Problems With VFX EXR/ACES cg Roundtrip in Resolve

Hi everyone! I’m currently working on finishing a project that I had to put on hold a few months ago. Unfortunately, I lost the DR project file, so I need to rebuild my finishing timeline using AAFs, RAW footage, and VFX EXRs, etc. I’m currently adding the VFX EXR exports back into the timeline, but I’m encountering an issue.

When I select ACES cc in color management and set the clip’s input transform to ACES cg and the timeline output to R709, the footage mostly matches the transformed ARRIRAW footage in the timeline; however, it completely clips everything over a certain brightness. I’ve attached a labeled comparison below for reference.

I am certain that the problem lies with the EXR export. I recently resumed working on this project, however, all the EXRs are from the last time I worked on it, several months ago. During my previous work, I completed a nearly final export of the film without encountering this issue with the ACES roundtrip at all.

This suggests that the problem may be with my settings in DaVinci or my transforms. I have tried various input color spaces to rule out rendering the EXRs in a different color space, but this has not resolved the issue. Moreover, the metadata from the After Effects exports months ago indicate that they were encoded in ACES cg.

I am at a loss for what the issue is and have exhausted all possible solutions. I am new to the ACES workflow and have encountered several challenges, but this one has me stumped. If anyone could provide any assistance, it would be greatly appreciated!

@grey I do not see any comparisons attached below. This could perhaps be because this was your first post and the forum rejected attachments. Could you please add those again in a reply to this post?

If the issues are specific to the after effects renders…

  1. confirm after effects was not processing in 16bit integer (as opposed to 32bit float) and thus clipping anything out of 0.0-1.0

  2. check if the exrs have alphas. Per the EXR spec, Resolve auto interprets alphas as premultipied which can cause all sorts of weird (non) issues. Perhaps if you select alpha: none in resolve, highlights will magically reappear ?

Yet another issue is if caching is enabled using an integer based codec such as ProRes. This will clamp 0.0-1.0.