An ACES based compositing and colorgrading workflow for CG elements in DaVinci’s Fusion and Color.
That’s it; your scene is rendered, everything looks good, now it’s time for compositing. In this article, we're not going to dive too deep into color-management but rather focus on good practices you could adopt to keep your workflow intact from start to finish. I insist that this workflow was created by myself for my needs, and I’M NOT A COLOR SCIENTIST. Therefore, it might contain some mistakes that prevent you from using it in its native form. Anyway, feel free to adapt it to your needs and report anything that looks like a mistake to your eyes. Although it was created to fit into a CG environment, it can also be used for live-action footage, but once again, it will depend on your needs. More posts will be created in the future to discuss other color management practices. With that in mind, let’s jump in.
For the purpose of this presentation, I’m going to use the case of a 3D Motion Design project created in Cinema 4D and rendered with Redshift. Check the project .
Our scene has been rendered in a multi-pass EXR sequence using ACEScg as our gamut.(1) The problem I encountered was that I enjoyed compositing tools in Fusion as much as I enjoyed giving style to my image in the color page, but in most tutorials, the ODT in Fusion was set for a final delivery color space, and I couldn’t find any straightforward color-managed workflow to combine Fusion and Color, as it’s the promise of DaVinci Resolve, a unified software for Editing, Compositing, color-grading (and other cool stuff…)(2).
The workflow I set up is focused on keeping an ACES environment between Fusion and the Color page, with a little tweak. First, you need to get the config.ocio from your 3D software because we’ll use it. Then import your EXR sequence into Fusion and JUST BEFORE the MediaOut node(if you add nodes after it, you might break the workflow) , add an OCIOColorSpace node. Import the config.ocio file with the browse button.
In the settings, choose ACEScg for the input and ACEScct for the output. You should see your shot became very soft in contrast and low in saturation, that’s normal. In your LUT window, choose OCIO Color Space LUT, then edit, and enter the following settings: Source Space = ACEScct and output = sRGB/or REC.709 (depending on how your monitor is set). Now you should see the same thing than inside your 3D software.
Thanks to that manipulation, we bring ACES to the color page, while viewing the image properly in Fusion. In color, you can add as many nodes as you need/are used to, and on the last one, add a ColorSpaceTransform effect. Choose AP1 as your input color space, ACEScct as your gamma input, and choose the according output setting for your delivery (REC.709/2.4, sRGB/sRGB, DCI-P3/2.6...).
Now you can composite in Fusion and enjoy the color-grading tools from the Color page. That’s something I wanted to have for a long time; it was frustrating to just output the final Color Space from Fusion and not use the Color Page. Thanks for reading.
1. When it comes to rendering, the war has not yet ended between PNG and EXR users. I’m not going to start another war on this topic; it will be discussed in another article.
2. I know that Fusion standalone can be more efficient than DaVinci’s Fusion, but the purpose of this article is to combine the best of the two worlds, Fusion and Color, in a single software.
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