ACES for Nuke via OCIO: Part 1 Initial Setup

Written by Deke Kincaid on .

Nuke 10 now includes a much better integration of the OCIO system into the nodegraph.  This adds much more flexibility of how yohandle color in Nuke and also makes the integration of ACES considerably easier for normal Nuke users who are not color scientists(which is most of us).  

These main goal of these tutorial are to go over the basic workflows of using both OCIO and ACES in Nuke.

1. Project Settings

So how to start with enabling OCIO/ACES? First goto your project settings.

 

2. Change Color management from Nuke to OCIO

Change the color management from Nuke to OCIO.

 

3. New ACES Configs included with Nuke 10

Now pick your config.  I would suggest you start with aces_1.0.1.  The other versions of ACES are there for backward compatiblity for people who did shows in ACES before it was finalized.

 

4. Read nodes colorspace switches to OCIO

As you can see now all the Read nodes will update with all the colorspaces from the ACES OCIO profile.  Previously in Nuke 9 or earlier you had to turn on "raw data" and use the OCIO nodes to do all your conversion.

 

5. Write nodes colorspace switches to OCIO

Same as the read nodes, the write node also gets the OCIO treatment.  

This knobs also decide which colorspace metadata gets written to certain formats such as quicktime so when you for example write out an AlexaLogC and read it back in, the Read node will properly know what colorspace the file was written as.  

*** beware of using the "raw data" knob as it will incorrectly write "linear" to the colorspace metadata for quicktimes.

 

6. Nuke ACES defaults are incorrect for normal Nuke users

All your default LUT settings defaults have been moved from "Project Settings > LUT" in Nuke 9 and earlier to "Project Settings > Color" in Nuke 10.  It was also combined with the previous OCIO tab.  

The default LUT settings for ACES 1.0.1 are not ideal for most people starting out with ACES.

 

7. Modify defaults for the average Nuke user

So the example below is not perfect but it gives a better suggested set of defaults to use for someone transitioning an existing Nuke pipeline to ACES/OCIO.

In the next tutorial we will explain what all the default LUT settings do and what you should choose for your pipeline.

 

Comments   

 
0 # Matt Grasso 2016-06-22 02:59
Thank you Deke, will definetely try this out
 

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