Fusion Monitoring Part 2: Accurately Viewing Compositions In ACES Workflows

How to Color Manage ACES Correctly in Fusion

Color management is an incredibly important skill for any colorist to master, and to do so requires both a technical understanding of color pipelines and an ability to keep up with the latest industry developments. This Insight will help you do both!

In this Insight, you’ll learn how the Fusion image pipeline behaves within an ACES DaVinci Resolve project. By understanding its specific tonal and gamut requirements, we can correctly color manage our compositions – and, more importantly, see our work accurately represented in Fusion’s viewers.

Part 1 of this series covers how to do this when working in HDR Davinci Wide Gamut Intermediate.

Work Accurately with ACES Color Management, inside Fusion

The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is a popular industry color management standard allowing post-production workers across multiple disciplines to convert camera formats to a single wide gamut of color space.

It is used worldwide for managing projects captured in various raw camera formats and then output to every conceivable viewing platform, from digital cinema to HDR broadcast and streaming services.

Due to its unique primaries and tone treatment, it clashes with Fusion’s VFX industry output color space of sRGB Linear. This mismatch of values can result in a visual shift of the image between Fusion page and the other pages in DaVinci Resolve, as well as within Fusion’s viewers.

By setting up an ACES project and observing the behavior of the image, we can implement monitoring solutions that will match the output across Resolve’s pages and apply a gamut correction for accurate compositing in Fusion’s viewer and on your external reference monitor.

Key takeaways from this Insight

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

• Take into consideration the source of our media when working in ACES.
• Match the Fusion viewer to the other pages in Resolve using the ACESTransform tool.
• Color manage compositions and source media on the Fusion pipeline.
• Load a third-party OCIO config file to correctly monitor a composition in the Fusion viewer.

DaVinci Resolve Fusion ACES Color Management Settings

Mixing Light members: Scroll down below the video to see my settings throughout this Insight.

External Links

• OpenColorIO.org – OCIO config file, as recommended by the developers in the DaVinci Resolve Reference Manual
• DaVinci Resolve Reference Manual – Official chapter on Using OCIO for ACES Coor Management in Fusion
• OpenColorIO GitHub – ACES 1.2 config file used in the Insight

Related Mixing Light Insights

• Fusion Monitoring Part 1: Accurately Monitoring DaVinci Wide Gamut
• ACES Mixing Light Flight Path – What Is ACES, and how do you use It?
• How To Install And Evaluate The Upcoming ACES 2.0 ODT –  Explore the candidate ACES 2.0 output transforms and learn the differences compared to the current ACES release.
• 55 Insights on ACES – Discover the treasure trove of ACES Insights on Mixing Light

Questions or Comments? Leave a comment!

Is this Insight useful to you? Let us know! Mixing Light is all about community discussions and we’re curious if you found this helpful, if you have something to add, or if you need more questions answered?

– Daria