Thanks for the help Randy, cc seems to give the best option, but as you say, still needs a bit of grade massaging.
And they told us ACES makes life easy!!
Back to the barbecue!!
It does make thing easier. Just not for Rec. 
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@paul_round Iâve been having good results with -
Convert the aces plate to Rec using - tone map gamma 2.4 ( should tag as rec )
Comp at rec ( the plate goes a slightly off colour )
Then use the inverse of the same tone map.
I believe itâs a photo map legacy preset.
I use this same pipeline whenever doing anything additive or glowy in the aces world.
Rec artwork comes out looking the same as it went in.
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Do the transfer using an ACES transform. You still get the tone mapping but the colour wonât look like it has changed.
small nerdy note on here: still use an inverted view transform to kick the graphics from rec to ACEScc. If you use an input transform youâll run into the ânot quite matchingâ issue.
but Iâve gotta say, client supplied graphics that live in a in rec and have specific RGB values should be applied after the comps are done and graded and converted to rec. I know I made a whole video about this, but the truth of the matter is I have never encountered a situation where anyone should be applying color-specific graphics in a scene linear space like ACES.
The point of ACES is to have a single, true-to-life colorspace and thus any graphic you get would need to be graded to match the scene. It is the ultimate âwe havenât made any decisions about color yetâ space. My can of cider looks different indoors and outdoors but both are correct. If I was replacing the graphic on one shot I would not use the same color as I would for the other.
Iâm a bit more fired up than usual because I was troubleshooting something similar a few weeks ago and the question I kept asking my friend was âwhy are you using ACES for this?â and got the vibe it was just a company policy for them now. So this little diatribe is not aimed at anyone in this thread, but at the idea that âACES is the one true path for all thingsâ and more specifically any company that makes my friends work in ACES without training them on how to solve the problems that it creates.
I love ACES, but itâs a TERRIBLE house format for a commercials shop. Thereâs a reason most flame ops (myself included) say, âwhatâs wrong with doing everything in rec?â The problems that ACES solves are not problems youâll encounter when working on graded rec709 material, so the whole affair is a bad experience.
so to answer Paulâs question: the workable solution is to apply the graphics after the grade and color space have been finalized.
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Sadly Andy, thatâs not an option here. What I donât get, is some of their graphics have been supplied in ACES, but this particular one is an 8bit PNG.
Bummer. Best option is an inverted view transform into ACEScc or cct and comp in log then.
what he said.
On the other hand you can take graphics and put them into the scene and look convincingike they are in the real world⌠it s 2 sided sword this.
If you shoot a actual phone screen you would grade the content of the screen to match âCI colorsâ(however wrong that might be). as they wont ever match.
So with aces you just have to do the same, comes with the territory, give grading a matte and let them figure it out with their clients in the room holding a phone with the graphic on it next to the reference monitor - be happy that in a comp first - grade later workflow this is not on the flame artisr anymore 
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I am minded of the time that I discovered colours looked different depending on the surrounding colours. In my experience of linear comping, the grade helps massively. I think all we can do is get the comp correct for the shot and grade has to be the hero by making brand colours feel more true. This obviously doesnât placate bean counters who take delight in using the digital colour meter. However to my mind, as Aaaandy Dill illustrated above, in different light, things look different so in my mind itâs not necessarily a bad thing.
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Just watched the first five minutes. It seems pretty interesting. Ta.
Iâm also a bit fired up about this as last year I worked at several places that are doing most of their work in Rec. I absolutely hate working in Rec, but I seem to be in the minority. I agree that a lot of Flame artists subscribe to the sentiment that everything should be done in Rec. I donât mean to direct this at you specifically Andy since you freely admit to loving ACES, but I think its telling that you wrote 'flame ops say, âWhatâs wrong with doing everything in Rec?â They donât ask because its actually just rhetorical, as in âI know that Rec is better because thats the way Iâve been doing it since Jesus was in underpants.â
In my book, there is no difference between someone who only wants to work in Rec and someone who only wants to work in ACES. Two sides of the same coin. There is a reason that we have multiple colorspaces. They do different things and if youâre dead set on only ever working in Rec youâre going to hamstring yourself before you even start. Where is the advantage in fighting the work that the colorist has done every step of the way? They crush the blacks to oblivion, blow out the highlights, pile on the grain and the sharpens, and then smash a fat vignette over the top of everything. How is that making it easier to do our jobs?
The last time I worked in Rec, I had to clean up a light that was passing behind someoneâs head. If I had the raw plate in ACES I would have been able to pull all of the hair detail out to put back on after cleaning up the light. Instead, I spent way longer completely rebuilding and tracking in hair patches and it still didnât look as good as it would have had I been comping in ACES. So if Iâm working with brand specific color values and client supplied graphics for a screen insert, then yeah it may make sense to just comp it in Rec. That said it makes absolutely no sense to pull a key for said comp in Rec when I could do it in ACES on a plate with 10x the dynamic range. The beauty of compositing is that I can both comp in Rec and key in ACES at the same time. So, "Whatâs wrong with doing everything in Rec? My answer is âWhy would you?â
I donât mean to cast aspersions on fellow Flame artists, but in my experience people donât want to learn about ACES because its âdifficultâ or âcomplicated.â I also disagree with the idea that a company needs to be specifically training people on how to work in ACES. Is it the companyâs responsibility to train people how to use the new camera analysis or teach them how to use connected conforms or any of the other improvements that have come down the line over the last few years? Weâre professionals claiming to have a toolset that allows us to do a job. If you donât have the tools, Iâm not sure why thatâs your employerâs fault. Iâve been using ACES for almost a decade now. Its not like its new, and there is a wealth of information out there to help educate yourself. Also, its not going anywhere so if you havenât spent time figuring it out then youâre only shooting yourself in the foot.
You can beat your chest and proclaim from a mountain top that youâre an artiste not a technician, but when ultramarine arrived in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages they didnât say, âOh I prefer these dull and desaturated plant dyes that are difficult to work with.â Donât stay in the Middle Ages! Give it another decade and Rec may well be gone altogether in favor of some HDR format for fancy new TVs or something.
I know that what Iâve said probably isnât a super popular opinion and I may have ruffled some feathers, but frankly Iâm tired of hearing people complain about ACES and talk about Rec like its some sacred cow. Itâs like being given a new car and then complaining that its too fast and powerful. Go back to driving your beater then I guess. Iâll see you in my rearview mirror when I blow by going a hundred miles an hour.
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I agree with the core of your argument, but this part bumped me a little. I think training employees is not only beneficial to the employee, but also to the company that trains them. Why would you not want to ensure your employees are not only up to date on the latest and greatest, but also trained in a competent and efficient way that is tailored and curated to the specific needs of your company?
My two cents- if you own a company, or even just manage a department or are a lead artist, your first thought should be on how make your company or team as efficient and well tuned as possible, if that means doing a quick webinar on ACES for your staff, cool. Even if itâs just sending out a video to folks and saying, check this out, itâs going to be useful and we all need to know it, cool. But if youâre not doing that and instead just griping that people donât know what they âshouldâ know, youâre not doing anything but wasting time and losing money. Granted, this is a lot easier said than done, (we all know the tight deadlines and tight margins VFX operates in) and then you add in that a lot of artists are freelance and not staff, etc etc. Itâs complicated! But I just love me a good training session from time to time, so maybe Iâm biased here.
I want to add, I very much have enjoyed learning a great bit about color management over the last few years, from all sorts of resources, be it co-workers or this forum or YouTube or random blogs. And I donât disagree in the great value of understanding it. Iâm also grateful to work at a shop where I feel quite free to ask stupid questions to people that know a lot more than I do, which is invaluable.
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Yeah I may have been a little harsh there for sure. Perhaps a little too fired up. I agree that it behooves a company to train its employees. One of the things that Iâve enjoyed most about my current gig is the freedom to learn without the pressure of incredibly tight deadlines.
I guess what I was really trying to get at is what I perceive to be a certainly level of complacency amongst Flame artists more generally. There is an attitude of, âWell its worked for me for the last thirty years so why would I change?â Its tiresome to hear people complain about ACES when if they took the time spent whinging and applied to learning theyâd be better off.
I feel that this attitude has had a detrimental impact on all of us as Flame artists. Producers, CG artists, and 2d leads have wised up to the fact that a significant portion of Flame artists donât want to/canât work effectively in ACES. Iâve worked at more than a few shops now where Flame isnât allowed to touch CG specifically because of this. It all goes in to Nuke for compositing.
There are a lot of people here who are totally fine doing conforms, adding titles, and eating sushi with the client. I guess I donât blame them since getting paid a Flame rate and doing that makes for a pretty cushy job. What is tough for me to swallow is the knock-on effect it has more generally in the industry when Flame gets pigeonholed as a finishing software because there are too many artists out there not interested in pushing their craft to keep up with the kids in Nuke. Its upsetting to me that I frequently have to point out to producers that I know Nuke just so theyâll assign me a shot with some CG in it instead of asking me to clean up the dust on the product shot at the end of the spot.
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I havent met a single person that learned how to use aces properly that has said âoh no this is stupid I much rather have rec709â
I think the fight is not with fellow artists, they will eventually have to deal with it because its the only thing that makes any sense going forward (you are going to comp everything twice for hdr and sdr deliverables? no ⌠well then its comp
before grade for you) .
In bigger vfx heavy shows (netflix/features) this is allready the defacto standard, and as we know commercial technology follows usually.
the fight is with producers that need to learn to not schedule grading before comp and supervisors that need to have a grip on workflows that make sense for a given project, often the timings and bookings get made even before its known how much vfx is going to be needed.
I know I am very loud and proudly waving the ACES flag for years now, because it opened me to the wonderful world of digital colormanagement, and I dont think I could ever deliver stuff as good and as fast without it, its one of the best tools in my toolset.
My biggest painpoint is with colorists trying to keep their secret sauce gradings secret, in an ideal world we would just have the resolve project so then colorist can work whenever in the pipeline , comp works on scene linear plates or something sdvanced like working wirh BLGsâŚ
this is what I try to enforce on all my
projects, I am not getting booked by old boomer producers at old companies that say things like " it we have always reviewed in quicktime 7" but way more by the type that understands that I try to change things up for the better
Worst motto ever is : Never change a running system.
/rant
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Hi!
Iâm Andy!
In all seriousness though, scene linear is lovely, but when you consider the added labor, training and complication that it adds to a spot (case in point: this thread not ending after a single reply of âhere is the correct way to do thatâ), the disposable nature of TVCâs makes rec709 a perfectly fine way to work.
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until you get hdr commercials and then it doesnt work anymore 
I understand your point but do you really rather do things like sky replacements, put in mattepaintings etc in rec? I dont see myself ever wanting to comp on graded footage (and I actually havent done that in years tbh) for any reason again ever, maybe this just my clients that dont care about locked grading , it never is, so all my comps used to murder themselves on each grading update. Ive almost never had clients be like âoh we need to change the compâ and even if its always easier to apply grading to a new comp version vs vice versa.
Edit->Comp->Grade-> add logos and music â export , its simple, it works , i have no idea why anyone would do this in a different order other than âbecause its always been like thisâ , idk 
added bonus: grading and comp can start on the same day (good for shorter and shorter timings)
Bonus2 : you can now stay in resolve after grading as it has all the comps for many projects(not all) - no need to take it all the way back to flame again.
Bonus3: you can give mattes to grading for thing you rotoed anyhow.
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Is there any actual timeline for HDR commercials, though? Wouldnât it require every tv station and cable network to entirely replace their equipment, ala the SD->HD transition? That seemsâŚunlikely, but I admit I am not following closely what is going with that part of NAB.
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yea well, i dont think looking at broadcast is where this happens first.
right now on hdr channels commercials are sdr-> hdr converted and upscaled to UHD 60/50p
I have not seen any commercials ever done in HDR, other than in store demos for tvs maybe
I think more like once instagram enables hdr things are going to get wild
This 