Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:15 on 31 March 2025

Executive Summary

Export your video from the Photos app in original, unmodified format. Then, in the Finder (yes, the Finder), right-click on the video file you exported and choose Services → Encode Selected Video Files, and choose your encoding (1080p in my case). The result will be an HD video that can be shared on YouTube and which will not be all desaturated and overexposed.

The Details

The first time I tried importing a video shot on my iPhone into DaVinci Resolve it happened: the video was all washed-out and overexposed. It brought back bad memories of uploading still photos to the Web and viewing them on my Mac in the late aughts, as the overall effect was quite similar.

Then, the fault was Apple software botching colour management. Specifically, Safari was assuming that any image file without colour management data embedded in it should be displayed using the native Apple colour space. The latter has a wider gamut than the de-facto standard sRGB colour space, and using it to view unconverted sRGB data causes photos that look overexposed and desaturated, i.e. “washed out.” The same web page would have photos that would look just fine on Linux and Windows systems.

Mac fanboys at this stage would get all pompous about how “Apple does colour management right” when in fact Apple was getting it massively wrong. Yes, Apple did use a colour space that provided a wider gamut than Windows or Linux. Yes, Apple system tools and libraries had support for reading colour space data before Linux and Windows did, but their handling of data with no colour space information was flawed; what should have been interpreted as sRGB was instead being interpreted as being in the native system colour space.

So it was Apple’s fault. The workaround was to always embed colour space data in every image saved for Web use, and to always save that data in sRGB form. Windows and Linux would ignore the colour space information but the image data would be sRGB so it would display correctly there. Apple software would see the sRGB colour space metadata and do the necessary conversion before passing it on for display.

Eventually, Apple fixed their broken colour management, but old habits die hard and I still save still images in the above way for Web use.

I don’t know exactly who is at fault here, but:

• The iPhone camera application is being weird. The Rec.709 gamma and colour space are the industry defaults for 1080p (i.e. “HD”) video (in fact, they were developed for use in HD video), yet if you tell your iPhone to shoot video in “HD” mode, it uses the Rec.2020 colour space with the Rec.2100 HLG gamma. You get an oddball video file instead of a standard HD one.
• The Photos app on both the iPhone and the desktop Macs will display the resulting video just fine, as will QuickTime Player and iMovie.
• When you import the video into DaVinci Resolve, the result looks all washed-out.
• When you export the video from the Photos app and tell it to use 1080p format, it does convert the colour space, but it does a poor job of it. The result looks somewhat washed-out and it has weird colour shifts.
• When you add a colour space transform to DaVinci Resolve’s colour processing, it also does a poor job of conversion.

So at this stage my money is on it mostly being DaVinci Resolve’s fault. It seems to be ignoring colour space information and assuming everything is Rec.709. It also seems deficient in reasonable defaults for colour space conversion (if the Finder can do it and get acceptable results without a lot of tedious tweaking by hand, DaVinci Resolve should offer a way to do this as well).

But Apple doesn’t completely escape blame here. If video colour space conversion is so tricky to get right (and I think this is part of the problem), then why use the troublesome Rec.2020 colour space when the user is telling the Camera app to shoot HD videos?

Apple fanboys should at this stage have a nice hot steaming cup of STFU. Yes, I know that Rec.2020 is “better” in the sense that it has a wider gamut and finer resolution than the industry standard, and thus preserves the ability to do more recovery of correct information in postprocessing. But the user has told the Camera app to shoot an HD video. That is critical. When the rest of the world talks about an “HD” video, they are talking about a video in the Rec.709 colour space, not some oddball Franken-video with the HD resolution but a non-HD colour space that will massively fail when shown on most video players on most platforms. Preserve the ability to shoot and save with greater colour resolution, yes, but don’t call it “HD” video if it’s not recording standard HD video.

There is, thankfully, a way to do a colour space conversion that produces acceptable results. It is hidden in, of all places, the Finder. See the executive summary above.

This, too, is Apple’s fault. The conversion should not be hidden in the Finder. It should not be in the Finder at all. It should be an option in the Photos app. (Well, it is, but that option doesn’t do a good job. Apple needs to fix the colour space conversion in Photos and clean up the Finder to not have the feature creep it does.)

To reiterate, it all brings back bad memories of what life was like fifteen or so years ago with still images. Implementing colour management in ways that could be theoretically superior to industry standards, but botching the implementation and making life needlessly difficult for your users, just seems to be in Apple’s genes. And mostly ignoring the desirability of embedding colour space info in media files seems to be in everyone else’s genes.

Published at 08:01 on 8 March 2025

Or, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” versus “peace, order, and good government.”

At least, that’s the dichotomy as it is commonly presented on both sides of the border. Or, should I say, it is so far as Americans are even aware of the second quoted phrase above, and most are not. It is a dichotomy that I disagree with. While it is possible to pick and choose examples that fall into that narrative, one does not have to try very hard to find counterexamples to it.

Zoning and Land Use Planning

I live in a neighbourhood of the sort that simply does not exist in most US West Coast cities. The sole exception is San Francisco, which is old enough to predate most planning and zoning laws. My neighbourhood does not predate such laws, yet it has a form more typical of neighbourhoods that predate such laws in the USA.

First, the lot sizes are a lot smaller. In the USA, supposed land of individual freedom and property rights, there was a government agency (the FHA) handing down dictates from above regarding, amongst other things, minimum lot size. Properties in nonconforming neighbourhoods would be not be eligible for government-underwritten mortgages, so not surprisingly, municipalities and developers caved to the demands. In Canada, supposed land of submission to good government, the Federal government was largely silent. The market dictated lot sizes, and since there was a market for 3500 square foot lots, such lots were platted and sold.

Second, a lot of the people who first settled here were immigrants from southern Europe. They were not wealthy. They could only just barely afford homes, and many of them couldn’t afford homes on their own; they could only afford them if they split their housing cost with some tenants. So they did just that. Now, this was against the law, these areas being at the time zoned for single family use. But then a curious thing happened: the City of Vancouver blanched at enforcing the law. These were people’s homes after all. These were individuals with property rights choosing to do what they wanted with their property. Is this the sort people we are, to come down with the mailed fist of authority onto individuals pursuing their own dreams with their own homes in their own way? So East Vancouver ended up becoming neighbourhood after neighbourhood of mainly duplexes. Eventually the city acknowledged reality and legalized such uses.

Americans have tried to do this, too. Sometimes it flies, but usually it doesn’t end so well. Neighbours notice other neighbours have too many cars parked in front, or have too many people entering and exiting, some routinely using the exterior entrance to the basement. A zoning violation gets reported. And the city usually comes down hard on such things. We have neighbourhood standards to enforce after all. Conform to the norm or suffer the consequences.

Policing

Independent police oversight, in which a third party investigates accusations of unlawful behaviour by law enforcement officers, is the norm in Canada and many other First World democracies. It is the exception to the norm in the USA, where police departments are generally trusted to police themselves. How this can be squared with Canadians having faith in government and Americans questioning authority is simply beyond me.

Incarceration

No nation locks up as many people as does the USA, either per capita or in absolute numbers. Not even China. Not even Russia. Not even Cuba. My guess is that North Korea should probably be number one on that list, but accurate data is sort of hard to come by when it comes to the Hermit Kingdom. Still, if your standards for a core human rights measure are “well, at least we’re better than North Korea,” let me suggest that your standards define the bottom of the barrel. Again, how this can be squared with Canadians being the ones more accepting of authority and submission to it is simply beyond me.

Prohibition

This one’s a little murkier. Both the USA and Canada went on an ill-fated experiment to micromanage which substances adults may or may not imbibe, and it went poorly in both countries. The difference is that when it started going poorly in Canada, it got repealed. Because of course it did: it was just like the illegal duplexes of which I wrote earlier. Do we really want to be in the business of policing what private citizens want to drink in their own homes? Is that the sort of society we are?

The USA doubled down. Respect authority! Obey! Time for a new, powerful, Federal police agency! Only after the doubling-down failed, and a Great Depression made people realize that a legal, profitable, alcoholic beverages industry might prove to be something of an economic shot in the arm, did the failed experiment finally end. In the meantime, Americans acquired a taste for Canadian whisky which led to one of Canada’s more profitable export industries.

On cannabis, some US states such as Colorado and Washington beat Canada to the game at legalization. Sort of. It’s still illegal on the Federal level, so what we have is a legal gray area where cannabis is illegal under Federal law but legal under State law, so the state and local cops won’t enforce what is a Federal matter. Plus it’s an all-cash business; banks are Federally regulated and don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Canada took its time (and many Canadians were embarrassed that it took so long), but cannabis is now completely legal here. Pot shops take credit and debit cards, because of course they do, that makes life easier for your customers and the banks have no qualms about serving just another legal business.

One area that fits the popular narrative is that no province pushed the envelope the way any US state did and tried to legalize cannabis before the Federal government was ready.

Narcotics

Canada trusts me, as a responsible adult, to go to my local pharmacy and purchase narcotics over the counter. No, they are not very strong narcotics. Yes, I do have to go and ask the pharmacist for them. Yes, he does ask to see my ID, and does record my purchase, so if I become addicted, it will be evident to the authorities. But I still can do it. Not in the so-called land of the free.

The Draft

Canada has been very reluctant to conscript people into its military against their will. Doing so during World War I triggered rioting and a political crisis. It was the USA that drafted young men to go fight in Vietnam against their will, and it was to Canada that many of these men fled for sake of their individual liberty. It is hard to think of any greater violation of liberty than to force an individual into servitude, yet the USA did just that.

Slavery

And not just during the Vietnam War. For decades, enslaved Black Americans fled north to freedom via the Underground Railroad. It’s not so well known in the USA, but Canada had slavery at one time, too. It just wasn’t so economically important on this side of the border, and quickly ran into adverse court decisions (there was a famous one in what is now Quebec that proclaimed that while slavery was legal, there was no law against a slave running away from their master). It was the so-called land of the free that for decades made peace with slavery and rationalized it because it was economically profitable.

LGBTQ Rights

Sex between consenting adults became fully legal nationwide in Canada in 1969. It took until 2003 for the USA to get to the same place (via a court decision that could be reversed at any time now). Canada also beat the USA when it came to legalizing same-sex marriage (which again is the law of the land in the USA by virtue of a court decision that could be reversed any time now).

And Finally, the Elephant

You know, the decline in liberty accompanying the transition to fascism that most Americans apparently seem just fine with. And sorry, I don’t know any other honest way to interpret those poll results. If Party A is advocating fascism, and Party B is advocating something squarely within the bounds of small-l, small-d liberal democracy, and the overall public takeaway that Party A is approximately where it ought to be and Party B is too far left, well, it seems obvious to me.

But You’re Cherry-Picking!

Sure, there’s things that fit the narrative (I even pointed one out above). But come on now, the last few months should conclusively prove beyond doubt that something is rotten in the supposed Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Some of us have been sensing the rot for some time.

I suggest it’s merely a commonly-believed narrative, and not any sort of accurate summary of actual political attitudes. The land of “peace, order, and good government” is quite often also the land of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and such it has long been.