I recently moved my Flame setup to a Mac Studio M2 Ultra and noticed an unusual issue: the second display (used for broadcast monitoring or reference preview) shows a slight but noticeable color shift compared to the primary UI display.
This happens regardless of the monitor brand (tested with both an Eizo and BenQ) & color profiles are set to Rec.709 with full calibration. When using the same monitors with other machines or in DaVinci Resolve; no shift is visible.
This seems to point to a possible macOS Ventura/Sonoma-level display pipeline behavior / maybe something unique in how Flame handles color output through Metal or OpenGL on Apple Silicon.
I have already ensured both monitors are running at the same color depth and refresh rate. Could this be tied to how Flame uses GPU acceleration for playback on secondary displays? Or maybe macOS is managing gamma correction differently between the ports?
Has anyone else seen this issue / found workarounds like disabling automatic color adjustments via Terminal or using DisplayCAL? Checked Hardware Questions - Logik ForumsCSM Training guide for reference .
I’d appreciate any advice, especially if you’ve tuned your Flame workflow for color-accurate grading on a dual-monitor Mac setup.
there is lots of stuff going on with macOS colormanagement and flame all at the same time.
In general:
Flames UI is “untagged” in macOS unless you turn on “sync profile” in flame where it does things … depeding on the used ICC profile.
Id turn that off, then set the monitor in macOS to sRGB profile and then on the monitor itself set that to whatever rec709 or what you want to use.
In flame set the broadcast monitor to rec709 as well.
Now if your source is tagged tec709
You should get the following chain of things happening:
Flame converts rec709 source to rec709 display - so nothing happens inside of flame
macOS then assumes sRGB for the flame UI converts that to linear/xyz and then to sRGB , so again macOS does nothing - great!
now your monitor has a native gamma of 2.4 so now the untouched values from the source are beign pushed to the display, thats what you want.
In resolve you can do just the same thing by disabeling “use mac profiles for viewers” then it will behave like flame
Make sure to check flame and stuff against a really “known good” monitor and playout combo as there are so kany steps of colormanagement with flame on top of macOS it can become extremely painful and convoluted so you might end up comparing completely wrong things .
I think anyone wanting to have a “color accurate” setup is running a blackmagic or aja card for clean output
When using the same monitors with other machines or in DaVinci Resolve; no shift is visible.