Hi Logik, I’ve been running into some weird behaviour with MediaHub colour management issues in projects with concurrent users in multiple workspaces.
Some background info:
- Flame 2027.1 on Rocky Linux 9
- Centralised project server
- Centralised framestore
- Centralised shared config (but not colour management)
- Project is shared between 3 users concurrently, each user has their own workspace and profile
- ACES 1.1 (in case it matters)
What we noticed today was:
- An artist tried to view an exported Rec709 Quicktime in MediaHub.
- They found that no matter what they set in their Colour Management options (tag only, view transform, etc) the preview pane would only show Clip CS ACEScg, Input CS Rec709, File CS Rec709.
- The preview thumbnail also appeared to be a Rec709 image viewed as ACEScg.
- Importing the mov resulted in a clip stated to be Rec709 but with the above appearance.
- Tried multiple known-good Rec709 files and MediaHub settings, as well as restarts and reboots, with the same results.
- No errors in Flame shell or app logs.
- Not specifically this issue, but other users have found import resolution settings mysteriously changing to values that seem to be set by someone else working concurrently, as well as tag-only imports having colour management applied in pre-processing.
What we found to fix this:
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I tried to open Manage Project but a message popped up saying that there was a lock held by a host that was no longer reachable. We did have another workstation crash today which could be related. Unfortunately I did not note which file was locked, and I haven’t been able to find it in app/shell logs.
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Clearing the lock and opening the workspace again, the Colour Management in MediaHub now showed auto-convert Rec709 to ACEScg, which matches what we saw in the preview pane before.
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Selecting Tag Only again finally got the Rec709 mov displaying correctly.
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So it seems that a stuck lock file (of the project config?) was silently causing MediaHub Colour Management settings to be stuck despite visual updates to the menu.
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This is concerning for us because, for example, when potentially working with a mix of ACES2065 and ACEScg material we may run into situations where we believe ACEScg material was imported tag-only as ACEScg where in reality it may be silently and incorrectly interpreted as ACES2065 and incorrectly transformed. Same for import resolution.
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We can no longer assume that the import colour/resolution we set in menus are being correctly followed by Flame.
This now raises a question for me:
- What is the expected behaviour for MediaHub Colour Management settings? Is it supposed to be global, project-specific, workspace-specific, or user-specific? I can’t find any info in Flame docs for this.
- I had the logical expectation for it to be workspace- or user-specific but it seems that it is project-specific based on this observed behaviour.
The solution for now may be to just use separate projects for separate users, despite Flame docs saying that a simultaneous multi-user project is possible using workspaces. Side note: I mistakenly assumed that media cache deduplication (hard linking) was only within projects but looking at Flame docs again it appears that media can be deduplicated between different projects, which is nice. We would miss having shared project presets and libraries though.
Thanks for reading all this and thanks in advance for any input