Unreal to Davinci Resolve Workflow - ACES & sRGB

hey welcome back william foshe here now i talk a lot about the importance of color grading your renders so now come to time to show you how i do things and what my workflow is for getting my renders out of unreal and into davinci resolve for color grading i'm going to show you two ways of doing things in this video we've got the easy idiot proof way and the aces workflow which is actually a whole lot easier to use than you might think now for the record i do not claim to be the leading expert in color science in fact in my experience the deeper i dive into color science the less i understand we got idt's and odts that are the color primary what i'll be showing you in this video it would work for me for both personal projects and production work but definitely take it with a grain of salt if some of you watching do happen to be very well versed in color science and i made a mistake do let me know in the comments below i will gladly stand corrected on the matter so let's get started with the important render settings in unreal before we get started in davinci resolve right after a message from my sponsor so a big thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video you guys know what skillshare is by now but for those of you who don't it's an online learning platform you can use to find thousands of inspiring classes on just about any topic you want whether you're thinking of a career change or you just want to pick up a new hobby if you're new to unreal engine and you want to make films and want to learn more on a topic skillshare had you covered with cinematic captures intro to virtual filmmaking in unreal engine after myself prior to starting this channel i had no idea how to use defensive resolve and adi singh's class on video editing in davinci resolve really helped me hit the ground running and get these videos out skillshare's classes are curated they're ad free new classes come out every week and even if english is not your first language subtitles in spanish french portuguese and german are available so the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link down below will get a one month free trial so you can start learning right now and with that out of the way let's jump into unreal and set up what we call ocio so here i am back in unreal you'll see i'm using unreal engine 5 preview 1 but don't worry you can use absolutely any version of unreal whether it's ue5 early access or ue4 the process here is exactly the same and before we get started i'm going to assume that you have an understanding of how the movie render key works if you don't know how i already have a tutorial on that right here so go check that out when it comes to time to render now in this tutorial i'm going to show you both the aces workflow and the non-aces workflow and for those of you who don't know what asus is it is the academy color encoding system which is basically the industry standard color space workflow that we use in film vfx and animation even if you don't want to use aces the process is pretty much the same this is not an asus specific workflow the first thing we need to do before doing anything at all is we need to download an ocio config and so ocio is open color io which is an open source color pipeline which is really focused towards film vfx and animation usage ocio is where we get all of that aces information that we need to render correctly so i've included a link down below where you can find all of the aces config that you may need for your own production but don't go ahead and download this whole thing this is like five gigabytes it is a huge file we don't need all this in this video we're going to be using the asus 1.2 config you can find it right here on the right hand side i'll also have a link directly to this if you want it down below at the bottom here you'll find the open color io config aces 1.2 download that and extract the zip file you're going to see why this is very important in the next step so back in unreal we're going to go to our content browser and i'm going to make a new folder right here call this ocio underscore configs and in this folder we're going to go right click again go to miscellaneous and we're going to create an open color io configuration we're going to call this ocio config zero one we're gonna save that we are going to open up this asset by double clicking on it right here and you'll see we need to load in a configuration file we're gonna click the three dots here and we're going to open up the config.ocio file right here that we just downloaded again you can find the link to download this in the description below and now we're going to add the desired color spaces right here so i'm going to go ahead and click on plus twice the first one is going to be utility scroll all the way down until we see linear srgb linear srgb is the default color space of unreal all conversions are going to be either from or to linear srgb next one we want to load here is aces and we're going to load in aces cg we're going to hit save and now we're done with that part of the process once this is done you're done you don't need to do this ever again for the rest of your project because it's an asset file this would probably the most complicated part of the process once you've done this you're good to go so now we're ready to render our shot here so we're going to go to our sequencer we're going to click on the render this movie to video and that is going to open up the movie render queue if you haven't already seen my tutorial on the movie rendiq i suggest you go watch it it'll make your life and unreal a whole lot easier so we're going to go ahead and add our level sequence that we have here and we're going to start setting up our important render settings in the movie render queue these settings are absolutely critical so we're going to click on unsave config here and these are the default settings i'm going to delete jpeg sequence and i'm going to add three more tabs the important ones here are anti-aliasing color output and exr sequence 16-bit so exr sequence is going to be your file format exr is pretty much the best file format for rendering in it is a container for data that can hold 32-bit float data it's fantastic so we can leave the exr settings to default anti-aliasing and i set the temporal count to 16 set the override the anti-aliasing to none and the important one here is color output i see this one forgotten all the time but it is the most important one so in the color output tab we have misc we're going to click on this ocil configuration and here i'm going to show you both the aces approach and the non-aces approach so if you don't want to use aces that's okay the process here is almost the same so starting off with the aces workflow we're going to click on ocio configuration is enabled we're going to load in the config file that we just made and we're going to add otioconfig01 and now in the source colors page we're going to set this to utility linear srgb and a destination color space is going to be asus cg this is the very important part of the process when it comes to rendering your shots in aces if you don't want to use aces we're going to uncheck is enabled here but you really need to make sure you disable tone curve right here make sure this is turned on you'll be getting the full range of data which means you can have pixels that are brighter than one and it's overall going to look a whole lot better you're going to have way more data to work with in the color grading part of the process this is what you want again super important so whichever one you use here whether you use aces or no aces that is totally up to you that's fine but this here is the important step of this entire process if you don't do this right you're not going to be getting the most out of your renders for now i'm going to be using aces but you don't have to lastly in the output tab where it says file name format i usually like to write what the color space i'm rendering in is so that is baked into the name of my file that way it is easy to tell which file is using which color space so i'm going to write aces cg right here hit accept and then we're going to hit render local and with our images rendered we're going to jump into davinci resolve where we're going to bring in our renders and set up our project settings correctly in order to get started with the fun stuff so here we are in davinci resolve and for those of you who don't know what this is davinci resolve is a one stop shop for everything related to video editing color grading sound editing all sorts of stuff davinci resolve is absolutely a fantastic tool and the reason i'm using this over any other package is because it's free i've included a link to davinci resolve install page down in the description below so you can go ahead and find it right there now davinci resolve does have a paid studio version of it which does have a few extra bells and whistles but for the most part most of what you'll be learning about today can be done with the free version now guys one thing i want to be clear about is this is not intended to be an all-encompassing bible of davinci resolve color grading there are entire youtube channels dedicated to only color grading in davinci resolve so bear with me this is more intended to be a quick long tip video all right so this is what you see when you load davinci resolve for the first time you'll see at the bottom the important thing here we have a whole bunch of menus we've got the media tab here we've got the cut page we have the edit page then we have the fusion page color fairlight and the delivery page now don't worry we don't need to use most of these the ones we're going to be using is the edit page here the color page right here and the delivery page right here so only three of them we're going to start off in the edit page right here the first thing we want to do with davinci resolve open is we need to correctly set up our project for aces usage and even if you're not using aces you still want to set up davinci resolve this way i'm going to say this again because it's really important even if you're not using aces you still should do this okay so with that said we're going to click on the file button up top here go to project settings and this is where you're going to set up your entire project setting now by default the resolution is in hd for my own sake i'll be using 4k but this is going to depend on your project of course the timeline frame rate is going to be in 24fps if you're using another frame rate you can choose it here but the important setting here is the color management tab over here on the left hand side we're going to set the color science to aces cct we're going to choose aces version 1.2 because that is the config file that we downloaded i think 1.3 seems to be the latest but i have not found a config file for asus 1.3 next we're going to set our aces output transform to rec709 and that's all we need to do we're going to hit the save button and we'll be ready to go so now the next part of the process is to import our renders you'll see on the left hand side of our edit page we have the media pool and this is where we're going to import our shots so i'm going to right click import media and this is where i'm going to import the image sequence that we rendered out of the movie rent queue for those of you wondering how do we convert image sequences into a video file this is how so i'm going to click on one shift click to get them all in here and hit open and davinci resolve is going to understand that this is a sequence so it's not going to import every single frame independently so now we can drag and drop our shot into our timeline like this and now you'll see we have our entire animated shot in here so now i'll be color grading my nighttime scene that we saw in my previous video right here but you'll notice that the colors feel totally wrong like they're completely off this is not what we want and that's normal okay now the next part of the process is to tell davinci resolve how to read our images we need to right click on our clip here go to aces input transform go to color space conversion and we're going to convert this to aces cg and now the colors feel a bit more right now i've also brought in two other clips here for those of you who didn't use aces so if you didn't use ocio and you only disabled the tone curve in the color output settings of the movie render queue this is how you need to tell davinci resolve to correctly transform your renders and you'll see here this is why it's really handy to name your files correctly so here i have no tone curve and here i have aces cg so i can clearly tell them apart i don't need to rack my brain trying to figure out which one is which so here you'll see if i just bring in these clips into the timeline the colors are obviously completely wrong they are over saturated they look like crap what do we need to do so i'm going to right click here go to aces input transform color space conversion but we're not going to set this to asus cg because we didn't export it in ac cg i see a lot of people doing this and it's wrong because if i do that it got a bit better but it still looks completely wrong your colors are going to be over saturated and crappy we need to right click ace's input transform color space conversion and set it to srgb linear and now this looks correct this should match what you had in your unreal engine viewport pretty much this render here was rendered in asus cg so i'm going to right click ace of input transform color space conversion aces cg and now you'll see these two renders match pretty closely but you might notice that the aces one has a bit more yellow in the brightest parts of the green wall notice if i toggle between the two a6g has way more yellow in it and from what i understand that would probably have to do with the fact that accg has a much wider color gamut than srgb taking a look at this diagram right here you'll see that hmcg encompasses a much broader range of colors than the limited srgb space especially in the greens notice how there's way more range of greens in the a7cg one that would account for the difference in green that we're getting here on the wall in the asus render and the non-a6 render so i know that seemed like a lot of steps but trust me this is the absolute best way to get your renders out of unreal and into davinci resolve regardless of whether you're using aces or not as you've seen whether you use aces or no aces there's not very many extra steps you need to do it's all pretty much the same so with that done we're going to be ready to jump into the color page and start color grading this shot right here this is where the fun part begins so let's get started and we're going to go into the color page right here at the bottom where it says color now this part here can seem a little bit intimidating sometimes because there is a whole lot happening here like so many buttons so many nodes the beauty of working in davinci resolve is that it is a node based system so you'll see here we have our main node and everything happened from left to right you'll see we have these spaghetti noodles here every node is non-destructive so we can go ahead and add another node by doing the alt s shortcut to make another corrector node so i can go ahead and just change the white balance for example make this crazy warm or something and if i realize that i don't like it i can just delete it it's a non-destructive process it's kind of like layer based editing but better so we're going to get into these a little bit later next here we have our timeline right here so this is how we can kind of cycle through our shot at the bottom here we have the color wheel and in the color wheels here you might be a little bit intimidated because now we have like lift camera gain offset what does that mean it sounds really scary but don't worry it's very simple to understand lift will adjust mainly your shadows gamma will affect mainly your mid-tones gain will affect mainly your highlights and offset is kind of going to shift everything evenly in the middle here we have a histogram where we can adjust our image with the help of curves like this and on the right we have the waveform and you might depending on your version of resolve it might be parade it might be vectorscope it might be something else histogram like that personally i love leaving it at waveform because this is really going to help us visualize if we are clipping highlights or clipping blacks overall the waveform is a fantastic tool and on the right hand side here we have the fx library and this is where we have a whole bunch of effects we can add like radial blur and glow and inhalation and all sorts of stuff for the sake of this tutorial i'm not going to dive into all of these but do feel free to experiment with some of these so now that we have a brief explanation of the ui out of the way let's get started with our first grade and so by selecting my node right here i'm going to hit the alt s shortcut and i'm going to right click on it and add a node label and i'm going to call this tone because my first adjustment is i usually like to adjust the tones of the image to make it a little bit less flat because straight out of unreal uh it often looks a little bit too flat for my taste so i'm going to go ahead and boost that a little bit higher so in the curves in the middle i'm going to adjust this like that just a little bit because you can go really overboard and you don't want to do that i'm just going to give it a subtle boost here and i'm going to crank down the shadows over here so just a subtle s curve like this can give it some much needed contrast so now if you select your node and you hit ctrl d you can disable it and re-enable it to toggle it on and off to get a better visualization of what exactly is happening next i'm going to hit the alt f shortcut one more time and i'm going to add a node label again and call this color correct and now once the tones have been adjusted i usually like to add a bit of color correction here because in this case i feel like the blue is way too strong it's much too dominant way too present and i'm going to tone that down a little bit so i'm going to go to the saturation bar at the bottom here and turn it down from 50 to 40 maybe even 35 just to kind of ease down the blue a little bit and the cool thing in here is we can also change the color temperature a little bit so if for whatever reason in unreal you went way too far we can kind of fix that in resolve make it much more neutral again so here in temp i'm going to adjust it and make it a little bit warmer maybe so i could make it much colder or much warmer if i wanted to so before and after before and after it's subtle but toning down the strong over-saturated blues helps the image in my opinion again everything i do here is entirely subjective because you know art is subjective so you may not even like the grading i'm doing here but that's not the point and honestly just these nodes account for 75 of what i do in defensive resolve when it comes to tweaking my renders a little bit because if we go back to the tone node here we can really fine-tune individual parts of the image very easily right it's really awesome to have that level of minute control over each part of your shot but now i'm gonna go ahead and add what we call the glow node so in the library here where you see effects if you don't see this library on the side make sure that fx is toggled here on the top right if your ui looks a little bit different than mine just check to see if like clips is not disabled nodes is not disabled you can adjust all of that up here so in the library of the effects tab here by clicking on the magnifying glass over here i'm going to search for glow we're going to drag and drop this in here and drag and drop that onto our node graph and you might see that nothing happened you may need to adjust the shine threshold like that and notice now whoa like this adds a really cool effect to our shot i think it's obviously overkill it's way over the top but you get the point the result i'm going for here i just want to add a bit of a warm glow so i'm going to need to make sure that i adjust the shine threshold and adjust the spread turn on saturation opacity like that i often like setting it from add to screen create the gamma there we go something like that change the threshold there we go something like that and then turn down the opacity if i toggle it on and off you'll see it's just a subtle glow here that does add a nice little effect and you can add multiple glows too we can have another glow glow node that will actually affect the um nice blue moonlight shining in from the top here so if i do this something like that it definitely feels much more magical but turn down the saturation a little bit so with just these two glow nodes if i select them both and hide them it's a pretty drastic difference and of course you need to art direct this for your own shot obviously overkill but i just want to demonstrate the effect whatever it looks cool now another node that i love to use is the aperture diffraction but you can only use this in the paid version of davinci resolve you may get watermarks if you try to use this so obviously i don't want that kind of glow here but i can adjust it like that tweak it a little bit like that opacity tone it down a little bit and if i toggle this on and off you'll see it does add a bit of a nice warmish vibe to it in some cases i actually prefer the way that aperture diffraction looks as opposed to glow but the choice is yours next up i like adding a little bit of a vignetting effect to my shot and the way we're going to do that is i'm going to select my last note in my note tree i'm going to move this down here like that there we go and we're going to click on the little button right here and we're going to click on the radial mask right there and we're also going to click on this right here and you'll see why now we can change the shape of this and i'm going to go back to my curves adjustment right here and i'm going to grab the top point here and bring it down and you'll see this is kind of what we're doing here we're adding a subtle vignetting effect just be careful not to go overboard with that and you don't need to grab just this point here you can also grab one in the middle it's going to change how the mid tones or highlights are affected so i'm just going to do a very subtle effect like that and if i toggle it on and off you'll see it's a pretty dramatic impact on the scene it helps us focus on the center of the shot a little bit it helps frame the image just a little bit vignetting is one of my favorite things i add it to most of my renders and most of my photographs actually but you know some people hate it some people love it do whatever you like we can go back here and change the shape of it if we want to like that so really all we're doing here is just some kind of mask to shape the light a little bit in our scene i could also make another node here where i wanted to do this like that and add let's say i want to fake a kind of god ray shining through well we can absolutely do that i'm going to rotate it like this go back here and i can go whoops i need to do the opposite there we go and now i can kind of just paint light that way if i want to by placing this wherever i want it to be these outer dots here are going to mainly be adjusting the fall off or the feathering of the mask here if i go here and toggle it on and off it's a pretty cool way to manually control and paint light wherever you want it to be that's why i like color grading in davinci resolve because we have so much more control over the final look over a shot as opposed to trying to do this in unreal it's a pain in the butt so i hope you're starting to understand the power of color grading in post as opposed to trying to do everything in the engine now obviously i don't want this this is way too much over the top but you get the idea now in most renders i often go ahead and add a little bit of chromatic aberration and i've talked a lot about chromatic aberration in depth in this video right here i even talk about why we add it and where it should be added and in a nighttime shot like this i typically wouldn't add chromatic aberration but i got a lot of questions about how to add chromatic aberration how to mask it out by high contrast areas so i'm going to show you my process for adding chromatic aberration even though i wouldn't need it in this shot here so we're going to go ahead and add the chromatic aberration node here next we're going to right click add node add layer mixer like that and we're going to right click again add node add a corrector and the corrector is really just another default standard color grading node we're going to plug this one here we're going to place it underneath the chromatic aberration and we're going to plug this one into the bottom one of the layer mixer and so what's happening now is if i crank up the chromatic aberration like crazy you'll see that the chromatic aberration is appearing everywhere in the frame like absolutely everywhere uh even over here and i don't want that it's showing up in the grass i only want it to show up in the high contrast areas because that's how chromatic aberration works in real life with real lenses so what we're going to do is we're going to use this node here to mask out only the bright areas and that way chromatic aberration will only be applied there so you're going to want to make sure you have the eyedropper tool selected here which is called the qualifier and we're going to click on some place in the sky like this and you'll see something happened we had some chromatic aberrations showing up in the frame here but why we can't how do we visualize that mask we're going to click on the magic wand button here and now you'll see everything that's gray is where chromatic aberration will show up and so at the bottom here we can adjust the illuminance and adjust that gray mask as we see fit but i only want to adjust it based on luminance not saturation and hue so i'm going to uncheck hue and saturation and i'm only going to play with my luminance values here like that so i'm going to lower it like this and now you'll see all the bright areas are kind of gray now and the gray areas are where chromatic aberration will show up so now if i click on my chromatic aberration node again so i'm going to uncheck the magic wand here you'll see it only showed up there in those spots see there's no more chromatic aberration anywhere else in the frame only up here now of course i've exaggerated that for effect you're going to have to art direct that the way you see fit but that is how you can mask out certain effects using the layer mixer node right here i don't really want it in this shot but now you know how to set it up so the last thing i'm going to add here is film grain because i'm a sucker for good film grain but uh the film grain node is only available to those with the paid version of davinci resolve you can still preview it but you won't be able to use it yourself i'm going to zoom in a little bit and you may need to adjust the film green presets i'm going to set the preset to 35 millimeter 400t and i may increase the opacity of it to make it a little bit stronger just for effect and in fact i'm not even sure if you are going to be able to see the film grain on youtube because of youtube's compression and noise reduction so again i'm just showing you what my process is not necessarily for the final result and that's pretty much it if i select all my notes here and i hit ctrl d this is before and this is after before after it was a pretty simple process but we really managed to push our shot to the next level with just a few nodes like this in a completely non-destructive way so i know this was a lot to unpack here but hopefully it made sense and you're able to push your own renders to the next level yourself and now the last thing we need to do is render this video out so what we're going to do now is we're going to go to the bottom here and where it is like a rocket ship that's the deliver page and that is where we're going to render out this video so for those of you wondering how we convert a image sequence into a video this is how so click on the rocket ship down here and you're going to find a whole bunch of settings so here you can choose your file name and the location of your video so i'm going to call this forest underscore grade underscore v001 next you can choose the format you want the codec you want the resolution your frame rate and the quality for the most part you can leave this a default and it's going to work pretty well next the last thing you need to do is hit the add to render queue button and hit render all and that's it you've rendered your video everything is done and you now have a video that you can play upload to youtube art station share it to your friends and family thank you so much for watching i hope you found this video helpful if you did do consider subscribing and leaving a comment down below and as always happy rendering

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 274,463

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Cinematics, UE4 4.26, UE5, Realtime, realtime rendering, rendering, CGI, 3D, 3D Artist, UE4, Unreal Engine 5, davinci resolve, color grading, colour grading, ACES, sRGB, srgb, linear

Id: Bo3BvhGdaUo

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022