Clip in Premiere Pro looks totally different in After Effects (new workflow with ACEScct)

Question

I'm currently working on a project and I totally changed my Premiere Workflow to the new color management flow and working with the wide gamut ACEScct. When I want to work on a clip in After Effects the colors shown on that clip are totally off compared to the clip in Premiere.

The settings of the sequence and clip in Premiere are:

The project settings in AE are:

This is the clip in Premiere Pro:

This is the clip in After Effects:

After 'Replace with Afters Effects composition' the source clip in Premiere changes from:

to:

The sequence changes from:

To:

Premiere version: 25.6.4 (build 5)

After Effects version: 25.6.4 (build 3)

Is it a bug or is there a setting not right in AE?

R Neil Haugen · Answer

The "new" color management of 25.x was a vast improvement, but as stated by the devs, not a completed thing for all workflows. Including some Ae/Pr things and some pass-through and grarphics/vfx plate workflows.

I would suggest starting with either of the limited tonemapping options in the Sequence settings in Premiere, as that has helped me with some issues similar to what you're getting.

One of the issues in Pr/Ae/Pr workflows is that Ae doesn't have the same options for working space with a different output space. In Premiere, the ACEScct working space/Rec.709 display/output space doesn't have a direct equal in Ae.

So you get back simply a color space of ACEScct and then need to change the management of that new clip back in Pr. The one time I tried that, I needed to export the clip from Ae, then use the Override to option, to get that to Sequence CM.

And like most complicated CM stuff, your mileage will always vary. Testing is needed, quite frequently 'poking the box' to see what happens with different options.

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