Which is the best color space?
- Video/Rec709/Rec2020
- Logarithmic
- Scene Linear
0 voters
and why?
SceneLinear - real world values
With bright values taking more real world values, a lot of compositing happens in a more photorealistic way. Blur (defocus and motion), glows.
Combine this with a LUT with some good tone mapping and you have a very good ceiling to play with and avoid unsightly clipping.
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There’s no good answer to this question. It all depends on the source, the destination (delivery specs) and the task.
but if you had to chose one…
I could not, I would not, not linear, not log, not video, I do not want green eggs and ham.
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But if only one was available, I’d chose some form of linear, ACEScg to cover most gamuts (or be close enough)
The question was: Which is the best color space? … and there’s no good answer.
Maybe re-phrase the question? Like, which color space do you favor?
It’s still very relative to the context though.
We always chose which ever makes more sense for each show, with occasional intermediate conversions.
The goal is always: don’t be destructive when you shouldn’t and work as fast as possible. (no need for extra unnecessary process just because of some theoretical ‘best color space’)
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shrugs
It depends of course. If I had to choose? Rec 709 only because its OG AF.
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Ccir 601 is old school, 709 is new still isn’t it? Its bad enough painting more pixels and wide-screen now we have to deal with more levels too?
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And of course: get the best photographic qualities out of that stuff 
Log… it’s all we see anyway.
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Horses for courses. I frequently jump between log and linear and rec.
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Honestly @johnt @Stefan dont think too hard. Choose one like your life depended on it!
Pretty even so far
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Aaaah!!! I really hope it doesn’t
I did answer the ‘secondary’ question though, ish … right?
I’m curious about what others will say anyway, what’s the mood … so, thank you @andy_dill for the poll!
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Aces is great to avoid any issue when mixing input.
Now the big question is what flavor of aces you need :
CG is great in batch but I find myself always switching from CG(lin) to CCT(log) for a lot of action
- grade : log : it’s much gentle to play with
- beauty : log : Any medium, soft, skin work like to play between 0 and 1
- tracking : log. Autodesk seriously !!!
- resize in the timeline to go from source res to HD : log : to avoid any black pixels with the resize node in lanczos
Lin is great for comp, mixing CG passes, blur, DOF, MotionBlur.
I sprinkle my batch with a lot of colorMngt from CG to CCT and back.
I still not sure if I would like my input to be AcesCG or AcesCCT (mpcAdv chose AcesCG to be the pivot color space), but more and more I think CCT is the best space at the timeline level.
My 2 cents.
F
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Easy as it is, Ive come to the conclusion we can’t blame Autodesk for tracking problems in linear. When there are such a huge range of values on a screen it’s difficult to get a computer to be as judgemental as we are when looking at a picture through a lut. Hoping that makes sense because once I started thinking like that I just scrutinised stuff more and tried to make the picture work for the tracker and got better results.
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The flame input should be aware of the color space (and more if it could deal with some sort of metadata 
) and applies the math to be sure it is confortable with.
Unfortunately, it’s not the case.
F
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none of this describes a colourspace,
Video ? What VHS? is not a colourspace!
Rec709 COULD be a color space but also could be just a Gamut or a Gamma , its to vague!
Rec2020 for sure is a just a Gamut.
Logarithmic, again, not a colorspace, doesn’t even describe anything, what kind of Log Curve, and even then its only a ‘gamma’ or a transfer Function again, doesn’t say anything
Scene Linear, is also just a transfer function.
I think we are being tricked here.
so my Vote goes to
Linear/Aces AP1 , which is scene-linear transfer function with AP1 primaries and a D60 Whitepoint . Which is then named AcesCG
Why?
- Because maths works best in linear, double the value, double the light , easy.
- It shall be saved into Float formats. Floating point is like… so much better than integer formats, like omg.
- Because its ACES and everything else is just dumb at this point.
- because its sexy
- because I like it
- because everything else should be banned from society.
I only like log encodings because some apps/tools afteredumfects * photocrap* have no good way of working with a linear transfer function (looking at you flame tracker -.-)
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How do you deal with the resize node in acesCG @finnjaeger ?
F
I convert to log before I filter the image and then back to linear.
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Color science doesn’t have a Domain/Kingdom/Phylim system, or at least those of us on the periphery aren’t aware of it, so I think using Log/Lin/Video is a good way to broadly catergorize colorspaces.
I mean, if we’re gonna get technical, video IS a log color space. haha. 