OTOY Forums

Hi Guys,

I’m currently trying to find a suitable workflow to render out stuff in octane, that needs to be comped into flat gamma LOG footage in After Effects.

As far as I know ACES should be the way to go, but unfortunately it only works correctly in 32 bit float, which is something that After Effects is absolutely terrible at. (Still in 2023 only a hand full of effects support it and it is littered with major bugs, please don’t get me started …)

So, I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to render out 16bit EXRs in linear with “force tonemapping” and apply a LOG LUT in Octane via camera imager.

Would this be a viable way? I’m unsure at this point about what exactly “force tonemapping” will do to my colour information. Will it effectively destroy my linear colorspace, making it practically SRGB?

While I’m unable to assist on the specifics of AE, it is worth to mention TIFF is also viable for log encoded output.

EXR as well, although it will always be floating point except when the said forced option is used, which is not recommended (detailed in the link below). ACES has log encoding specifications worth looking into.

However, for a standard comp workflow, it’s preferred to stick to a linearly encoded floating point EXR output and transcode in post.

Frankly, AE is a red flag. Nothing Adobe offers is suited for serious and straight forward CGI VFX work. It barely works and can be tedious to do what a suited software does easily and often natively.

In case it may come handy, an Octane ACES write up.

Thank you very much for you detailed answer elska! You have been very helpful.

I guess for now I shall stick to simple 16bit EXR output and adjusting the gamma in post.

In the future I'll definitely get rid of goddamn After Effects for Jobs like this! I suppose Fusion will be my way to go, since Nuke would be overkill for me being a 3D Generalist and not a fulltime Compositing artist.

You’re welcome.

Fusion Standalone specifically. DaFusion would be a headache (the one included in DaVinci, being a whole differently purposed software).