Hello and welcome to another SternFX tutorial with me, Eran Stern. And this time, we'll talk about Open Color IO and ACES workflow in After Effects.

So first, let's talk about the elephant in the room, actually under the bridge in downtown Chicago. Well, first, it's not a real elephant, of course, but an animated 3D model. The link is down below in the description.

Same for the video background, by the way, courtesy of Adobe Stock. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I already tracked this shot and exported to Cinema 4D, where I merged this elephant and rebuilt the materials and lighting using the Redshift renderer.

Then I rendered it using a few 3D passes, and more on these in a moment, but for now, I'll switch back to After Effects and show you my comp in progress over here.

And you may be able to notice that something doesn't look right. The colors are not matching at all, and this is because the color space is not the same.

The good news, and the reason we gathered here today, is that from version 2023 and later, it's much easier to configure colors in After Effects using the new color engine. But as always, there are a few gotchas and things to be aware.

So let's see how to set it up. Now, first, I want to take a moment to explain what is Open Color IO, also known as OCIO.

So this is a color management solution used primarily in motion picture production that helps enforce a core management methodology required for high-fidelity color imaging. So to simply put it, this is a system that unified colors to look the same throughout the entire pipeline, from creation, 3D rendering, and of course, compositing and delivery.

One popular device for that is the Academy Color Encoding System, also known as ACES.

And this is a free, open, device-independent color management system that aims to be the filmmaking industry standard for managing color.

So as I told you, these days After Effects supports it natively, so we no longer need to work with third-party effects and adjustment layers that compensate and translate from one color space to another.

Everything is being handled directly inside After Effects. And to see how to set it up, first I'm going to switch to Cinema 4D and show you my render settings over there.

So I'll click on render settings and I'm using, of course, the Redshift renderware. And over here on the Redshift, we can switch to the globals just to show you that by default, the color management of Redshift is already being set to the ACES color space and the display is set to sRGB.

So bear this in mind, we're going to use it in After Effects as well.

But for now, I'll switch to the AOV section.

And this is the way that I define the different passes. Now, for this example, if I click on show AOV manager, you can see that I only have four passes. I think it's enough to illustrate what we need to see.

So we have the beauty pass, the matte, the shadows, and the reflections. All right, so I already took care of it. And under save, you can see that I'm using the multi-pass image to save and open EXR, and all of those passes are going to be baked into the scene single image sequence.

And After Effects is going to automatically translate them using the extractor plugin. So once this render has been finished, I'll switch back to After Effects.

We are already imported all the files. And just to illustrate those passes, I'll select the reflections, for example, switch to the effect controls, and we can see that we have the extractor effect, which is already set to the reflections pass.

And of course, I'm also using some linear wipe to just see these reflections over here.

But the thing is that we can't really see them. The main reason is that we are not using the maximum color bit depth. We are now working at 8-bit per channel, and this is why we are missing a lot of details, and also, of course, the colors don't look right.

So to fix this, what I'll do is click on this button, and it's going to automatically open up the project settings with the color tab.

Now, you can get to the same menu using File > Project Settings, but this is the better way to work because you are already being switched to the relevant tab.

Now, by default, the color engine is set to Adobe Color Manage. I'll switch it to OpenColorIO Color Manage, and After Effects is going to warn me that this is going to have a major impact on everything that I'm doing here.

I'll click OK, and then obviously I can select an OpenColorIO configuration. I leave it with the default settings, but if you want, you can switch to different stuff, as well as load a different configuration file.

For now, I think this is going to work. Now, if we are here, we are going to change the bit depth from 8 to 32 bits per channel.

And of course, we can also define the working color space directly from here. So as you can see, in my case, it is already set to compositing linear ACES-ACEScg, but you can pick from different stuff over here, as well as show all if you are not seeing the relevant color space.

Again, I'm going to return to this in a moment and show you why you want to display everything.

But also notice that we have a display color space. So this is going to translate the ACES to the monitor that you are using. In my case, it's sRGB, but of course, you can switch it to a different kind of device.

This is depending on your gear. All right, now I'm going to click OK, and as you can see, things are looking much better when it comes to the elephant, but the video background is not looking correct.

And this is one of those gotchas when you are working with the new configuration. So if I'll open up my source files folder, we can see that the elephant layer was automatically translated to the correct color space, and this is being taken from the project settings that I just showed you.

But the original video is not using the correct profile. After Effects by default decided that it's going to assign this profile for it.

And this may change in the future. I think this is a bug, and the color profile shouldn't be set automatically to the same working space, but Adobe thinks this is a feature.

Anyway, we need to override it and assign the correct color profile to this file and any other files that you're going to import to this project. And to do it, I'll click on the Interpret Footage button, and this is going to show me all the options, as well as allow me to click on Color and change the color space.

So over here, make sure to tick the Show All option and then click on this pull-down menu and look for the correct color space.

Now, in this case, I happen to know that this one needs to be Rec. 709, but depending on your clips, you may have something different.

You may have something from a different vendor, a different camera, so you need to make sure that you are selecting the correct profile. So I'll click over here and then I'll click OK, and now everything is being synchronized.

If I switch back to Cinema 4D just to check it, we can see the colors are now matching. Look at the render, obviously over here, not the viewport colors, and we can start to composite the elements and create our composition.

Also notice that over here we have a pop-up menu with all the different ways that we can simulate those colors. So if you want to see it with Rec.

2020, then go ahead and change it, but as I told you, in my case, I'm going to use the Rec.

709 to make sure that it looks more or less the way that I expect it to look. And from this point onward, everything is going to work the same, so we don't need to add any effect or adjustment layers.

After Effects is going to manage the colors and take care of everything for us. And this, of course, includes the render. So let me show you what I mean. I'll make sure the composition is selected over here, and then I'll go to the Composition menu and choose to add this to the render queue.

I'm not going to render it, I'm just going to switch it to, let's say, high quality, and then I'll open up the output module.

And as you can see, the profile that we set, the project profile, is going to be baked into the render. And this means that when you are going to bring it to any other application that supports Open IO, in this case ACES CG, it's going to look correct.

If you're going to play it from a QuickTime Player or anything from the desktop, it won't look correct. The colors are not going to be the same way that you are viewing them over here.

So this is a workflow aimed toward compositing applications. So let's return back to the main composition, go to the beginning and preview it so we can see how this works when everything is being combined and managed together.

And this is it. This is how you set After Effects to work in Open Color IO, specifically using the ACES configuration.

And as always, Adobe keeps developing this, so things may change and improve in the future, but the gist of it should stay the same. So whether you are working in the film industry or just interested in a better and more predictable way to manage colors, using this workflow can save you time and reduce frustration.

OCIO / ACES workflow in After Effects

Scripts