It’s a big day for Beta. In today’s Beta build (23.1.0 build 44), you are getting not just one, but two new features to take out for a test drive. Introducing native OCIO/ACES support in After Effects! I’ve attached documentation for a deep dive into the feature, including a Quick Start guide which is copied below. We would love to hear your feedback, including what you think of the workflow, and whether you get the results you expect. As always, thank you so much for participating! Quick start File > Project Settings a. Create an After Effects project and select Color Engine as OCIO color managed. b. Select the appropriate OCIO configuration file. i. We are shipping the ACES configuration ACES 1.0.3 with the application bundle. ii. NOTE on ACES 1.3 Configurations In addition to the default ACES 1.0.3 configuration, there are now two beta configurations from OCIO which are compliant with ACES 1.3 (ACES CG v0.2.0 (Beta) and ACES Studio v0.1.0 (Beta)). These are still under development, but they do include new features and enhancements setting the stage for ACES 2.0, such as the ability to set the Rules in the config file to an assigned color space. We will update these to the release 1.3 versions once they are available. c. Select a Working Color Space d. Select a Display Color Space2. Add some media (EXR, etc.) to your project a. Media Color Space is automatically assigned a default color space (specified by the default role) b. Media Color Space can be overridden via the Interpret Footage dialog accessed by right-clicking the footage in your Project panel 3. Create a composition a. Composition window shows color converted content i. Color conversion - Media Color Space to Working Color Space ii. Color conversion - Working Color Space to Display Color Space b. Use the Display Color Space dropdown in the composition toolbar to change which display transform you are viewing 4. Export the composition a. Add the composition to render queue b. Select the Output Color Space in Output Module Settings > Color dialog 5. Use OCIO Color Space Transform effect to apply any color space transform to your layer, especially if you need to apply an effect or CDL/LUT that was created in a different color space. 6. Use OCIO File Transform effect to apply a LUT or CDL to your layer. Make sure to change the color space using the OCIO Color Space Transform if required for that LUT/CDL, and then apply another transform to bring it back to the working space you are using.

Known Participant

Question

Welcome to native OCIO/ACES support in After Effects!

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 18, 2022
25 replies
29350 views

It’s a big day for Beta. In today’s Beta build (23.1.0 build 44), you are getting not just one, but two new features to take out for a test drive. Introducing native OCIO/ACES support in After Effects!

I’ve attached documentation for a deep dive into the feature, including a Quick Start guide which is copied below.

We would love to hear your feedback, including what you think of the workflow, and whether you get the results you expect.

As always, thank you so much for participating!

Quick start

File > Project Settings
a. Create an After Effects project and select Color Engine as OCIO color managed.
b. Select the appropriate OCIO configuration file.
i. We are shipping the ACES configuration ACES 1.0.3 with the application bundle.
ii. NOTE on ACES 1.3 Configurations
In addition to the default ACES 1.0.3 configuration, there are now two beta configurations from OCIO which are compliant with ACES 1.3 (ACES CG v0.2.0 (Beta) and ACES Studio v0.1.0 (Beta)). These are still under development, but they do include new features and enhancements setting the stage for ACES 2.0, such as the ability to set the Rules in the config file to an assigned color space. We will update these to the release 1.3 versions once they are available.
c. Select a Working Color Space
d. Select a Display Color Space2. Add some media (EXR, etc.) to your project
a. Media Color Space is automatically assigned a default color space (specified by the default role)
b. Media Color Space can be overridden via the Interpret Footage dialog accessed by right-clicking the footage in your Project panel

3. Create a composition
a. Composition window shows color converted content
i. Color conversion - Media Color Space to Working Color Space
ii. Color conversion - Working Color Space to Display Color Space
b. Use the Display Color Space dropdown in the composition toolbar to change which display transform you are viewing

4. Export the composition
a. Add the composition to render queue

b. Select the Output Color Space in Output Module Settings > Color dialog

5. Use OCIO Color Space Transform effect to apply any color space transform to your layer, especially if you need to apply an effect or CDL/LUT that was created in a different color space.

6. Use OCIO File Transform effect to apply a LUT or CDL to your layer. Make sure to change the color space using the OCIO Color Space Transform if required for that LUT/CDL, and then apply another transform to bring it back to the working space you are using.

Work_natively_in_ACES_in_After_Effects.pdf

Feature request

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J

Joanna26443531nz2j

Participant

Together with what has been said before:

- both Beta OCIO configs are broken - can't get proper colors displayed in viewer no matter whch sRGB transform I use in the viewer - no problems with built in 1.0.3 config and custom 1.2 config

- can we have a way of saving the path to the custom config, maybe in the preferences so that it shows in the dropdown as a 4th option?

- is there a way to still use display color profile? Right now it seems the best we can get is display the viewer in sRGB, but I have a calibrated WsRGB monitor, so sRGB values come out too saturated. With the default CM in AE, after everything was configured we could check in the View menu "Use display color management" which added one last operation in the chain of pushing the sRGB viewer colors through the system monitor color profile - with the new OCIO color management that option in the View menu is grayed out 😕😕

- yes, the default config should be OCIO 1.2, not 1.03. Where did you get it? 1.2 is already 2 years old.

- the old CM could read embedded color profiles in source footage, not all, but jpgs came in as sRGB, rec709 footage was recognized as rec709 etc. The new OCIO CM just gives up and applies the scene color profile to everything, could we get the same behaviour as the old one? If it thinks it's an sRGB source, apply a proper OCIO import profile.

PS. I specificaly wrote import profile not input profile because the proper sRGB profile in this place would actually be the Output - Output sRGB profile from the OCIO 😉

Other than that, a surprisingly polished release. Very clean and logical workflow - good job guys.

Now if you would just make Add Grain 32bit compatible and fix Gaussian blur so it doesn't produce negative halos every time it blurs pixels brighter than 1, we would be all set to work with ACES projects finally 🙂

TimKurkoski

Community Manager

Hi @Joanna26443531nz2j ,

I'm only going to comment on one thing, the bulk of this message I will leave for our Color team and @Christine Goldby .

> fix Gaussian blur so it doesn't produce negative halos every time it blurs pixels brighter than 1

Do you get the same result with the Fast Box Blur effect, by increasing iterations? These two effects have the same underlying kernel, the main difference is in the calculations on top of that (fixed vs. controllable iterations) and the UI. We generally consider Fast Box Blur to be the more modern version.

J

justins29082732

Participating Frequently

I can confirm, I'm also seeing negative values on Gaussian Blur. However, Fast Box Blur looks fine.

B

Ben.Rohel

Participant

Hi,
I would love to try that but I can only see After Effects 23.1.0 build 41, and it doesn't have the ACES workflow.
How can I actully get build 44 ?
Thanks for your help.
Ben

Christine GoldbyAuthor

Known Participant

Hi @Ben.Rohel. In your Creative Cloud app, there is a button on the upper right to Check for Updates. After clikcing that, hopefully it will show up. If it doesn't, try again in about 12 hours - I think it can take up to 24 hours to populate for some users.

Shebbe

Community Expert

Oh and one more note btw, dunno when the AE update was pushed but the Release Candidate 1 is currently the latest ACES OCIOv2 configs. Canon and ARRI were added amongst other updates.

Christine GoldbyAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you @Shebbe for so many good ideas and questions! I will forward some of these on to the team for responses. If you have a chance, read through the attached instructions as there are more details included, such as using Environment variables which may help as well.

Shebbe

Community Expert

Thanks Christine!

OCIO Env Vars:

Yes gotcha, it wasn't clear to me that AE was already picking up the path set in the env vars. Would it be useful to have some kind of visual clue as to that it's reading the env var instead of a manual path?

Output/Export:
It looks like the Display color spaces on the beta configs don't get the RRT applied. The issue I described is not seen with the OCIOv1 config because the displays are only the combined RRT+ODT named Output - sRGB.

I'm not sure if the config can be altered or how other software do this but we need to have an option to chose the full targets including the RRT ACES 1.0 - SDR Video.

OCIOv1:

Is there a reason why ACES 1.0.3 is used and not the latest 1.2?
https://github.com/colour-science/OpenColorIO-Configs/tree/feature/aces-1.2-config

Shebbe

Community Expert

You folks deserve a million kisses for this one! It's finally coming and I've never been a excited as now for an Adobe software update. This will mean so much for the industry.

Here's my initial feedback:

Upon some quick tests I already ran into an issue with exporting with ODT applied. What would be the way to bake in SDR Rec.709/sRGB into ProRes? Both the gamma is off and values above 1.0 are clipping.

(output was set to sRGB display, interpret footage + viewer set to Raw)

Left exr through sRGB ODT, right ProRes with baked ODT

Another thing that immediately stood out to me was that we aren't allowed to use the OCIO Color Space Transform without setting global management to it. What if we wan't to manually manage a project in some cases? I think it could be nice to still read from the project settings which config to use but have Adobe managed enabled instead. Or/and give the option to browse to a config on the plugin itself. May sound weird after all the craving for OCIO but for some setups it can be nice to only have some tools to convert between certain spaces via a config and not use the display/aces output side of things.

And what about OCIO through environment variables? Can imagine many studios wanting to manage configs through that on their systems.

Design:

Now that we have a pretty full page on the Color tab the other 4 tab's settings look quite lonely....

Maybe group them up a bit? They could all fit within one tab now the window is this big by default.

Workflow:

Will be be able to define color spaces in the color picker so we can choose say Display sRGB colors instead of values that become the workingspace's color values. I think globally via color picking role makes sense but could be nice to have a setting for it in the colorpicking window so it can convert from there too?

Like that for example.

But again, great progress has been made already! Also really happy with other improvements lately with v23.0 release and now in current beta ARRIRAW on the GPU finally with proper processing for Anamorphic :D. Recently finished a project with that were it would have been incredibly helpful to have already but we managed in the end.

Look forward to more features and improvements. OCIO Premiere next?...

moebius90009

Known Participant

It's anyhow possible to make Masks working with EXR?

Workaround for now: Draw the mask on a solid and use that a a TrackMatte.

Thanks!

grump

Participating Frequently

Hi,

This is very exciting for me, because I work with a lot of brand colors and Aces is always a struggle. But I can not get this to work properly. I tested a scene from Cinema 4d 2023.1 with the latest Redshift 3.5.09.