Tutorial: Real Time EXR Workflow

a couple of days ago i made a poll on youtube asking what file format do you usually use when exporting animations from blender [Music] and 55 said png but only five percent says they're exporting an exr and i just want to show you the problem with that okay so here we are in blender and we're looking at the pre-rendered shot so here you can see the default settings in blender when you are making a new project file the file format is by default set to png so the problem with this that i'm going to show you is that this fire is really really bright but if we lower the exposure here you can see we're lowering the entire image but what i also did is i also exported this in exr now we're going to see what the difference is between a really bright png render with the exposure lowered and a really bright exr render when the exposure is low look at that we have all the information the fire is not overexposed because if you're rendering in the exr format it's impossible to overexpose your footage just think about that you are running around in blender with a camera that's impossible to overexpose but if you're rendering it as a png sequence you're clipping this data you're losing all this data so in this tutorial we are going to export a video file from blender in the exr format and then we're going to import it in davinci resolve without losing any of this data and we're going to keep the filmic view transformed [Music] okay so i've already exported this as an exr but let me just show you how you would do this in blender so first of all you go to the output properties and then you scroll down to output and you set the file format to open exr if you like you can choose openexr multi-layer but we won't need all those extra channels we just need a png replacement for now and the regular open exr is amazing and now before you go ahead and click render i just want you to know that if the codec is set to zip the files are going to be huge but if you set the files to dwaa which is lossy the files are smaller than png i actually did some tests and here are my results and as you can see the png format is significantly bigger than the dwaa compressed exr sequences so i highly recommend using this because the loss of data here is absolutely impossible to notice it's incredible so file format open xr codec dwaa lossy and let's just select our output fire sword let's go ahead and click render animation so the reason why this render is going so fast is i'm not really rendering the simulation i'm just re-rendering this image sequence so that's a bit weird but now i just figured i'll just show the exporting of the video okay so it's done now let's open this in davinci resolve [Music] so here we are in davinci resolve 17 i'm just going to click untitled project so let me just reset my ui first of all make sure you're in the media tab and then figure out where you saved your exr sequence i saved my hair and here you can see you have all these images but we want to import these as a sequence not a still images so click these three dots and set the frame display mode to sequence so now you can see these as image sequences so let's take the exr sequence i also have the png sequence so i'm going to take both of these and i'm going to drag them into the media pool and now let's go to the edit tab and this is where the problem with exr starts we can see that there's a significant difference between the exr render and the png render because the png render looks correct it has filmic view transform enabled it's actually burnt into the pixels but that's the problem with the png we don't want that we want to be able to do color adjustments before the filmic is applied let's go ahead and drag our sequence down to the timeline this is the exr sequence take down the png sequence as well in fact i'm going to stack these on top of each other so now i have the png sequence on top and the exr sequence on the bottom let me just disable the png sequence for now here we have the raw exr sequence look how smooth it plays it doesn't miss a single frame and then look at blender it's it's impossible davinci resolve is actually the smoothest program i've ever tried when it comes to previewing exr and it doesn't even fill up your entire ram as well it's an amazing program so how do we make the exr sequence look like the png sequence to do this we're going to use a lookup table or a lot so let me disable the png sequence select your exr sequence you can right click go lut lookup table and exr is by far the most used format in visual effects so go down to visual effects and since we are linear and blunder has a gamma of 2.2 you can set it from linear to gamma 2.2 and this is going to make it look like it has the view transform set to standard here is the exr sequence in blender with the view transform set to standard but there's a problem it's still not the same and that's because by default blender renders it with a filmic view transform which looks like this so how do we make this look like filmic in davinci resolve as well [Music] this is difficult i tried to solve this for a really long time i just i tried everything i tried correcting it manually i looked in the program files blender foundation data files color management filmic ah what's this sp i 1d can you use that i don't know so i struggled with this for a while i ran out of ideas and then i discovered all this filmic color data you have the cube files why not just use them as lookup tables so that's exactly what we are going to do we are going to download this zip file and let's going to save it to our desktop extract and in this folder you can see you have all these cube files and this readme file is a really weird explanation and i wouldn't recommend doing it that way honestly if you want to combine visual effects shots and cg shots and maybe some live action plates and you want to combine all your stuff on your timeline i don't recommend using it as mr zubotka hair suggests although thank you mr woodka for all these amazing files that's amazing thank you so how do you lay this on top of the exr sequence in resolve let's go ahead and delete the previous slot so set it to no lut selected and let's go to file project settings color management and open lot folder so this is the folder where davinci resolve saves all its lookup tables and you can see these are dot cube files so we can just paste this in here and click update lists and we're good to go so right click new folder let's call this filmic let's find the stuff we just downloaded let's take all these right click copy and go to the filmic folder paste so now you go back to davinci resolve and you click update lists and click save so now you can right click and go lut and you have this filmic folder and you have all these luts but there's a problem we need to add two of these we can't just add one of these because there is not one of these that will just fix it so how do you add two luts to one footage in davinci resolve well in the color tab you can see these nodes let me just make sure that you can see this here is a node we can add a lut to this node and then we can add a serial node so it's first going to apply this slot and then it's going to apply this one so this will allow us to add two lots to our footage at the same time so let's take this first one right click lut filmic and since we are in linear you can set it from scene linear to base encoding and now we have a super flat image and that's perfect because now we can add the base contrast which is sort of like the filmic flavor that we're all used to so right click lut and let's go filmic filmic resolve bass contrast boom it plays super smooth and it's amazing and now you're probably thinking well what's the point with all this work this is the good part let's have a look at the png sequence let's go into the color tab and let's just try and lower the exposure here we have the exact same problem as we did in blender but now if we disable the png sequence and look at the exr sequence instead make sure the first node is selected now you can lower the exposure and the data is all here look at this with this beautiful data so that means that we have successfully exported our exr sequence from blender without losing any data only a little bit of compression but you won't notice and we have all our data in davinci resolve now if this video is going to make you go into a exr workflow here is a big quality of life improvement that i can suggest with my entire heart an open source exr viewer this program is amazing it allows you to view exr sequences just super smooth it's much faster than opening blender or davinci resolve to just preview your exl files so let's have a look this amazing software that we'll be using is called djv it's an open source tool and it's amazing it's really good so let me just download the exc here i'll be leaving the link in the description for this i'm wondering if i can record my screen while i'm installing this software so let's just find our exr footage right click open with djv.exe always use this app to open exr files yep look at this then you can press play and it plays smoothly you can in real time you can select what you can press r g and b and just select what color you want to see uh you can press h to flip it vertical to make it upside down and you can just do all these kinds of things you can right click and drag and this is all saved in your ram so this is such a huge time saver when you just want to look at your exr sequences and then you have this memory cache so you can increase this now you can see i'm using 52 of 4 gigabytes and if you have a lot of ram you can just crack this up and then what's really cool about this is if you go to image image controls and you for example go to exposure you can go ahead and lower it and lower it and look at that it can read the data that is beyond the floating point so this software is amazing the only thing that remains now is to give this amazing software the filmic view transform and you can do this by going image color space and if you go to config click this plus sign and on our computer let's find where blender is saved so program files blender 3.0 data files color management this one config.ocio so let's copy just the file path here and let's paste this and let's set it to config.ocio and now let's go to image and add plus and let's set it to open exr and now set the open xr to filmic what can i should i remove this view oh no never mind let's set the view to filmic and the open xr to linear yeah perfect of course and then if you want to view it as standard you click standard perfect so now you can cross this out and you can press play and we got ourselves a filmic exr image viewer that is just amazing so now that we have djv set up you can just take any exr file just double click on it and just play and this software is just amazing and you can just right click go back and forth and it's going to by default be played with the last one which is filmic so it's truly an amazing tool so i hope this workflow helped you it certainly helped me it's probably saved me hours and hours of work of not having to go back and re-render stuff because you have so much more color data that you can bring with you into davinci resolve and play around with the colors think about this blender is free and open source djv free and open source davinci resolve free but proprietary but still free and it's amazing software this is the workflow i use every single day and i hope it works for you too thanks for watching [Applause] [Music] the png is actually rendering slower from blender than exr jpeg or ffmpeg video so that's just another reason to use exr jpeg is the smallest the 8-bit png is on third and the 16-bit png is on fourth and then you have the regular zip which is 16 bit float it's 22 000 kilobytes for one hd frame and then you have the exr zip codec multi-layer 69 000 kilobytes for one frame that's insane so the dwaa codec for the exr format is such a fantastic png replacement one could argue it's a png killer [Music] you

Channel: Polyfjord

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Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021