ACES Resolve & Nuke Workflow Clarification

Discussions - Using ACES VFX
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1

Hey guys… Here at my company we’re planning to implement Nuke (switching from AE and Fusion) and ACES on our workflow. So the ACES workflow (from what I’ve learned) starts at our Colorist who receives the camera footage and does some color correction using DaVinci Resolve with the following settings:

  • Color Science ACESCC
  • ACES VERSION 1.0.3
  • ACES IDT - The camera’s colorspace (i.e. RED DRAGON GAMMA)
  • ACES ODT - The monitor’s colorspace (i.e. sRGB)

Then when he finishes his work, he exports that footage with color correction with the ODT set to No input transform (equivalent to ACES 2065-1) to EXR float files.

Then the VFX department uses that footage for compositing work using Nuke with the following settings:

Color Management - OCIO
OCIO Config - ACES 1.0.3
Working Space - ACEScg
Monitor - Whatever they are calibrated to (i.e. sRGB)
8-Bit Files - No idea what to put here*
16-Bit Files - No idea what to put here*
Log Files - No idea what to put here*
Float Files - No idea what to put here*

*please help me :sweat_smile:

When we import the footage the Read Node has the colorspace ACES 2065-1 (which was used when exporting from Resolve).
When we finish compositing the Write Node is set to render EXR’s with the ACES 2065-1 colorscape.

This workflow will probably be terribly wrong but from what I’ve read this is what I have understood so far. Can anyone please help me tell me if this is the correct workflow or not and if not what am I doing/thinking wrong?

Any help would be deeply appreciated. Thanks in advance.

2

All of the nuke settings you asking for are defaults you set the read/write node to. Without knowing more about your workflows the safest settings for these would probably be:

8-Bit Files - Utility - sRGB - Texture
16-Bit Files - Utility - sRGB - Texture
Log Files - This depends on which log format you are receiving. “RED DRAGON GAMMA” is very vague. We typically set this to the log format of the hero camera. Since this is a default it can always be changed after the fact in the read/write node.

Float Files - This is the colorspace of your 16/32 bit float files on disk are encoded in. Since you said the output from Resolve EXR files are ACES - ACES2065-1, so you should set this to the same.

3

Thank you very much for your response. So, just to see if I understood what you said, those settings are just to define defaults for those kind of imported files. Those settings can sort of be overrided by the selected one on the READ node. My guess is, the same happens to the monitor if set it to sRGB (i.e.) on the project settings and then I change that on the viewer to REC709 (i.e.) it’s REC709 colorspace that I’m viewing on the monitor. I’m sure this seems obvious to pretty much everyone but I didn’t actually understand that untill now. Really helpfull answer Deke.