Struggling with Cinema4D Octane, Resolve, Adobe matching workflow

Discussions - Using ACES
1

Hello dear learned friends,

I’m really coming up against a brick wall when trying to get consistency between software! I hope someone is in the mood for helping me to troubleshoot my approach in what I think is going to be a fairly long first post…

My goal (for today) is to render in Cinema4D with Octane and get exactly, or close as damnit, to what I see in the Octane Live Viewer to export from the Picture Viewer and for that export to still match when I import into Davinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. In some respects I’m pretty close, but in crucial ways I might as well be at square one.

I have Cinema4D set up so that:

  • the scene is using ACEScg*
  • Octane Render is set to HDR 32bit float and ACEScg
  • the Octane Live Viewer transform is set to ACES 1.0 SDR Video
  • In Octane Settings Colour Management I have loaded OCIO ACES1.3 config with the Intermediate left to Automatic**
  • In Cinema4D Picture Viewer I have the View Transform set to Embedded/ACES 1.0 SDR Video

The look is as I would expect/hope, the view transform is doing a great job at showing what I would expect to see from a well exposed photo with similar lighting setup to the render.

There is a small difference between the Octane Live Viewer and the Cinema4D Picture Viewer, though: the Octane Live Viewer is less bright, perhaps 2/3 of a stop. Colour is (at least perceptually, I’ve not tried nulling things yet I’m not close enough) the same. I would have assumed this would be the same, so am I doing something wrong already?

Next I export as a 32bit EXR. I gather 16bit unzipped is the official standard but I am using 32 bit for these tests in the (perhaps misguided) assumption that having extra unused data in the container can’t hurt. I have tried 16bit unzipped and not seen any difference… indeed could I use zip or even DWAB compression and still be okay here?

Upon importing the EXR into Davinci Resolve with the following colour managed project settings:

  • Input colour space: ACEScg
  • Working colour space/gamma: Davinci WG/Intermediate
  • Output colour space/gamma: Rec709 2.4

the image is slightly darker than the Cinema4D Picture Viewer, less than a third of a stop — so between the two I’ve seen so far but closer to the Cinema4D viewer than Octane’s. Exporting as ProRes 422 and h.264, both rec709/2.4, and then reimporting shows them as exactly the same (excepting the steppier colour of course).

Where I’m at up to here isn’t ideal, but it’s pretty good if I’m only working with renders and want to colour time and grade them: the exposure isn’t exactly the same but I’ll be adjusting contrast anyway and the colours are exactly what I expect when creating materials and viewing in Cinema4D.

Working with Adobe software is a sliding scale from frustrating to a nightmare, though. I work with people who use Premiere for edit and I need to be able to work in it as well — same goes for graphics in After Effects. I have found the Premiere Pro 2025 colour management impenetrable:

  • I am using ACEScct as the working space, outputting as Rec709
  • there is no way to perform an input transform on ACEScg, is there?
  • I have tried to render and export ACEScct from Cinema4D with OCIO as there is an option to mark footage as ACEScct, but Premiere puts it about five stops too bright (colour seems to be okay though)

I can’t do a jerry rigged workflow with stacking a Lumetri instance pulling down five stops or anything like that, it’d be a nightmare in the studio.

Working with After Effects introduces a different set of issues. I set up the project as:

  • OCIO colour managed ACES 1.2 (I have also tried 1.3 Studio, same results)
  • 32 bit float
  • Working Colour Space ACEScg
  • Display Colour ACES/Rec709

When I bring in the same EXR as Resolve, and Interpret it as ACEScg, it is very very close to the Octane Picture Viewer in exposure, same colour, but it is a little bit more saturated — ie it doesn’t look the same as Resolve. Setting Resolve’s working space to ACEScct almost imperceptibly changes the colour in the scene, doesn’t bring it to the AE rendering though, so I assume that the differences are down to Adobe/Blackmagic implementation of colour?

If I change the working colour space to ACESccg, Dynamic Link the comp into Premiere, and set the input colour space to ACESccg I get the same colour as in AE, which is something… but if I export that section as Rec709 something happens to the gamma, as confirmed by reimporting it into the sequence. Highlights are squashed into mids from the meaty part of the peak at around 80IRE coming down to the low 60s.

I haven’t used Premiere Pro in earnest in a few years and I could have sworn there used to be more export options. I can’t find where to confirm the gamma… when exporting a ‘rec709’ file is it actually conforming to bt1886 and always marking it at 2.4?

Sorry this is such a long post. Here are my real life use cases that I want to make as smooth as possible:

  • create materials in Cinema4D that conform to real life RAL, Pantone, or whatever else colours and render shots safe in the knowledge that they’ll colour match practical footage perfectly
  • work with camera footage (eg shot in Canon Cinema Gamut) and integrate CGI VFX seamlessly
  • export multiple AOV layers from Cinema4D to be comped and mixed with further graphics work in AE, and dynamic link that comp into Premiere sequences filled with various input colour spaces, as part of team projects

Am I thinking about this all wrong, is the goal with an ACES workflow not to be able to hand over ACES outputs from one piece of software to two different pieces of ACES compatible software and their outputs be identical so much as nail down a single pipeline?

Eternal thanks to anyone kind enough to give me some pointers here!!!

side notes and footnotes:

Should I use ACEScct instead of CWG/Intermediate for working colour/gamma in Resolve if I’m going to use ACES encoded input media?

If the scene working space in Cinema4D is ACEScg, can I get Octane to render ACEScct via OCIO for output to Premiere and expect colour and exposure to behave?

*when using the built in 1.0 I don’t seem to get problems, but the OCIO ACES2 config flat out doesn’t work and the OCIO ACES1.3 config throws up some errors in the RS viewer… it does seem to work and if I’m not using Red Shift does it matter? I suppose more to the point does it matter at all that the Cinema4D default is ACES1.0 and should I not bother with the newer config?

**I’m using ACES1.3 because 2.0 wouldn’t load into the scene and it made sense (to me) to keep things the same? Also, Should I come off automatic and set the OCIO to ACEScg here?

2

Hi there,

A lot to read through… I can see where the discrepancies may come from a little bit. Let me give you some global pointers.

Color management concistency:

You need to make sure when using any form of color management that includes a DRT, i.e: a 'tone mapper', that this mechanism is maintained throughout the entire pipeline while working with scene-referred data. So in the case of using ACES, you need to have ACES as the view transform in Cinema/Octane, Resolve, Premiere, After Effects.

Your Cinema ACES view settings may also be set to output sRGB while moving to Resolve / AE for movie you’d switch to Rec.709. This causes a shift and display profile management/compensation may or may not be enabled. At the least, you should already target the right display as output, use that everywhere, and ideally also have your physical display calibrated to that target.

Resolve offers ACES as the color pipeline if you chose ACEScct as ‘color science’ in the management settings. You cannot use DaVinci Wide Gamut (RCM) because that uses Resolve’s own DRT. Alternatively you can also manage the color manually by leaving ‘science’ to DaVinciYRGB, setting the timeline color space to the space you plan to grade in (ACEScct probably) and the output space to Rec.709. The settings don’t ‘do’ anything to the data directly. But the timeline space is there so that when you convert a node to another space (internally) it understands where you came from. It also used the provided information for some grading tools. The output space is there for determining how the CIE scope interprets the data and what the export tags will be if kept as default. When using manual management you use ACES Transform OFX nodes to convert from ACEScg to ACEScct → grade → ACES Transform from ACEScct → 709. If you’d be using a customized OCIO config that you’d want to maintain through the pipe you can even use OCIO nodes now in both the Edit and Color pages of Resolve, they used to be only in the Fusion page before v20.

Color management limitations:

Cinema4D

Cinema4D's management is chaotic from what I remember because they have both OCIO and 'legacy' functionality running at the same time. At least with Redshift I remember there being oddities with the native picture viewer when rendering/exporting. As long as you are certain you are actually exporting linear ACEScg without any view transform baked into the data you're good to go.

Premiere Pro

Premiere pro does not support ACES or OCIO. I would highly suggest that you turn of Premiere's color management and not look back at it again (until in some lucky day they make sane design choices). It's the biggest mess of all software out there. They provide ACEScct as a working space but this has nothing to do with ACES as a pipeline and there are many broken aspects to it's design.

There are ways to get ACES working in Premiere but they are far from ideal. I would recommend doing editorial work on already view transformed ProRes video for example. And also use finished comped display transformed video only in Premiere for final editorial assembly if that’s what you use Premiere for in the chain. Keeping the data scene referred there is too messy.

After Effects

After Effects supports OCIO so if rendering was succesful your image in AE's viewer should exactly match that of Octane. Make sure that your files in AE are correctly marked as being ACEScg, this isn't an automated process.

Hope this gets you a bit closer to a concistent pipeline. I haven’t answered all your questions directly so if after more testing you still have some please ask them again.

3

Thanks so much for your reply Shebnahjah!

I’ve got a few things to go on here — you’ve confirmed my suspicion that the best thing to do is colour in resolve and export ProRes for editing in premiere.

I’m confused by the difference between the appearance of an acescg encoded exr when viewed in resolve and after effects despite them using the correct input transform, same working space, and same output settings. I’ll have to dig deeper to figure out what’s going on as it’s entirely possible I’ve missed something somewhere… although I am not using a dedicated viewing monitor and am currently looking on my MacBook Pro screen, and perhaps that’s all it is: the mystical world of Apple display management.

4

What are your AE color management settings, composition viewer and file interpretation color settings looking like? And what are your Resolve project color settings and media input space? Could you share a screenshot of these and the differences you see? You were mentioning discrepancies in the ‘x amount of stops’ ranges which sounds odd for color management unless some kind of double transform is happening somewhere in the chain.