How to Export HDR Video from DaVinci Resolve for Instagram and TikTok
You've spent hours color grading footage in DaVinci Resolve. You export, upload to Instagram, and... it looks flat. Meanwhile the person next to you posts a quick iPhone clip and the screen physically brightens, contrast pops, and the whole thing looks cinematic without trying. What's happening?
Instagram and TikTok now support HDR playback. Your iPhone has been filming in HDR by default for a while. When someone scrolls past an HDR post, their phone screen cranks up the brightness and expands the contrast range automatically — that's the "glow" you've been noticing. But if you're mastering and exporting your beautifully shot footage in standard dynamic range (SDR), it'll actually look worse than casual phone footage on Reels, because the algorithm treats it as the flat, limited-range content it technically is.
Let's fix that. Here's the full workflow for exporting Dolby Vision HDR from DaVinci Resolve on an M-series Mac.
What HDR Actually Is (and Why Phone Footage Triggers It)
HDR — High Dynamic Range — isn't a filter or a look. It's a wider container for brightness and color information. Standard dynamic range tops out around 100 nits of brightness. HDR content can go up to 1,000, 4,000, or even 10,000 nits depending on the format.
Your iPhone shoots in HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma, a curve designed to carry HDR brightness data while staying backward-compatible with SDR screens). When you upload that footage directly, Instagram reads the HDR metadata and tells the viewer's phone to enter HDR playback mode — brighter highlights, deeper blacks, wider color.
When you import that same footage into Resolve and export in SDR, you strip all of that out. The fix is to master your timeline in HDR and export with Dolby Vision metadata so the platforms know what they're getting.
Step 1: Configure Your Mac Display
Before you touch Resolve, your display needs to be set up correctly so you're actually seeing HDR while you grade.
Open System Settings > Displays.
Make sure the XDR Display (P3-1600 nits) preset is selected. On a MacBook Pro with an XDR display, this unlocks the full 1,600-nit peak brightness the panel can deliver. If you're on a standard M-series MacBook Air, the peak brightness is lower but the color pipeline still works.
Set your screen brightness to 50%. This gives Resolve a consistent reference point — the system will still push beyond that 50% for HDR highlights, but your midtones and shadows will be calibrated correctly.
Step 2: Set Up Your Resolve Project for HDR
Create a new project (or a new timeline in your existing project) and dial in these settings:
Color Management (Project Settings > Color Management)
Color science: DaVinci YRGB Color Managed
Timeline color space: Rec.2100 ST2084 (this is PQ — Perceptual Quantizer — the gamma curve Dolby Vision uses; it maps brightness values all the way up to 10,000 nits)
Output color space: Rec.2100 ST2084
Go to the Color tab in your workspace and screenshot or note these settings so you can replicate them later.
Master Settings (Project Settings > Master Settings)
Timeline resolution: Match your delivery (1080p or 4K)
Timeline frame rate: Match your source footage
Enable "Use 10-bit output for viewers" (sometimes labeled "Output 10-bit color")
Enable "Use display color profile for viewers"
That second toggle is critical — it tells Resolve to pipe its output through your Mac's color management, which is what makes your XDR display actually render the HDR brightness levels in the viewer.
Close Resolve completely and reopen it after changing these settings. Resolve can be stubborn about applying display pipeline changes mid-session.
Step 3: Handling Canon Log Footage (Color Space Transform)
If you're working with camera footage shot in a log profile — Canon C-Log, Sony S-Log, ARRI LogC, whatever — you need to transform it into the HDR color space before grading.
Select your clip on the Color page.
Add a Color Space Transform node as the first node in your chain (before any correction or look nodes).
Set the Input Color Space to match your camera. For Canon, that's typically Canon Cinema Gamut or BT.2020 depending on your recording settings.
Set the Input Gamma to your log curve — e.g., Canon Log 3.
Set the Output Color Space to P3-D65 (P3 is the wide color gamut used by Apple displays and most modern phones; D65 refers to the white point, a daylight standard at 6,500K).
Set the Output Gamma to a curve that maps into your HDR timeline. With a Rec.2100 ST2084 timeline, Resolve handles the final mapping, but selecting ST2084 (PQ) here keeps the transform clean.
This transform takes your flat log footage and stretches it into the wider brightness and color range that HDR provides. Your highlights will separate from your midtones, and you'll have real headroom to push the grade.
Add your correction and creative grade nodes after this transform node. The Color Space Transform should always sit at the start of the node tree.
Step 4: Handling iPhone HDR Footage
iPhone footage is simpler because it's already HDR — you just need to tell Resolve what it's looking at.
Select your iPhone clip on the Color page.
In the Color Space Transform node (or in the clip's input settings under Color Management), set the Input Gamma to Rec.2100 HLG.
Leave the input color space on Rec.2020 (BT.2020 — the wide color gamut iPhones record in).
That's it. Resolve now correctly interprets the iPhone's HDR brightness data within your PQ timeline. The footage should immediately look right in your viewer — bright highlights, proper skin tones, no washed-out look.
Step 5: Export Settings for Dolby Vision
Here's where the metadata magic happens. On the Deliver page:
Start with the H.265 Master preset as your base.
Codec: H.265 (HEVC) — H.264 doesn't support the 10-bit HDR pipeline.
Profile: Set to Main 10. This is non-negotiable. Main 10 gives you 10-bit color depth, which means 1,024 brightness levels per channel instead of 256. Without it, you'll get banding in gradients and skies.
Resolution and frame rate: Match your timeline.
Under Advanced Settings, find the HDR metadata options and select Dolby Vision Profile 8.4.
A quick note on Profile 8.4 specifically: Dolby Vision has several profiles. Profile 8.4 is the cross-compatible one — it includes an HDR10 base layer so the file plays correctly on devices that support HDR10 but not full Dolby Vision, and it carries the DV metadata for devices that do. It's the sweet spot for social media delivery.
Hit render.
Step 6: Verify Before You Post
Before uploading, check your export:
Open the rendered file in QuickTime on your Mac. If your display settings are correct, you should see the HDR brightness pop — highlights pushing noticeably brighter than standard content.
AirDrop it to your phone and play it in the Photos app. You should see the same HDR behavior.
When you upload to Instagram or TikTok, look for the HDR badge — a small icon that appears near the post controls (on Instagram, it shows under the "X" / close button in the upload preview). If you see it, the platform detected your Dolby Vision metadata and will serve the post in HDR to capable devices.
If the badge doesn't appear, double-check that your export profile is Main 10 and that the Dolby Vision 8.4 metadata option was enabled.
Wrapping Up
The gap between "professional" edited video and phone footage on social media has been an HDR problem disguised as a quality problem. Your grade isn't the issue — your delivery pipeline is. Once you're exporting in Dolby Vision with the right color science settings, your work will finally look the way it's supposed to on the platforms where people actually watch it.
Set this up once, save it as a Resolve preset, and every export from here on out just works.