Export Footage Keeping Colour Space

Never had to export footage using the original colour space. Is there a way to do it?
For example, original footage is slog-3 cinema. Client wants it back with the same flag. Exporting in Flame doesn’t seem to respect that when going to quicktime.

Could you give more info?

How are you exporting? Color management node - view transform rec709? QuickTime on mac? Maybe ColorSync Off?

What space did you work in? How was it imported?

There is some metadata in EXR that Flame will inject with a colour space tag :thinking:

As far as I know, QuickTime uses NCLC colour tagging, three numbers that define the colour space for any colour managed players (like quickTime)

Not sure that this list has slog-3 cinema

Are you trying to get Flame to convert back into this camera log or just that the quickTime needs the flag?

If you were sent quicktimes you could look and see what tagging they have and then match that.

A bit more info. I always work in ACES 1.1 on Linux 2025.2
The footage was imported with tagged color space - from file or rules.
Exporting Quicktime 444.
Pretty sure if I export EXRs it will keep the flag. But it’s going back to Premiere and I don’t want to complicate it for the editor.
I’ve tried exporting without any LUT, also with a LUT set to SLog 3/SGamut3Cine - No difference.
I’ve done it with ColorSync on/off.
NCLC tagging does not affect this.
I am trying to export exactly what I imported.

How are you checking the quicktime exported? That’s always the last link in the chain, but just as important. It can easily make you misunderstand how you’re actually exporting the footage.
If you’re checking it directly re-importing in Flame, your color management setup there will definitely affect what you are watching.

From my experience, Flame isn’t great at reading and showing the color space metadata. You can also double-check it in Resolve, or just export a small sample and post it here.

Cool. So you are working using the ACES 1.1 colour management preset

you import the quicktime using from files or rules
what is this tagging your footage as? Something log?

You are working in that same log and not changing anything and then you are exporting a quicktime.
If you haven’t changed the colourspace you shouldn’t need to apply any LUT.

What comes in goes out the same :crossed_fingers:

have you looked at the NCLC tagging on their quickTime to see what values it has? What NCLC values do yours have? Are they different?

there are programs you can use to change the NCLC values on a quicktime

Footage is tagged correctly as sony.
If “What comes in goes out the same”, my imports, from the material I exported, should know that they’re sony. They do not.
And AFAIK NCIC has nothing to do with specific camera Metadata. You can change color space but not camera metadata. Nor can you inject Sony Log info into the metadata.
But I could be wrong.

Ahh I see. I’ll put NCLC out of my mind for now.

So Flame is a massive metadata eater. As in it seems to loose metadata in the process.

I use nuke sometimes to put metadata back in but usually on EXRs I haven’t done it on movs before

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I would go back to the client and ask for clarification. That seems like an unreasonable request, or maybe better, a misinformed request to me.

It’s one thing to export the footage in Slog3 ProRes, so that a color pipeline that follows can treat it identically to other source files that didn’t go through VFX. That is not uncommon to make color easier and more consistent.

However, it’s not feasible to re-encode the file so it’s indistinguishable from the original camera file. For one, because cameras use different codecs that are usually not found in post software, such as XAVC. And are often packaged as .mxf or other containers. What would they do if the camera file was from a RED camera? Ask to re-encode as RED RAW? Even if you managed to get some metadata restored, there’s no telling if the pattern rules in the color software would properly recognize, if they, for example, expected .mxf instead of ProRes.

Also, there is a myriad of metadata that aren’t necessarily relevant to post, and nobody has bothered with them traveling through a pipeline.

I would export Slog3 to ProRes, and the colorist on the other end may have to manually tag that clip as such, rather than relying on the software auto-decoding color space. A small inconvenience for the benefit of having a consistent color space journey. They should call that a win and move on.

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