How to Use ACES in After Effects - Full Overview (2023) 

It is just crazy to me how convoluted this process is.

Nice!! Cute creature AND valuable workflow!!! Thanks so much for making these videos, this is awesome!!

Find someone to love you, the way InLightVFX loves ACES ;-) Very well made tutorial as usual.

Finally a proper ACES workflow in After Effects ! That's a relief

So glad your making videos again! All super high quality. Color space with vfx has always been something I’ve struggled conceptualizing.

Yeeeeees this is what we like to see! Short and too the point, and finally ACES in After Effects, great round up as always!

Excellent tutorial! For a very complicated workflow, you've done a great job explaining it!

You are goated! Thank you for covering this so quickly. Mad hype to not have to jump through hoops just to achieve an accurately color matched image

I was searching for this info and this video is great! You did a great Job! Much appreciated, suscribed. Thanks!

This overview is absolutely pure gold for more reasons than one!

Easily the best tutorial online. Great job explaining everything!

This is SO helpful. Thank you!

Thank you for this video!!! So helpful and TO THE POINT

Thank you so much for the clear explanation of the workflow. Literally saved my day!

Thank you, man. You helped me a lot.

Thank you, this finaly got my head around it.

wonderful!!! bravo !!! melting brain awesomeness good vibes in the clarity of giving the information !

Thanks! very usefull tutorial

These color space videos are so crucial. Thanks!

I'm very happy to have found this video today. It's very impressive！！🐿

finally, i was using the opencolorio plugin before but this is so much nicer.

Thank you for the great and precise overview. I'm a colorist and have been sending this to VFX artists and it's been very helpful in explaining ACES.

Great video and explanation! Thanks

Great video ! I've been waiting for AE to implement ACES into their software for too long now

Another banger! Great video Jacob

Hehe, it's nice you made a video about it!!! I really like it so far, I hope they will release non beta version soon :)

Nice video, it is useful for my work, Thank you.

you saved me! Thanks!

Amazing description, can't thank you enough!

amazing video! very straightforward! very well done!

Very nice! thanks for the explanation

I've been learning about color managed workflows and messing around with AE old horrible system. Perfect timing for this to come out

Fantastic. Really nice explanation. Thank you very much for bringing more clarity to me.

Perfect work ! Keep it up

Just a small suggestion with exporting the final thing for a colorist, You can export in pro res as well, it's lossless and preserves all the details and the file sizes arent huge like EXR

Thanks for that video - helped me a LOT!!

This is a great video with tons of useful information! Thank you so much. On a current VFX project I'm working on I've been utilizing exclusively a 32 bit ACES workflow within AE, and this helped me get a grasp of setting things up. That being said, I have been runing into some issues lately that I'm not 100% sure about the best approach to remedy it. I've had several shots where I'm wanting to overexpose parts of my image (for example, an interior scene with a window that I want blown out to be more realistic). The issue I've been running into on these shots is that upon making the final render, those bright areas end up being clamped down to a grayish-tone that looks very bad and incorrect. I'm assuming it has something to do with the high dynamic range of a 32 bit project, but I'm not entirely sure on the best way to approach this. So far, the only fix was to reduce the exposure of those bright areas until the clipping went away, but then I no longer had the overexposed effect I was intially going for. I want those areas to be over exposed, but I don't want them being clamped down to a slightly grey value, I want them to appear white or darn near close to it. Any ideas on a proper workflow for something like this? Or do you have any videos/courses that go over that? No worries if not, and thanks in advance!

Omg I needed this so bad... literally just saw this as I was opening an AE project I have to deliver next week that can use this (instead of the janky hack I've been doing). Thank you sir!!!

Thank you very much

This is SUCH a helpful video. I have come back to this multiple times now for reference. Thank you so much for making this. You're a really talented educator!

You're in resolve, you're only one step away from dumping musty old After Effects for Fusion :). Great tutorial, sending it to my AE friends!

What a headache with this ACES workflow really! It was way easier earlier with full sRGB. Thanks for the tutorial.

Fantastic work!!

You are awesome man thanks for your effort

mate you're a star thank you

THX!!!

This video is awesome!!! I will like to adress a small issue just in case. I found this problem with my cg and workflow and is that you have to convert the interpretation of the cg footage to 32 bit if you are working with EXR because if no the color appear compresed

incredible, thank you!

Helpful, thanks!

For anyone that doesn't have an explicit "Output" in the render view. After clicking show all on the colour profiles, the only sRGB that matched was "sRGB-Display/Un-Toned Map"

Thank you, i am always messing up my color transforms hahah

LOVE this video YES!

Finally i used to put aces as a .cube luts on Photoshop limited to a 5 luts only which i could only play with opacity and rendering took forever with a lot of crashing

Great Video, thanks a lot. What I noticed when working with ACES: there are no real whites, for example when creating new solids. Plus, all the grading steps behave completely different to the the usual srgb workflow. Maybe you can cover your typical grading steps in a future video? :)

Thanks for this clear and concise tutorial! Question: are you viewing in ACES/sRGB because that's what your monitors are set up for? Are there any issues with this workflow and Mac monitors setup for "Display P3"?

Cool video. what is the flowflow with black magic footages?

good

Please make a Fusion video about ACES as well.

Color management in AE was always alien to me, Untill now, thankyou!

💚Great job as always 💚 In a professional work environment what is the format that the videos are exported to be shown as a movie or series?

YOU ARE A HERO, IT WAS JUST WHAT I NEEDED! T H A N K Y O U S I R

This might be the best video I got on 2024

great thank you for this tutorial, I have a 4444 XQ MOV file, but when I export it as a JPG from After Effects or Nuke and import it as an image plane in Maya with the camera, the color changes when I render it in Arnold. I'm working in ACES in Maya 2022, and I've set the camera color space to sRGB, but the color still changes. I was wondering if I might be exporting it incorrectly as a MOV file. How can I correct this issue? need your guidance on it thank you

why the color picker changes to grey instead of pure white, when we change to aces workflow. thank you and well done for the tutorial

Damn all those transforms are making me crazy

Say I want to use ACES workflow, but I need to key green screen footage as well. How do I do that? I heard keylight doesn't work well in linear compositions. (Also, the footage can be shot in slog or cinetone, which one is better?)

I duplicated output sRGB and rec709 to input for the artists ;)

What media color space/input transform should I use to work with braw footage (shot with a bmpcc4k) in this workflow?

Where do i find this Color Output Setting when using Media Encoder?

So much more convoluted than Nuke

After Effects now has the OCIO Look Transform and OCIO CDL Transform as effects under the Color Correction category that use OpenColorIO to process color. You don't need to enable OpenColorIO color management in the project to use these effects. plz. make a video with this topic

My outputs appear a little dull when viewed in macOS's Finder. I've tried every combination possible, from OCIO 1.2, 1.3, and even custom OCIO profiles. They look fine when I bring the image back into the OCIO-managed AE project, but If I bring it into an Adobe Color Managed AE project, they look dull just like it does in Finder. Does anyone else have this issue??

Part of the income of my new VFX job is being earned by you right now, actually

Great content man ! like and subscribe. thank you. just last question with which encoding format should we export from blender before compositing ?

so did u rendered aces in blender beta? thanks for video!

I was super excited about this but I think I prefer the old workflow where I stacked OCIO adjustment layers I could just copy/paste. Maybe I’m just being stubborn!?

Why Aces 1.2? I'm new to colour management but I hear 1.3 has fixes like correcting out of gamut errors

Where can i get the OCIO Color Space Transform? i downloaded ocio for after effects 2022, but it doesnt show me that effect neither de especific name ACES-ACEScg

Referring to footage as input confuses the audience. We don't have to "discuss another time". Color management is a "filter" that has Input and Output. We need to set a correct Input (color space of our footage), and a correct Output (desired colorspace of our footage).

One issue I'm having with this workflow is when I work with a plugin like Maxon Universe. I think the plugin, and many others, are not designed to work in OCIO so they don't look right. Is there a workaround for this that anyone knows of? After Effects built in effects work fine.

Maybe I missed it, but I think you forgot to mention that you have to linearize the Working space from the project definition. Otherwise, the import will apply the internal Afx transformation color to all the imported footage.

Please do a davinci resolve workflow and aftereffects using exr. Pleaseeeee

Is it better to do adjustments like color correction after or before the ACES View Transform/Output transform?

Thanks Jacob. What's the advantage of using ACES? I recently did some freelance and ran into trouble using ACES. I asked my colorist friend about it and he basically said to never use ACES unless I it was specified.

1:10 Why haven't you chosen aces 1.3? Thanks!

What were the chances to find an image with my hometown (the first image - Cisnădie, Sibiu, Romania.) in an after effects tutorial clip hahah

CAN YOU PLZ PROVID LINK OF ALL PROJECT FILES ASAP...

When we will se your videos uploaded in HDR???

So how do you output aces from blender? or does filmic log have an input profile you can use in AE?

why not 1.3?

Anyone else have many, many less options for color spaces in all the twirl down menus?

Does bitdepth play a role?

I would have not thrown you some money not thinking I was getting some kind blender file. def feel tricked. while I'm criticizing.. going why and what settings in blender would have been helpful. :/ anyway thanks for the vid. it did help me getting hdr up to youtube. I think . cant tell for sure.

If you choose a non-linear Output-Transform (Like V-Log, LogC, S-Log etc), DON'T export to Half-Float/16bit EXR as OpenEXR was only ever meant to store LINEAR color values. Colorvalues are stored as floats and those are being "cropped" by 16bit EXRs... but Log footage needs the full float precision to keep the color details. So by exporting to a Half-Float EXR you are basicly losing a lot of color info, especialliy in the highlights. Its similar to exporting in 8 Bits. Forr iinear data, this doesn't matter as you just lose an inpercievable amount of colorprecision... in log, this tiny bit of precision multiplies exponentially. It's a very math heavy topic and hard to wrap your head around if you haven't dealt with colorspaces for a long time ;) If you want to export Log footage, go with DPX, ProRes4444 or an Avid equivalent.

The big problem with ACES in AE is that the "Display Color Space" doesn't preserve RGB in native graphical elements like text, shapes, solids in AE.... Thankfully this method of making adjustment layers does work around that... (In my understanding the adjustment layer with Color Space Transform only applies itself to layers with an interperated input source. Which solids / text / shapes does not have.) But Adobe needs to fix this "display color space" or ACES in AE won't work intuitively with the majority use-case for AE which is motion graphics(!). It could be called ACES hybrid.

Finally！Now I can sleep well tonight

For some reason I don't have the V-Log output on my render options, even after pressing show all.

If it's one thing I've realized from my climbing videos - it's that the number one most important thing is the color. Now I only go as far as shooting in slog since I'm just filming for fun 😆. But all of this is to say that it's really cool to see this process done at a professional level!

scientist. :)

it took till 2023?