OCIO Updates

Hey dev team,

I see a silent update to OCIO has snuck it's way into the latest builds. It now supports and provides the built-in ACES 2.0 configs which is very welcome.

With that I do want to point out again that I feel the implementation leaves many things to be desired.

1. The LUT based 1.2 config is still present. The issue is that not only is this very legacy already and even ACES 1.x users should not use this config anymore, it's the default when you switch to OCIO color management because it's in the first spot of the list. The OCIO Configuration dropdown menu also does not remember last choice when swtiching between OCIO and Adobe managed so you switch to the thing that shouldn't exist in the software anymore every time. Also consider making ACES 2.0 Studio the default. Lastly this LUT based config also takes up 530MB of additional installation storage. Please I ask you again to remove this from the build. Users that need it for whatever reason can always source it themselves.
2. The project settings has a display space choice but this has literally no real function since the composition viewer is it's own instance per comp. If you want a use for it, look at how Autograph implements it where the viewer is set to “use project” or can be overridden by the user.
3. The comp viewer having unique OCIO view settings per comp is very counter productive. Ideally this is a global thing and so is exposure and other viewer settings.
4. The viewer's OCIO options are a flat list rather than Display and View separated making selecting the correct display really messy and the list very large. Please consider separating the two components like how OCIODisplay effect works.
5. Scopes still do not support reading post display transform which would be really useful.
6. There is no elegant way to do hybrid managed workflows. Ever looked at Autograph? It offers per comp color management so you can enable/disable OCIO on a per comp basis. Right now if we want to do hybrid setups we need to set the OCIO workspace to none and exclusively use manual conversions via the effects. This also disables the use of the comp view transform while working with ACES. It would be really nice to do both OCIO and non OCIO workflows simultaneously given the nature of things you do in AE which isn't necessarily only scene-referred compositing for a single or several shots. And the limitations of working scene-referred with display referred data is not worth it if you only need ACES for pure comp and not full pipeline.

So I do hope this OCIO stuff is not already on life support which it seemingly is since it's release, only updating version for compatibility sake just now even though ACES 2.0 OCIO configs were released March 2025..

There's still so much work to be done and improve. Thanks for reading.