Playback window color and saturation off

Some background:
I've been a video editor for 15 years and have been using Final cut 7 for most of that time. I upgraded my computer recently and so now I'm forced to make the switch to X which I'm very reluctant to do so...but it's got to happen sometime! I've been watching tutorials and I think I'm getting the hang of it, but no matter how I hard I try, I can no get my play back video to match the quality/color of what it's supposed to be. I've exported a clip out and it exports correctly, but there's no way I can color correct a clip that's not showing me what it truly looks like. I'm attaching a screen shot to hopefully show what I'm talking about. The playback window is dark and saturated and doesn't match the filmstrip preview on the left. HELP!!!!

And for the record, I've clicked the drop down menu on the up right of the playback window and I've toggled between best quality and best performance. Nothing changes the way it looks at all.

I believe this is going to be a hardware issue. X, just like 7 did, will degrade video upon playback, if necessary, to give smoother playback. The Performance/Quality setting sets a priority of one over the other, but isn't an absolute. Thus, what are your hardware specs? What are you trying to play back (i.e. codec, duration, plugins used, etc).

WhiteLilyPro wrote: l... I've exported a clip out and it exports correctly, but there's no way I can color correct a clip that's not showing me what it truly looks like...The playback window is dark and saturated and doesn't match the filmstrip preview on the left. HELP!!!!.

As FCPX.guru said, what is the hardware? Is this a separate display or an all-in-one (ie iMac, MacBook)? If a separate display are you running multiple monitors? If external is it direct HDMI or using some kind of A/V hub? If multiple monitors what if you temporarily use a single one -- is the viewer pane dark on that when not full screen?

Re external playback there can be gamma differences between some players, e.g, VLC and Quicktime X.

However I've never seen a case where the viewer was too dark/saturated, yet filmstrips were OK. That said, filmstrip thumbnails are cached so in some cases they reflect the color/exposure/gamma state when those thumbnails were generated. If present, this usually manifests as the thumbnails looking uncorrected and the viewer looking better corrected, not vice versa.

Is it like this for all media or only certain media types? Is it possible the media was tree format (like AVCHD, XAVC, etc) and you imported bare video clips? In some cases the missing metadata is needed to properly display it, although I'd expect the thumbnails to also look bad.

What if you make a test project, add one clip to it and no effects whatsoever. Is that also over saturated and dark?

If so turn on the Inspector, press the Info button at top. Is the color space Rec 709 or something else?

Put one clip with no effects on a test timeline, then select that and in the Info Inspector at bottom left press the "Settings" button and try manually setting the Color Space Override to Rec. 709.

Also are you using any LUTs or color-related plugins?

As a standard measure make sure you have installed Pro Video Formats 2.0.7. In Mojave that is in System Preferences>Software Update. Before Mojave you get it here: support.apple.com/kb/DL1947?locale=en_US