Dark Video/Gama Shift from Davinci Resolve to YouTube I've asked a version of this question before, and found a workaround solution that worked for a while. But now I'm at a point that I'd like to find a real answer to my problem.

So I edit and color my films in Davinci Resolve 12, and I publish to YouTube.

My workaround workflow has been as follows:


Shoot with my Canon SL1
Copy the footage to my hard drive and then into Davinci it goes (I don't transcode cause I don't have room)
Edit, color, do everything within Davinci
Export from Davinci using the default QuickTime MPEG4 Video setting
(Convert to x264 using Handbrake, send to client to watch via Google Drive; make changes as requested)
Final convert for YouTube using MPEG Streamclip
Upload to YouTube


If it helps here's the settings I use for MPEG Streamclip:


That workflow has worked well for 1080p videos up until this point.

The problem is, I'm trying to upload a 4K video now. When I try to convert this video, I get a screen that says compression error. (and nothing else) Since I never really liked this workflow from the start, I thought I'd take this opportunity to figure out the right way to do this.

The problem that made me use my workaround workflow in the first place:

Whenever I try to upload videos I've converted using Handbrake to YouTube, they look fine when I play them locally with VLC on my computer, but on YouTube they look pretty bad; the dark parts of the image become far too black.

I've researched this a lot and I think the problem has something to do with changing the RGB levels from full to limited. (0-255 to 16-235) From my understanding, this would change everything in the video below brightness value 16 to totally black. That makes sense as far as what's happening to me, so I think that's what's happening when I upload to YouTube.

So, my question is: How do I get exactly what I watch in Davinci to exist on YouTube when exporting in 4K?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
The MOV you exported from Resolve is tagged as Rec 601 (despite being UHD).

So, I transcoded your MOV using the command below, preserving all color characteristics and uploaded that to Youtube. Downloaded YT's transcoded video and compared it to the MOV, and in ffplay, VLC or Potplayer, they look the same.

ffmpeg -i Untitled.mov -crf 18
       -color_primaries 6 -color_trc 6 -colorspace 6 -color_range 1 resolve-upload.mp4


P.S. I also uploaded your MOV and downloaded its transcode from YT. Turns out that the transcode is flagged as Rec. 709, which is wrong, despite the MOV being tagged as 601. The rip of my transcode is tagged as 601.