Because Prores Quicktimes are always assumed to be Rec.709, ignoring color management can result in color and brightness shifts, often incorrectly blamed on a “Quicktime gamma bug”.

In this video, a direct follow-on from Part 24, I look at how we deal with sRGB branding colors when we are working with High Dynamic Range and ACES.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time pondering whether or not this is a niche topic. But having spent the previous week dealing with exactly the issues outlined in this video, it’s certainly going to become increasingly relevant.

This video is tying together several topics that have been covered previously.  Firstly, ACES was introduced back in Part 12, and it provides an industry standard for working with High Dynamic Range video. In Part 19 we introduced High Dynamic Range video, and then in Part 20 we looked at a number of scenarios that all demonstrate how and why working with HDR simply looks better. In Parts 22 & 23 we looked at how HDR video is tone mapped for Standard Dynamic Range outputs. Most recently, Part 24 emphasised that corporate brand colors are always defined using sRGB values, and we need to use color management so they remain accurate when they are output to Rec.709 Prores.

So what’s the problem with ACES?

The answer is partly to do with the state of the corporate industry in 2024. After Effects is a hugely popular application, but it’s dominant in the areas of the industry where High Dynamic Range and ACES are yet to make an impact. Every motion designer I know is still working with Standard Dynamic Range projects – that’s 8 or 16 bit, using sRGB or Rec.709. There are many areas where After Effects has a dominant market share – advertising, live events, product launches, conferences, large scale projections, broadcast promotions, POS displays and that’s before we even start to consider social media platforms and the massive amount of content uploaded every day. All of these areas are still using regular SDR video – often Prores Quicktimes for “masters” and MP4s for streaming.

The types of productions that are most likely to use After Effects are also the types of productions where corporate brand guidelines are critically important.

ACES was designed for large scale, high-end productions including feature films and premium TV shows.  I don’t think they had motion design at the top of the list when it was being developed, and I don’t think the average VFX artist needs to worry about RGB brand colors when they’re compositing Hollywood blockbusters.

But the technology for HDR production is here, and compositing using HDR & ACES just looks better. So After Effects users are going to see an increase in HDR and ACES productions – maybe not overnight, but certainly over the next few years. On a personal level, the majority of advertising projects I’ve worked on over the past 4 or possibly 5 years have been completed using ACES. It’s just a matter of time.

So tying all these previous threads together: it’s easy to make the decision to work in an ACES project, because it simply looks better. And we can composite in High Dynamic Range while rendering and delivering a Standard Dynamic Range Prores master. But this process will result in changes to the brightness of the final result, and this includes any branding colors used. Obviously branding colors need to be accurate in the final, delivered masters – and so here we are.

This is part 25 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

Part 22: Introducing Tone Mapping

Part 23: HDR Tone Mapping

Part 24: Corporate Branding Colors with Standard Dynamic Range

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

All large companies have brand guidelines that must be followed, with strict instructions for design elements such as logos, text and colors. But keeping brand colors accurate throughout the video production process is not as simple as it might seem, and so it’s not uncommon to find motion designers and other content producers slightly terrified of doing something that might “change the colors.”

In an earlier video in this series, I said that the term “color management” means different things to different people. Before we had HDR video production, the main purpose of color management was to keep colors consistent across multiple devices, and across multiple stages of production. Although this sounds like a good thing – and really, color management is your friend – the underlying fear of the colors “changing” has meant many designers have simply ignored it all together.  But as we’ll see in this video, ignoring color management can cause its own set of problems. In fact, the most common cause of color shifts in videos rendered from After Effects is just the result of expected, default behaviours. The video explains it all:

The notion that “the colors have changed” isn’t just a common fear amongst motion designers, but it’s also a very real, very common problem. I’m sure that every After Effects user has noticed, at some point or on some project, that the final renders don’t quite match what they’re seeing in After Effects. This problem, where outputs and deliveries look a bit different to the After Effects composition window, has been frequently discussed online for years. It’s quite common to hear this color shift blamed on some sort of “Quicktime gamma bug“.  But although the color shift is real, it’s not the result of a bug. It’s actually to do with the way Quicktime files – especially Prores – are handled by other applications.

Once you understand the problem, it’s easy to fix – and you no longer have to worry about getting phone calls from your agency or client about the colors looking wrong.

While there is a Quicktime gamma “bug”, that’s a separate topic that others have explored in much more detail than I have.  It’s also worth knowing that the “real” Quicktime gamma bug only affects those on OS X. If you’re an After Effects user rendering to Prores, then any color shifts you’re seeing are far more likely to be caused by the scenario outlined above – rendering an sRGB Prores which is then assumed to be Rec.709. And if you’re working on Windows then you can ignore any discussion about a “gamma bug” altogether.

In the very first video in this series, I mentioned how I’ve found a lot of online advice about color management to be simply wrong. Something that continues to irritate me is when people ask for help with color workflows and are told they have to buy an expensive reference monitor. While it’s always nice to own professional equipment, and a great monitor is a wonderful asset to have, simply owning a reference monitor is not going to fix any color workflow issues. You can buy the most expensive monitor on the market but that’s not going to help you if you’re rendering sRGB Prores files, or working in Rec.709 but typing in sRGB values from the corporate brand bible.

This video covers conventional video production using Standard Dynamic Range – the sRGB and Rec.709 colorspaces. Even so, there’s a lot of information here and I had to stop once it got over 20 minutes. Once we start working with ACES and High Dynamic Range, then working with branding guidelines becomes even more complex – because we don’t just have to worry about colorspace conversion, but also tone mapping.  So that’s coming up next…

This is part 24 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

Part 22: Introducing Tone Mapping

Part 23: HDR Tone Mapping

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Tone mapping gets complicated.  And even though the basic concept is easy to grasp – we’re modifying a high dynamic range image for standard dynamic range displays – the many permutations and combinations start adding up to make it frustratingly complex.

In part 22 I introduced the basic concept of tone mapping, and the video ended by showing how we can use 32 bit mode with sRGB projects.  But sRGB was never intended for High Dynamic Range, and so the preferred way of compositing HDR video is using ACES.  But even here, ACES isn’t just a button we can click.  Currently, we have three different ACES options in After Effects, as well as the original Adobe Color Engine.

This video continues directly on from the previous one, Part 22.  And we still haven’t finished: in the next video I’ll demonstrate inverse display transforms, which are particularly important for AE users dealing with corporate branding colors.

Although ACES solves many problems for visual FX artists, especially those working in large production pipelines, High Dynamic Range can still be a minefield for individuals or small studios working on motion design projects.  This series has been aimed at After Effects users and the motion design industry, which is currently in a frustrating situation.  While all digital cameras can record High Dynamic Range images, and we have demonstrated that HDR compositing simply looks better, the majority of video deliveries are only required to be Standard Dynamic Range Rec.709.  This means that if we want to use ACES for better looking, industry standard compositing, then tone mapping the HDR composition for SDR output must happen at some point.

While this is generally one of the main strengths of ACES, the process can make SDR videos darker than intended – a potential hazard for commercial motion designers.  Indeed, sometimes it feels like video content in general has gotten darker over the past few years, and I’ve often wondered if ACES pipelines were to blame.

This series has definitely become much larger than I ever expected, and there are parts of this video that I actually wrote several years ago. The notion that “what you see is what you get” is no longer true when working with HDR, was one of the key points in my original plan. When I first discovered that After Effects cannot display HDR video in the user interface I was slightly shocked.  It wasn’t something I had thought about, but it felt like it was a significant deficiency on Adobe’s part.

It has taken me a few years to fully grasp the complexities, and acknowledge how integral the User Interface is to a massive application like After Effects.  Fundamental changes to user interfaces are not easy!  And yet, only a few weeks ago, Adobe launched After Effects 2025, built on a brand new user interface code base called “Spectrum”.  While there are bound to be some complaints from anyone who has to adjust to the change, and I’m sure a few early bugs will need squashing, what this hopefully means is that After Effects now has a brand new foundation on which to incorporate future HDR features.

Right now, in October 2024, this video is accurate:  After Effects cannot display HDR images on a HDR monitor. After Effects 2025 has only been out for a couple of weeks. But I’m looking forward to the time when this video becomes outdated, and After Effects is updated to support native HDR in the composition viewer.  I have no idea when this will happen, and I can only assume that when it does it will have involved an enormous amount of work.  But HDR is the future, and so it’s only a matter of time.

This is part 23 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

Part 22: Introducing Tone Mapping

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Since the launch of the RED One in 2007, every camera manufacturer has developed models that can record some form of High Dynamic Range video, but we’re still working in a world where the majority of video deliveries are Standard Dynamic Range – regular Rec.709.  Bridging these two worlds involves Tone Mapping – adjusting the higher dynamic range of the source images to suit the lower dynamic range of the output.

When I initially planned this series I totally underestimated the significance of tone mapping.  It’s not that the concept is difficult to explain, or even demonstrate.  But once you get into ACES workflows, it’s easy to end up with videos that are darker than expected, or have corporate branding colors looking wrong.  When I first started putting this video together, I soon found myself bogged down with over an hour of wordy explanations and convoluted examples.  I almost gave up, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s been so long since the previous video.

For After Effects users especially, who are more likely to be dealing with corporate colours and other branding assets that need to be consistent, tone mapping is a significant but vital hurdle to cross.  I ended up splitting my first draft into two parts to try and make the topic easier to digest.

In this video, I’ll start with a simple explanation of what tone mapping is, and demonstrate a few basic approaches.  But I’ll also recap the philosophical issue of when we can tone map our assets in a post production workflow.  Although some of the video covers topics from previous articles, this is all laying the groundwork for the next video, which looks at the more complicated side of tone mapping in an ACES environment.

At the beginning of the video, I demonstrate a few different methods to tone map videos in After Effects.  To save you trying to pause the video at the right moment, here’s a gallery of those tests (which also includes a preview of an ACES example).  While I have steered clear of making subjective comparisons, it is pretty clear that there are significant differences between using the Adobe ICC colour engine, and a LUT provided by the camera manufacturer.  These differences will be further explored in the next video.

This is part 22 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

In this video, I look at the range of HDR colorspaces and formats in common use, to help demystify what they are, where they came from, and why we need them.

One way of understanding what’s going on is to look at these new colorspaces from the perspective of the companies and organisations that created them.  Once we realise where something came from and what it’s for, it’s easier to appreciate how everything fits together.

While we have had rec.709 and sRGB since the 1990s, many of the newer colorspaces have come from camera manufacturers, who are recording High Dynamic Range video using their own different logarithmic formats.  We’ve covered log formats before, and how they record High Dynamic Range video using integers, and perhaps it’s not surprising that each company has their own proprietary solution.  In fact, when it comes to colorspaces, many companies have several different options. Canon doesn’t just have a Canon Log format, but 3 different versions – helpfully named CLog 1, CLog 2 and CLog 3.  Sony is comparable, but their S-Log formats have separate “Cine” color versions as well.  Even Arri, who for many years had just given us the “LogC” colorspace, have introduced LogC4 to go alongside their original LogC3 stalwart.

But those colorspaces are just from the camera manufacturers.  At the other end of the hardware spectrum, we have colorspaces designed for devices, including TVs, cinema projectors and phones.  Then we have the ACES colorspaces for post-production and mastering, while streaming services have muddied the water with competing standards for delivering HDR content to our homes.  It can be difficult enough to explain the difference between a colorspace and a file format, but it gets more confusing when they overlap.

Despite having been immersed in color management for the past few years, there are still some everyday questions that I don’t have clear answers to.  While this series has provided a broad overview of history and technology, it hasn’t really dived into step-by-step instructions for specific workflows.

It’s important – and helpful – to appreciate the difference between the gamma curve and the color gamut of a colorspace.  While these topics were introduced in the earlier parts of this series, understanding their difference can be key to understanding the differences between colorspaces.  sRGB and rec.709 have the same color gamut but a different gamma curve, while rec.709 and rec.2020 have the same gamma curve but a different color gamut.

Perhaps because of this, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to get some firm details on how Apple’s P3 colorspace works with High Dynamic Range displays.  Because Display P3 uses the same gamma curve as sRGB, I would assume that its peak brightness would be the same as well.  However Apple’s devices have different screen modes available for P3 displays that are labelled “P3-400 nits”, “P3-500 nits” and “P3-1600 nits”.  Exactly what the relationship is between these hardware display modes and the original sRGB gamma curve is… well, I don’t know.  I’d love to hear from someone who can clarify how it all works.

I hadn’t intended to make a video just on formats and acronyms, but I can see how important it is to clarify terms and to try and make it simpler for anyone just starting out with High Dynamic Range.

In the next video I’ll look at Tone Mapping, and it will be nice to jump back into After Effects.

This is part 21 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Without a doubt, the most significant thing that happened to me in 2023 was nearly losing an eye.  Luckily I didn’t, but it was something that a cheap pair of safety glasses – or even sunglasses – could have easily prevented.

So this year, my first post is a simple PSA: wear safety glasses when mowing the lawn.

Mowing the lawn can be a mundane task, it’s a perfect symbol of suburban life.  Obviously housing styles vary all around the world, and cities have apartments, townhouses and other types of high and medium density housing.  But in many parts of the world, once you get to the suburbs the houses and yards get bigger.  There’s usually a patch of grass out the back, or front, or both.  And it just keeps growing.

A quick calculation suggests I’ve mown the lawn several hundred times over the course of my life, and I’ve never thought about it as a dangerous task, or even something slightly risky.  I’ve even popped out the back and quickly mown the lawn while waiting for renders.  It’s not exactly in the same league as skydiving.

Last August I was mowing our back yard and the mower flicked a small stone up into my right eye.  This has never happened before, and can only be considered an unfortunate fluke.  The small stone, just a piece of gravel, packed a lot of energy and the impact alone was painful enough that I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d been hit.  Initially I couldn’t even open my eye at all.

The short version is that I initially lost all sight in my right eye.  I went to my local hospital, before being transferred to a larger hospital with a specialist eye clinic.  I had multiple tests including an ultrasound and a CT scan. I’m not sure if I was reading the image correctly, but I think my eyes were pointing in different directions, like Homer Simpson.

Luckily I didn’t need any surgery, and following an exhaustive regime of medication, my eye sight began to return the following day.  For several weeks everything looked light and blurry, as though I was viewing the world through a piece of cling film (or a heavy promist filter, for the DOPs out there).  By the time the scratch on my cornea healed, my eyesight had returned to mostly normal.

My eye is permanently damaged, but only mildly.  When measured with a basic eye chart, it’s slightly worse than my 20/20 left eye.  I don’t notice this indoors or while working, but the iris muscle is permanently damaged, so my iris’s will always be different sizes and I need to wear sunglasses outside.

The real point is that all of this could have been avoided with a pair of cheap safety glasses, it’s just that I’ve never considered mowing the lawn to be unsafe.

Because I like a bit of DIY, and I’m inherently clumsy, I already owned several pairs of safety glasses and goggles. I’ve always been vigilant about wearing goggles when using power tools, and when I’m using an angle grinder (something I find generally terrifying) I wear safety goggles AND a full face mask.  I even wear goggles when using a line trimmer, something I do almost as much as mowing, and I’m always impressed at how a line trimmer can cover me in dirt from head to toe.

But mowing the lawn? Meh.

In the months since my accident, I’ve talked about it with all sorts of friends and colleagues.  And none of them – not one – has said they wear safety glasses when mowing.

It was an unlikely, unlucky fluke to be hit in the eye by a small stone while mowing the lawn.  But if things had been slightly different – a larger stone, or a few mm to the left – I could have been even more unlucky.  I’m still surprised that my eyesight recovered so well, and having to wear sunglasses is a much better outcome than wearing an eye-patch.

The prospect of blindness is terrifying for everyone, but perhaps more so for visual artists.  I don’t really dwell on what could have been, or what I would have done if I was no longer able to work professionally.  I was lucky (ish), but a cheap pair of glasses would have taken luck out of the equation.

If you have a back yard or a front yard that needs mowing, and you’re looking for a New Years resolution – then look no further.

Safety glasses are cheap and there are many styles available that don’t make you look like a mad scientist.  Google suggests the cheapest pairs are less than $2, but even more stylish options are less than the price of a good lunch.

Do yourself a favor.

The underlying theme of this series, and the motivation for creating it, has been that video technology has advanced to the point where After Effects users need to start paying attention to color management.  We’ve had HDR video cameras since 2008, and all the latest TVs, phone and tablet screens support HDR in some form or another.  Netflix has been streaming HDR content since 2017.  After Effects users who are still working with regular 8 bit sRGB / rec709 projects will soon find themselves left behind.  The basic history behind High Dynamic Range was the focus of the previous video in this series, Part 19.

But in addition to the rapid advances that have been made in camera and display technology, not to mention the post-production industries that produce visual fx for television and feature films, there’s that one basic fact: Compositing with High Dynamic Range simply looks better.

This video follows on from Part 19, which introduced the history behind High Dynamic Range, and recapped how we deal with HDR video assets in After Effects.  While compositing has been touched on before, most notably in Part 17 – where linear compositing was explained – this time we pause for a second, look past the technical details, and just appreciate what we’re seeing.

This video isn’t just one long tutorial, it’s a collection of demonstrations that all focus on using 32 bit float mode in After Effects.  While Part 18 demonstrated that 32 bit float mode means no highlight clipping, having a Higher Dynamic Range in your composition has a number of other benefits that all result in better looking compositions.  It also demonstrates how to use older, non-32 bit plugins with a 32 bit project, as well as a couple of quirks to be aware of.

It’s a long video, about 45 minutes, and I don’t expect everyone to sit through it in one go.

Skip to the end…

So here’s a list of sections and times if you want to skip through to the good bits.

03:25 – 1) Highlight clipping recap

06:43 – 2) Blurs & Depth of Field

15:30 – 3) The Notorious Six!

21:00 – 4) Blurring HDR colors (neon effects)

24:32 – 5) Motion Blur

28:43 – 6) Curves & curveballs with HDR

32:54 – 7) HDR Compander for older plugins

38:14 – 8) Highlight compression and managing composition brightness

Here’s a few stills to get you started…

Demonstration 1 is a simple recap of what was covered in Part 18 : when we use 32 bit float mode, highlights aren’t clipped.

Because highlights aren’t clipped, that means HDR compositions handle color and brightness much better.  We no longer have to worry about The Notorious Six!

And having a larger dynamic range allows blurs, glows and depth of field to behave much more realistically, resulting in better looking renders…

A big shout out to Chris Brejon’s incredible online site, a valuable resource for anyone interested in color management and cg post production.  And thanks for introducing the term “The Notorious Six” – now I know what to call it!

And thanks to Video CoPilot, who’s tutorial on realistic rain drops I borrowed to demonstrate the HDR compander.

In the video, I mention an older tutorial that shows how to change channels to improve image quality – that tutorial can be found here.

This is part 20 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Up until 2008, there was a pretty clear distinction between shooting on film, and shooting on video.  Video cameras recorded regular, “normal” video – the same standards that were used for television. For a long time, video cameras recorded analogue PAL & NTSC signals.  In the 1990s digital formats such as miniDV offered many advantages over analogue formats, but the actual images being recorded were still the same standard as broadcast TV.

Even when television made the huge, global transition to digital, high definition broadcasts in 1998, video cameras still recorded the same type of signal that was used by broadcasters, what we would now call “Standard Dynamic Range”.  What you recorded with your video camera was what you saw on your TV screen.

But in 2008, the RED company launched their first digital camera and changed everything.  The Red One camera didn’t record regular video, it introduced the concept of raw video files that offered much greater dynamic range.  Suddenly, a future where video cameras could compete with film for detail, dynamic range and latitude seemed possible – something considered heretical by film connoisseurs.

Since then, every camera manufacturer has introduced digital video cameras that recorded video in some format other than Rec.709, offering higher dynamic range and greater latitude.  If you haven’t come across log files, or raw video files, then it’s only a matter of time.

Understanding HDR video, what it is and how to use it, is essential for all After Effects users, even if it’s not something that is affecting your daily work right now.

Covering all aspects of High Dynamic Range video in one article isn’t possible without running longer than Oppenheimer, so this is the first of a few articles that will examine the topic.

This is part 19 in a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.

Inspired by the news, I thought I’d demonstrate how I use Syntheyes and After Effects together, for advanced screen replacements.  I’ve owned a copy of Syntheyes for almost 20 years, and while I’m hardly an expert matchmover, it’s proved itself a valuable tool, time and time again.

There are already loads of screen replacement tutorials out there, and I guess this is just one more.  However I’m sharing the approach that I’ve come up with that works well for me, and as I haven’t seen anyone else approach screen replacements in exactly the same way, I thought it was worth demonstrating here.  This is not a finely polished, step-by-step tutorial, but more of an outline of the processes that I use.

I make it clear in the video that working with Syntheyes for screen replacements is my own personal preference, and that the same shot could also be solved using Mocha.  Here’s a tutorial on the BorisFX YouTube channel that shows how you would deal with similar occlusion problems in Mocha.

Because the video is outlining the overall workflow I use, it doesn’t do a deep-dive into the actual compositing processes that might be needed. Once I have a flattened, relatively static plate to work with, then integrating the new screen can be done just like any other composite.  There’s a number of elements that need to be considered to fully integrate the new screen onto the existing footage.  Often, the most important are matching the blur / depth of field of the footage, which might change throughout the shot.  Matching the color of the new element is also vital – especially the black & white points.  Reflections and lighting changes need to be added – in this video, the green screen makes it relatively easy, but this can be challenging if your footage has other content already on the screen.  Any parts of the foreground that occlude the screen might need to have edge blurs and lightwraps applied.  Finally, the re-pinned composite might need additional motion blur, using a plugin like RSMB.  Because the unpinning process demonstrated here scales the background plate up soo much, it’s normal to have to deal with large noise & grain as well.  And in many cases, you’ll have to spend considerable time removing tracking markers that were put there during the shoot!

The video mentions a few other resources, so let me list them here:

• Firstly, if you’re looking for a more traditional series of tutorials for Syntheyes, then check out the TrackVFX YouTube channel.
• BorisFX are regularly releasing excellent training videos for Mocha and their other products
• The Syntheyes website is here
• Neat video, the best denoiser for After Effects, can be found here
• …and BorisFX will be holding a live Q&A on September the 13th

The merger with Syntheyes has only just been announced and so it’s too early to know what the future holds… but it’s not too optimistic to hope that one day we might even see Syntheyes integrated & bundled with After Effects, just like Mocha is!

One last thing… In the video, I clarify that not all shots are suitable for 3D camera tracking, and in those cases a more traditional solve using Mocha can be used.  However even if I use Mocha to do the tracking, I still use the same un-pin and re-pin process outlined in the video.  But instead of using nulls with expressions for the CC Power Pin effect, I’ll just use the corner pin data that the Mocha AE plugin can produce.  Once the track is done, I’m still using the corner pin information to un-pin the source footage, and then re-pin it to the background plate after the compositing has been done.

I’ve been writing After Effects articles for over 20 years – check them out!

Have you ever read something online, tried to find it again and completely failed?  Lots of conversations begin with someone saying “I read an article…” and that’s where I’m starting today.  I read an article.  Except I read it a long time ago and I haven’t been able to find it again.  It’s not a big problem, because it’s more to do with the way the article made me feel at the time, rather than any specific details in it.  So I’m doing a lot of paraphrasing.  Don’t quote me.

When I’m not working with or writing about After Effects, I’m also interested in food and cooking.  And the article that I stumbled across was on a food related website, and it was looking at the failure rate of restaurants.

Restaurants are quite well known as being poor investments.  Apparently, most new restaurants fail within a year of opening.  This is well covered on the internet, although the exact failure rate is sometimes disputed.

When I resigned from my full-time job and went freelance, the first thing I did was register my business name.  In my particular city, once you do that they send you out a little brochure that outlines all the sorts of things you need to do if you’re starting a small business.  And I remember that the brochure I got had an entire chapter dedicated to saying DON’T OPEN A RESTAURANT.  They mostly fail in the first year.  Mostly.

The article that I have completely failed to find again wasn’t looking at the exact failure rate of restaurants.  What they were interested in was that this figure has been increasing over time.  Now I am completely making up numbers here, but let’s say that in the 1980s, about 50% of restaurants failed in their first year.  That number has climbed.  Maybe it was 55% in the 1990s, 60% in the 2000s, and 65% in the 2010s.  It’s even higher now.

But regardless of what the exact numbers are, why are they going up?

As I read the article and the authors outlined their research, findings, and shared their conclusions, I felt the hairs on my neck beginning to stand up.  Because it sounded like everything that they were writing about could also be applied to the motion graphics and visual fx industry.

I don’t know if motion design and VFX studios are more or less likely to close down than they were 20 years ago.  I don’t know if the number of artists that are leaving the industry is increasing, or if there are any other long-term trends in solvency and profits.  But I can’t help thinking that After Effects and Chicken Parmigiana might not be that different.

Pub Grub and Pixel Pushing

So – what did those authors discover?

The simple version is that a lot of restaurants failed because their founders felt like they were joining a global foodie culture, and participating in some sort of worldwide foodie movement, while the average paying customer just wants something cheap and simple to eat.

Back in the 1980s, for example, restaurants were considered pretty posh if they baked their own bread.  But that was about the limit of in-house production.  But since the 1980s the world has seen an increase in globalisation (sorry, I hate that word) and the emergence of the internet has formed huge, global, social networks.  No matter what you’re interested in, the internet allows you to instantly share and communicate with people with similar interests, no matter where they are around the world.

Foodies are no exception.  There are countless recipe sites, YouTube channels, blogs, forums and so on to do with every single aspect of food and food culture. If you can cook it, or eat it, then the internet is full of people cooking and eating it.  Worldwide foodie culture is absolutely huge.  And even though there’s a seemingly infinite number of cooking shows on TV that run 24/7, the real culprit here is Instagram.

Tiramisu, chocolate fondant (aka lava cake) and salted caramel are all examples of foods / flavours that have spread across the globe, and that have been the subject of research into exactly how, and how fast, they spread.  I didn’t know people could earn a living studying salted caramel, but now that I do I’m re-evaluating some of my life choices.

The problem comes when people who are passionate about food decide to start a restaurant.  They’re obviously doing this because it’s something they love.  But being immersed in an endless source of global content creates a sense of pressure.  Your Instagram feed might be inspirational, but it’s also a constant stream of induced peer pressure from an audience you think you’re a part of, but that you’ve never actually met.  Your imagination becomes your harshest critic.

A chicken parmigiana is a pretty simple meal.  You start by getting a piece of chicken and frying it. Then cover it with some ham, tomato sauce and cheese, and serve it up with fries and a bit of salad. That’s it. Many years ago I met a local radio presenter who was determined to review every single chicken parma in Melbourne. It’s noble work.

But to someone who loves food, who’s passionate about everything food related to the point that they’re opening their own restaurant, the global foodie community generates a self-imposed sense of pressure.  They’re not just focussed on chef’s hats and reviews, they’re looking for Instagram likes, retweets, shared posts and other social media love.  They want to feel like they belong.

A simple chicken parma is not enough.

Yes Chef!

So the restaurant doesn’t just get a piece of chicken and fry it.  They source their pedigree chicken from organic, free range breeders who hand-feed them an Aztec grain blend.  The breadcrumbs come from the sour-dough bread baked in the kitchen, from the restaurant’s own sour-dough starter, carefully blended with Japanese panko crumbs.  The chicken is deep fried in sustainably sourced peanut oil.  The restaurant cures their own ham (and prosciutto!), and sources their cheese from a local dairy.  The tomato sauce is made from San Marzano tomatoes grown around Naples. The chips are hand cut, the salad includes 3 types of heirloom lettuce, and the dressing is made with olive oil that they’ve pressed themselves, on an antique olive press they restored, and then everything is garnished with micro herbs that they grow in the kitchen’s own garden.

I’m sure the end result is delicious.  I’m sure it looks amazing, and the photos they share on Instagram will receive thousands of likes and shares.

But here’s the problem.  If the owners of the restaurant sat down and carefully calculated how much that chicken parma actually cost them to make, they’d realise they need to sell it for $60 in order to make a profit.

Now as much as I love a good chicken parmigiana, I simply can’t afford to shell out $60 on a regular basis.  Even if a local pub has a $20 lunch special, I can’t justify paying that much every day.

The restaurant owners either don’t know how much their food is actually costing them, or they’re setting their prices based on what other restaurants are charging, or they’re just making up prices to suit their customers.  Their gourmet chicken parma ends up on the menu for $40.

They don’t realise it, but they’re in trouble.  The average punter who just wants a $20 pub lunch doesn’t really care if the fries have been triple-cooked or if the cheese comes from a water buffalo.  They just want a chicken parma, and they don’t really expect it to cost $40.

So the restaurant is either losing customers who think the prices are too high, or when they do have customers they’re losing money because the meals they sell are costing them more than they’re charging.

Eventually, they close down.

The restaurant has failed because they over-delivered and under-charged.  They over-delivered because of the influence of social-media, and they under-charged because their customer base couldn’t support the full cost of running.

Why a chicken parma is like After Effects

Obviously, I’m exaggerating slightly, but that’s the basic gist of the original article.  Do you feel like there are any parallels to your daily work as a digital artist?

I’d be surprised if anyone working in the motion graphics / VFX industry has escaped the fuss and attention surrounding AI tools.  Every time I visit Twitter I’m bombarded with posts proclaiming that “AI is going to revolutionise your job” and that there’s “10 things I need to know”.  Maybe there are, but I’d prefer to eat a can of surströmming than click on one of those stupid links.

From browsing the headlines and popular posts on social media sites, you get the impression that emerging AI tools are a huge threat to the livelihood of digital artists.  But chatting to individuals and listening to what actual working professionals have to say presents a different picture.

Perhaps a greater threat to digital artists is the mental health burden created by a constant stream of online, socially-networked content.  The imposter-syndrome fuelled by an Instagram that’s always full of beautiful inspiration, from a seemingly endless pool of more-talented artists.

The loosely defined term “industry” deserves some attention here.  What I’m suggesting is that the overall “industry” is much, much larger than the relatively small pool of exceptional work that is routinely shared and admired online.

Going back to our food examples, then there’s definitely a market for fine dining.  Many chefs aspire to work in “3 hat” restaurants.  Annual restaurant rankings receive global attention; either gaining or losing a chef’s hat can change the fortunes of a restaurant overnight.

But not every restaurant has 3 hats.  Or any hats.  And if you look at the larger food industry then it wouldn’t be surprising to find that cheap, fast-food outlets are more popular and more profitable.  There’s room in the world for a few restaurants to sell a $60 chicken parmigiana, but the local pub selling a $20 lunch special will be more popular – and almost certainly more profitable.  What do you think the ratio of fine dining restaurants to small cafes and sandwich bars is?  Maybe 1:10, 1:20, 1:50? Or more?

So what about digital artists?  For every motion designer working on a Hollywood title sequence, how many other After Effects users are out there producing website banners, in-store promotions, conference titles, training videos and so on?

It might be worth having a look at the success of Canva, and the impact it’s had on traditional graphic design.  Canva is definitely a success story.  But where did the success come from?  It’s not like they developed a revolutionary new AI tool.  They’re not charging thousands of dollars a day.  Really, what Canva did was recognise the market for simple, accessible design for a very broad audience.

Canva is not the equivalent of a restaurant selling $60 chicken parmas, they’re the café in the office foyer that sells coffee and sandwiches.  There’s nothing wrong with coffee and sandwiches, just like there’s nothing wrong with restaurants.  But which one is making more money?

For every motion design studio that’s charging $20,000 for a small animation, there’s a client out there who’d be just as happy with a $20 template from VideoHive.  I’m not saying that one is better than the other, only that you need to understand who’s paying the bills, and how much those bills are.

If you’re a digital artist who doesn’t work on the types of projects that fill Instagram and Twitter feeds, then it’s easy to feel imposter syndrome.  Just like a restaurant chef who feels like they need to roll their own pasta and churn their own butter, digital artists can feel an online pressure to learn new software, watch more tutorials, read more articles and so on.  I’ve spent the last year telling After Effects artists that they need to learn color management.  And they should, but I know that there’s huge numbers of After Effects users out there who don’t need to worry about ACES, High Dynamic Range, and linear compositing (yet).

Under pressure

Restaurants are feeling pressured to bake bread, churn butter, prepare charcuterie, press oils and grow vegetables.  Is that any different to a digital artist feeling pressured to learn Unreal, or Mocha Pro, or Silhouette, or Nuke / Houdini / Resolve / Cavalry?  Are you spending weekends and evenings watching tutorials, reading articles and checking out other people’s work online?

I’ve worked alongside motion designers who are doing amazing work in Cinema 4D and After Effects, but have confessed to feeling inadequate because they don’t use Houdini and Nuke.  Maybe using Houdini and Nuke for motion design is the equivalent of making a $60 chicken parma.  The point isn’t really the tools being used, but rather the implied pressure that comes from a daily feed of exceptional work that doesn’t really reflect the supply & demand of the overall industry.

I’ll be honest here.  I’m not on Instagram and I hardly use Twitter.  Even though I do have a twitter account, there are countless recommended artists that I have deliberately chosen not to follow, simply because I find an endless stream of brilliant work to be overwhelming.  If you’re on twitter and I’m not following you, please don’t be offended.  It’s not because I don’t think you’re good enough to follow; it’s probably the opposite.  If you’re regularly sharing wonderful, inspirational examples then I’ve figured that it’s better for my mental health to spare the onslaught.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the biggest threat to our industry might not be from AI taking over our jobs.  I’m not sure that “AI will immediately revolutionise the way I work”, and so I don’t feel compelled to read about those “10 things I need to know.”

But judging from the industry zeitgeist, and not some bullshit clickbait headline, the very real threat to studios and artists is simply under-charging and over-delivering, because there’s the perception that everyone else out there is doing incredible work, with incredible tools, and being incredibly successful.

I’d like to think that digital artists are inherently creative people.  But sometimes imagination can be a double-edged sword.  Imagining that you’re not good enough, or that everyone else is more talented, more skilled, more successful, and therefore more valuable – is toxic.

So ask yourself – are you a $60 chicken parmigiana?  Being a $60 chicken parma isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But if you’re a $60 parma that’s being sold for $40, while feeling guilty because you still think you’re too expensive, then there’s a problem.

But that’s enough musing for now.  I’m going to the pub for lunch, and I already know what I’m going to order.

I’ve been writing articles and tutorials for over 20 years.  If you liked this one then please check out my other work!