Hello everyone. I’m working on ACEScg project and building some captions. I’ve set them to true white (FFFFFF), however they all look very washed out. How can I make them brighter? It seems Flame is somehow not letting me make them true white and they look greyish. Bear in mind I’m not a colour management whizz, it’s something we set internally in the company.
Thanks!
White for text is a complicated topic in linear color space.
I assume your final delivery will be a Rec709 render?
In that case I would suggest not to do the captions in ACEScg, but do your ‘view color transform’ per rules, and then add the captions in the delivery color space, not ACEScg.
In HDR there is no singular true white anymore, because it all depends.
I know this answer involves some color management, but you can’t escape that in this scenario. Going the route above actually will simplify this a lot for you.
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put a color mgt set to view transform in your timeline above all of your aces material. above that colormgt layer put all your rec 709 grfx; titles; endcards; captions; etc
Thanks so much for your reply. We’re actually delivering in HDR to a streamer. How can I make sure the text is whiter/brighter then?
I’m building my captions in Text tool in Flame - it’s not external GFX that I can just tag Rec709 I believe…
In that case you need to find out what the streamers specification for GFX is. They usually need to sit at 200nit, and GFX textures are treated separate from image in terms of what pure white is. This is definitely a color management process then.
This is well documented for Resolve, not sure how that would work in Flame. Assume it’s possible. Maybe someone else who had to deal with can share their setup.
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Thank you. Even if they need to be sitting at 200nit, which I can check on my scopes, how can I make them that - the white doesn’t go whiter and is grey-looking. This is for Flame-created captions in Text tool…
I have actually checked and they allow up to 300nit brightness on text. I have no idea how to do this. Do I use ‘Luminance’ in the Fill colour picker to make this white brighter?
How are you adding your captions - with the subtitle or the text tool? Appears maybe the latter.
If you’re on 2024.2 or later, there is a separate subtitle track which sits on top. If you put your text in there, it will actually come in as an overlay at 1,000 nits (or whatever your mastering display is set), which is actually wrong. But you can dial back the color of the subtitles to bring them back down to 200 or 300 per your scope.
If you add the text via text tool inside your picture stack it will be a lot more difficult. The reason you’re seeing gray in your case is because you’re fighting the tone mapping curve.
And it seems like ADSK with the subtitle tool hasn’t tackled HDR yet, as there are no settings for subtitles and nit levels. That should be an enhancement request. In the project preferences there should be a setting for what level GFX are placed in HDR and it should apply to the subtitle track.
I just tested that in a project, and it worked for me. Ended up with around 60% luma on the subtitle color. But your mileage may vary.
Many thanks for your thorough help.
I am creating the captions in the Text tool. I am on Flame 2023.3. They are standard captions with white text. The problem with it is that, when I select the Font fill to White, it’s just grey. I can go to the Font fill colour and there’s a Luminance setting I can play with, and bring it up, but it seems a bit bizarre. I don’t know what else I can try to control the Text brightness.
Since you’re on an older version - here would be my work around.
Place the captions in a separate timeline by themselves, which is set to Rec709/SDR color space. Render this out to bake the captions into an image. If you can with alpha great, but on black is fine.
Then bring this baked layer into your original timeline, set on top, enable comp. If you exported with alpha it should work straight, otherwise change blend-mode to ‘Add’ or ‘Max/Lighten’.
Now that this is just another image layer, your standard color correct should allow you to dial the exposure in so you hit 300.
There’s something how Flame reads your text elements that is causing them to be tone-mapped badly in the HDR stack.
One caveat - this work-around would make this look good on your HDR output/review.
But if you work in Dolby Vision there may be additional considerations so it translates correctly to all the different displays. You will need someone else who does that to comment if there is a better / correct way of doing this.
In Dolby Vision, your GFX captions should remain at a constant level, while the main image gets remapped based on viewing display. If you bake the captions, that logik breaks.
Otherwise you run the risk that it looks good on your mastering display but fails QC anyway.
I assume there are others here who do finishing and online for streamers frequently. I know several, but they’re all on Resolve, not Flame.
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Also, what’s the bit depth of your text. You’re in 16-bit floating point?
Yes that’s right.
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You should ask for a HDR display if you are doing HDR first of all, its pretty darn important to see what 200/300 NIT titles mean in the context of the rest of the show.
as a HDR enjoyer ive seen titles placed so badly in terms of luminance, 300NIT titles while the diffuseWhite of the show was 100NIT or night-time-shots looked crazy awful, especially given MiniLED displays that will get you massive blooming if you do that .
otherwise, if its a single color (as you said plain white/neutral) title there is no colorspace to worry about as you can just directly add it to whatever level you want directly on top of your PQ timeline.
I think flame is missing a PQ Clamp node where you can clamp stuff to certain NITs levels directly but you can calculate this yourself :
(math gets a bit more complex if you deal with floating point and another translation in there from linear/float to PQ/Integer)
Depending on your particular pipeline/workflow having the PQ graded HDR10 segements in a 12bit Integer timeline would be the best.
In 8bit integer terms:
Full Signal = 255 RGB = 10.000 NIT
75.18% = 192 RGB = 1000 NIT
62.19% = 159 RGB = 300 NIT
57.91% = 148 RGB = 200 NIT
50.81% = 130 RGB = 100 NIT
44.03 % = 112 RGB = 50 NIT
so if you would just make a simple graphic with these RGB values and say “this is PQ/ST2084 now” and throw it on top of your PQ track it would be fine. (for white/grey graphics , once we talk about stuff like CI color logos and whatever this becomes a bit more complex, as you want to have rec709 gamut in a rec2020 container… otherwise stuff will look super duper off. )
If you have additional for example ACES colormanagement on top, you should rethink that workflow, titles should be added post grade.
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