ACES setup for Davinci Resolve

[Nicolas Hanson]

Can someone please guide me through setting up a project for ACES in Resolve?

[Margus Voll]

I could but then i would take "credit" from others and their tutorials.

What would you like to know?

[Nicolas Hanson]

Hi Margus! I would like to know how I can set up Resolve to work with ACES. I don't think you take credit from others by being helpful and explaining me how I can do this in the most used color correcting software available. 

[Margus Voll]

I try describe a bit later how i did it.

[Ildus gabidullin]

 

 

[Margus Voll]

Those videos cover it. What i do differently is that i set input transform on files not the project based as then i can have mixed material timelines.

 

Did it help you or is there any questions ?

[Bruno Mansi]

The ACES workflow in Resolve is pretty straightforward - as it should be. My reasons for using it in preference to other colour management systems would be in situations where I'm sending out shots for (say) VFX work. My understanding is that if I gave a Nuke compositor a graded shot, and he/she was using ACES within Nuke, I would get back a comped shot that would slot back in without any problem.

Now, given that VFX work may involve accessing original log camera plates, 3D animation, stills and various effect loops (fire, smoke, particles effects etc) It's important that they see the graded shot correctly so that they can match the other elements to it. Nuke uses the OpenColorIO (OCIO) system, which is compatible with ACES, so you can set up the OCIO configuration to emulate ACES.

All good so far, but did you know that there are some different ACES standards that Nuke compositors may use as their default settings? Have you heard of ACES 1.01, ACES 2065-1, ACEScc or ACEScg? I'm in the process of trying to find out more about some of these various flavours of the ACES standard, however one quote (on Nukepedia) got me a little worried...

"ACES2605-1 is very large gamut encoding which makes it very hard to work with. ACEScg primaries are much smaller making it an ideal working space for compositing and working with cg images."

I'm not sure what this means, but it implies that VFX artists may be working in a reduced colourspace before the final ACES ODT back to what I originally sent them. I'm no colour scientist, but this doesn't sound good for my grade.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone on these forums who has any experience of this sort of workflow and can shed any light on the subject.

 

[Margus Voll]

I have VFX guy here to test the workflow out of Resolve and it includes a lot of ACES2605-1 and ACES2605-0 and so on.

Generally if you all are on the same page or know each others workflow in detail it should be fine.

CG version is there for a reason as some cgi apps and 3d generate anomalies without it with infinite colors.

[Filip Zamorsky]

I would say that the most important thing is to have all footage colormanaged. This way all clips could be properly converted to another color space. If the small gamut color space is converted into larger one, all colors should stay as they are. If larger color space gets converted into smaller one, the most saturated colors are "moved"  into that smaller space. But it usually means, that your footage will remain almost same, in the case you don't have pure red, green or blue color in there. Green is usually the most affected color. You can imagine someone wearing green reflective safety jacket, for example.

Edited October 23, 2016 by Filip Zamorsky

[Tom Evans]

Can someone please list an ABC guide on how to set up DaVinci Resolve for ACES?

 

[dermot.shane]

select ACEScct under pref's / color management

select project IDT if aplicable (ie; not a raw project)

select ODT

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