Correct way to interpret stock VFX footage in NUKE with ACES

Hi, first of all, I know very little about color science so please bear that in mind.

We have a collection of stock footage like explosions, blood, etc. and a lot of these files are in MOV format and we previously imported them into Nuke as Gamma 1.8 files and it worked fine. What would be the correct workflow to work with these files in ACES?

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Welcome and thanks for your first post Livia!

Looking forward to people’s response…I’ll check back to be sure you get some help.

Steve T
ACES Admin

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Hi Livia,

the correct way of using such elements is to use the IDT sRGB-Texture. With this operation you are bringing the element into the “scene”, the same way you would use a texture in a 3D application.

The luminance of the elements stay in their range with values between 0-1. Therefore they might look a bit dark due to the different tone mapping that ACES uses, in comparison with the standard Nuke sRGB viewer, but this also depends on your output colorspace. (I assume out_sRGB or out_Rec709, right?)

The limited color gamut of sRGB is placed in the far bigger gamut of ACEScg. Therefore the colors might appear a bit desaturated.

Use a ColorCorrection node to adjust the brightness, contrast and the colors to to make the elements “fit” in your scene/comp.

Please also check the article Understanding the sRGB-Texture IDT that I wrote a while back.

I hope this helps.

Greetings

Daniel

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