world-wide screens, btw.
BlackMagic chose a different approach for the problem, an export option they call Rec.709A ... and yes, A is for Apple.
It adds an NLC tag to the file header that actually gets the Mac ColorSync utility to apply full Rec.709 standards. Which is fine.
But ... it has exactly the same effect outside of a Mac as the Adobe LUT: the file will be dark and oversaturated on the other 85% of screens out there.
Yea, that's a right mess all right.
I work with colorists on a daily basis, and I teach pro colorists. The majority of whom work on Macs. None of whom grade their image according to a Mac screen. Of course, the PC people don't grade to a PC monitor either. They use "i/o" devices made by BlackMagic or AJA to get the signal out of the computer without the OS getting a say, and feed it to a grade 1 reference monitor. That is a specific class of device, like the Flanders or Eizo rigs.
Those monitors run about $5,000 or so for SDR work. For the HDR pro work, they'll be using a monitor about $30,000 in cost, and yes, I know a few people with those rigs.
None of them delivers for a Mac screen ... they deliver to standards, whether it's Rec.709 or say DolbyVision HDR for b-cast work. So none of the movies you watch on your Mac were graded to look 'right' on a Mac. They were graded to proper standards, which is all a colorist can do.
And ... relatively speaking ... that material then looks "professional" compared to all other pro produced material viewed on that screen, even though it ain't nothing at all like what the colorist saw on their screen. That's "Life".
And yea, colorists scream about this mess a LOT. I've included a few informative links.
Neil
How Display Color Management in Premiere Works by Jarle Leirpoll (awesome editor/color/teacher guy, best book on working in Premiere Pro also by him, available on his site.)
Why Master on a Calibrated Display? LightIllusion.com/ Steve Shaw (who's company makes the calibration/profiling software many colorists use.)
Color Management for Video Editors by Jonny Elwyn (great overal blog looking at the whole issue of CM for editors ... and he includes a link to the following ...
Finishing at the Highest Possible Quality in Premiere Pro /mixinglight.com (outside the ML paywall, available for all. Encapsulation of a presentation on Premiere's color management I gave at NAB-Vegas 2019 in the Flanders/MixingLight booth. Much gratitude to Patrick Palmer, senior program manager for all Adobe video applications {PrPro, Ae, MediaEncoder} and to then-color engineer Francis Crossman, who spent hours with me in-person and over phone and zoom.)
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