I like to store and share some links that I found interesting and useful in the last months. Here they are:
A new OCIO v2 config called AgX and a video explaining some of the ideas behind it.
https://youtu.be/68xlyvRewKk
A three part series about the new display rendering transform AgX.
Some interesting insights in DSLR camera native file or also called RAW files.
Another interesting video about camera RAW and some insights into the capabilities of DarkTable.
I watched this video 20 times, but I am still too dumb to repeat the same steps with a scan that I made with Scaniverse or PolyCam. One day I will hopefully understand the right workflow.
All the steps are easy to understand, but I still fail to make them work for me.
I bought the PDF to support the efforts from Grzegorz Baran.
I am happy to have finished another article that was long in the making. I even had to stop working on it and finished the article One scene – many images before. But somehow it made sense, because this article was still also in the middle of some thought processes.
The idea is always first to look from display output to the working colourspace. I try to use a well known colourspace with well known display related primaries first and then climb up to bigger and wider colourspaces and different display rendering transforms.
The ACES 1.2 release candidate is the last version that will be available for the OCIOv1 framework. Newer OCIO configs that support the OCIOv2 framework are at a pre-release state at the moment. I will try to stop using the OCIOv1 configs and switch over the OCIOv2 configs.
When you want to use the new OCIO configs in Nuke 13.2, please be aware that Nuke only can read the name…_ocio_v2.0.ocio configs. The name…_ocio_v2.1.ocio configs are not supported in this Nuke version, but Blender 3.5Alpha for example can read these configs.
Another new behaviour in Nuke is, that you cannot set an output transform in the write node unless you alter the OCIO config by yourself. Output or view transforms are missing in the write node. The workaround is to use a OCIODisplay node at the end of the nuke script and write out the files with a write node that is set to “raw data”.
That is a very bad implementation at the moment in Nuke, because as soon as you view the OCIODisplay node, the viewer itself needs to be set to “raw” as well, otherwise the view transform will be applied twice.
The issue is discussed here. I assume this will be addressed in the upcoming Nuke 14 release.
Autumn is here and so there will be soon new Apple OS versions.
In the upcoming weeks there should be coming the MacOS Ventura and the iPad 16.1 releases. Of course I will do some HDR tests once the updates are available.
In the meantime I cleaned up the subdomain hdr.toodee.de and the HDR-Gallery pages. Some of the information was already outdated and I re-ordered the example clips to declutter the pages a bit.
comparison of different view transforms / display rendering transform / output device transform
Beginning of this summer I started an article, but somehow it was never finished. I added lots of images, but the context was missing. Now I revisited the article and finished it up.
I took just one simple rendering from Blender and viewed it through many view transforms including the three candidates for ACES 2.0, both in SDR and HDR.
One image – four blog posts and one and a half years later.
Only the middle image is the intended look for a typical sRGB display.
I think I can finish looking at this image for a while now. I finished part four of a series of blog post that I thought would fit into one post initially. But the deeper I peeked into the issues with this image, the longer it took to finish the articles. Here is an overview of all four articles.
Blender 3.2 is out and has a lot of new features. One of them is the color space override in the Scene/Output section. This was a good opportunity to test out a little scene that I have set up. So you could view the left image in Blender …
…but actually render out the right image. This is a stupid example, but it’s getting more interesting when rendering EXR files. Please read the Blender 3.2 render colorspace overrides for more information.
Plus a follow up article rendering a close-up of the same scene and taking a closer look at different display rendering transform (DRT) options: One Scene – many images
Using different display rendering transforms in SDR
Happy new 2022! In my WordPress site I have several topics that I started in 2021 but I was not able to finish. I am looking forward to present them hopefully in the near future.
The new topics are not directly related to ACES, that’s why I created a new section called “Exploring HDR displays” on this WordPress site.
One article, at least a first part, I am able to present today. The blurry red star on a cyan background. Since I read the blog from Troy Sobotka I got fascinated with this image. The top image shows how it should look and the second image shows how it looks far too often when you try to recreate this image for yourself.
got a small update. With the new versions of the operation systems MacOS Monterey and iOS 15 I need to check again on which devices HDR is supported. There are some strange changes. For example I could always show my demo files on the iPhone 11 Pro. Now I got a new iPhone 13 Pro and the same page does not work anymore.
I also got the new M1 MBP with an XDR display, so I decided to update the subdomain hdr.toodee.de with some more detailed information on which device and with which browser or app this page actually works as intended.
Blender 3.0 lighting tests, converting a finished drone footage trailer from SDR to HDR in FCPX and filming with the new iPhone 13Pro in the ProRes format.
Blender 3.0 entered the beta phase, so I thought it is time to update the Blender and ACES 1.2 page. I found a Blender lighting tutorial video on YouTube from FlippedNormals.com and this animated me to follow along with the Blender 3.0beta version.
A fun tutorial to follow along.
At the same time I was testing the latest version of the AMD RadeonProRender 3.3 for Blender as my 2020 iMac has a Radeon Pro graphics card.
I ended up rendering some stills of the sculpture head in Blender 3.0 with ACES 1.2. As the view transform I used sRGB. The Radeon ProRender does not officially support Blender 3.0, so I used Blender 2.93.5 and Filmic to light the scenes.
My three renders in SDR.
The finished renders I imported into Resolve in ACES 1.3 mode and for the ODT I chose the HDR output ST-2084 1.000 (P3D65limited). My iMac does not show me a proper output on the UI viewer in Resolve, so I simply graded the stills to around 700 Nits peak brightness with the help of the scopes and checked the results on an iPadPro XDR. For the SDR version, I switched to the ACES/sRGB output and started the color corrections from scratch.
The HDR version or the three renderings.
Why not keyframe the three light situations and create a light animation. Rendered with the AMD ProRender engine and with Cycles in ACEScg and the same light animation, but different shaders and light intensities.
And last but not least, the two render sequences using the OpenDRT (0.090b2 from Jed Smith) display rendering transform and some additional grading in FCPX.
A quick test with the OpenDRT instead of the ACES RRT&ODT.
And here is another little test that I was able to for a personal project of Florian Zachau from Sehsucht that he shot on his SKYDIO 2 drone. He sent me his finished edited and graded project as a UHD ProRes file, I gave it a shot and converted it in FCPX to HDR.
The camera source files and his graded master are done in SDR, but the overall images have already such a big contrast, so it was easy to stretch the sun and lights even further out and make them brighter. I tried to hide the sun disc a little bit more and desaturated areas around the sun. A bit of grain was added and the converted ProRes file handed back to Florian.
Sure, there are compression and other artifacts from pushing the material even further, but on a mobile screen the image looks just cool! Thanks to Florian to be able to add a bit of “spice” to his cool trailer video.
Amazing drone footage shot by Florian Zachau, edited and graded in Resolve.
For the last little project I did a walk alongside the Elbe in Hamburg and filming close to dawn on a sunny autumn day in November.
The shots were filmed just from the hand holding the phone in HD 1080p@60fps in ProRes. The 20 GB heavy clips I imported into FCPX and created a little edit in a HDR/WideGamut. The source files are shot in HLG mode, and I tried in FCPX to to a conversion to PQ, but there is not much more that I could pull out of that footage. So I uploaded the slightly graded film from a ProRes HLG master file.
iPhone 13 Pro ProRes footage shot in HLG and finished in HLG
The same edit, but converted to PQ in FCPX and finished with some additional grading steps.
