ACES color science is becoming more and more popular these days and we get asked about ACES support in Nobe Display a lot. While direct ACES support in the plugin is not something trivial to implement mostly because of number of color science transformations that exists and should be supported, there is a way to use the plugin using ACES color science.
This is what we see if we use the plugin with the ACES color science enabled:
In order to do that we need some of the new features that arrived in DaVinci Resolve 16. Nobe Display Plugin works in REC.709 color science so to make it work we have to convert the input signal to the appropriate ranges. Then the plugin outputs REC.709 signal so again we need to apply the conversion so that DaVinci Resolve will get the valid signal out of the plugin. To apply the conversions we are going to use a new built-in OpenFX plugin called ACES Transform.
Color Space Transform plugin
The general workflow would be as follows:
input → ACES Transform → Nobe Display Plugin → ACES Transform → output
DaVinci Resolve 16 Workflow
If we translate it to the Nodes in DaVinci Resolve we should have something similar to the node tree below:
Now let’s configure the transform plugins. I set up the project settings as ACEScct and ACES version 1.1. This means that the first transform plugin will convert the ACES color science to REC.709 (which the False Color Plugin expects). Then the second transform plugin will do the opposite – REC.709 to ACES.
Project settings
In my case the configuration for both transform plugins looks like this:
ACES to REC.709
REC.709 to ACES
Once the transform plugins are configured we can select all 3 nodes and create a compound node. The whole workflow should be applied in the timeline node to enable monitoring of all the clips in the timeline.
