sRGB
Also known as: standard RGB, web color space
The default colour space of computer displays and the web, which browsers, phone galleries and thumbnail tools all quietly assume.
Updated
What it means
sRGB is the assumption everything falls back to. A file with no colour information attached is treated as sRGB by every browser and almost every application, which is why it behaves as the default.
It shares its primaries and white point with Rec. 709, the video equivalent, and differs in how brightness is distributed across the range. For practical purposes the two are close relatives.
It matters most where video meets stills. A Thumbnail, a frame grab or a poster image lives in an sRGB world, while the video it came from lives in a video colour space.
How it works in practice
Exported stills need converting. A frame pulled from a graded clip and saved without a conversion looks washed out or over-saturated in a browser, which is a colour space mismatch rather than a grading error.
Tagging is what makes it predictable. A file carrying its colour space in the Video metadata is interpreted correctly, and one carrying nothing is guessed at by whatever opens it.
Wide gamut needs a deliberate choice. Rec. 2020 and display-referred wide gamut are not sRGB, and anything delivered outside the default needs the tagging to survive the trip.
What to watch out for
Untagged files are the common failure. The guess is usually right and occasionally wrong, and when it is wrong the picture shifts in a way nobody can explain without going and checking the metadata.
Screenshots and frame grabs drift. A grab taken through a player that applies its own conversion is not the frame that was in the file, which matters when it becomes the thumbnail somebody sees first.
Platforms convert without saying so. An upload is re-encoded and re-tagged on the way through, so Platform recompression can change the colour as well as the compression.
How RawClip handles it
Delivered video is tagged with a standard colour space so it looks the same in a browser as it did in the grade. Thumbnails and preview frames are converted for the web rather than exported raw, which is where a mismatch would otherwise show.