@hjf4a2 I mean, Eevee is way faster and easier to use. I think it's appropriate to recommend it for starters, as it's easier to see the final result and they're probably doing simple stuff.
Thanks so much man!! It felt like the MultiLayer aspect of OpenEXR has been getting all the attention, but very few seems to mention that regular OpenEXR is such a fantastic format to knock out some unclipped HDR renders from Blender! And the DWAA codec is absolutely amazing the more I look at it
@@Polyfjord I abandoned the multi-layered EXR because there are a lot of problems on the edges of the masks! I usually render masks in black and white mode. since I'm new to the blender, there are some problems. The output from 3d max is very simple)))
@@Polyfjord One quick note (after i was following your workaround): DWAA (or any lossy compression) is amazing, if you don't want to use cryptomatte. But DWAA is totally ruin the crypto-channels. So, it was a long time, when I figured out what is the problem... :)
DWAA is the same compression that is used in JPEG. The trouble of JPEG mostly comes from the fact that each time you save it the information is lost, and if you only save the DWAA EXR once, you only lose it once, that’s why it’s not very noticeable, however… However, lossy compression ideally should be used only to backup the final version of the file at the end of the pipeline, and it’s better to use lossless for all intermediary transformations. - for images without grain: ZIP for 32-bit or PXR24 for 16-bit gives the best results - for images with grain, PIZ - for stereo images, ZIP - for solid color images, RLE (There’s an article called Understanding EXR Data Compression which contains this information)
Goddamn man, you saved my life. I was trying to uses cryptomattes for my last 2 projects, and since I saw this video I've always set exr codec to DWAA, and it was just fine until this projects. On that compression DWAA does, it seams you lost crypomattes data, and it brokes up. I'm now testing which codec would be the best to hold cryptomattes but getting less space on the disk than ZIP. Maybe you know the answer(?)
The information this guy is providing us through his tutorials is just a crazy amount of knowledge and really imp stuffs to learn! Also, the intro, outro, thumbnail of his every video is just so amazing, it just makes me fall in love with the tutorial! Thank you for doing all this hardwork for us! ♥️♥️
But at the same time, I see kids nowadays running around with 4TB+ hard drives. Are people really routinely rendering out 60 minutes worth of 30MB/frame footage to fill up these drives? I suppose backing up each project could become a pain...
OMG literally the DWAA advice flipped my world upside down. As someone for whom file sizes are a big deal, I never used EXR because of how massive they are, and what an enormous RAM hit big files take on editing software, but DWAA actually being *SMALLER* than PNG?? I never knew this!
OMG thank you, everywhere i read people talking about EXR, they just said they don't use it because of the file size. And now you just went and showed us that actually EXR can have a smaller file size than PNG. Good thing i participated in that poll ( i am one of the basic PNG user.... :D ) + how much more information EXR holds than PNG.
Yes! Thank you so much for this! The last couple of months I've dived deep into Davinci Resolve but there's almost no info on how to correctly grade CG footage if it's not through very complicated VFX comping which I do not do - this was exactly the kind of video I needed! I would love to see more of your grading workflow if you have any tips and tricks, developing different looks etc :)
This is awesome! I've always avoided EXR because of huge file sizes. Now I can have extra control over my renders for free! Downloading Davinci Resolve right now, thank you for sharing this.
I've been using Blender since high school, currently a college student and still using Blender for my Senior animation project. I never heard of OpenEXR format, always rendered in PNG or MP4 format. This is really new to me, it looks like somehow it keeps the data of the fire and not effecting the rest of the image? Never even knew this is a thing until UA-cam recommended me this video. I don't know much about video editing, just basic putting clips and sounds together, but this looks interesting. Thanks for sharing, and I'm thinking maybe I should dive into learning video editing to help improve my animation shots.
PNG (and most image formats) have a limited range, for example from 0 to 255, where the maximum is white, and there's nothing after that. EXR uses floating point, that means the number doesn't really have a maximum value. 0.0 is black, 1.0 is white, but 2.0 is even more white. Additionally, most formats use gamma correction (particularly the standard sRGB) to preserve darker tones (which we are much more sensitive to than lighter tones) in just 8 bits per channel, while EXR is typically stored in linear format (no gamma correction at all), because floating point has more precision on small numbers, and because each floating point number typically has at least 16 bits (usually 32).
It's the "raw" of CGI but there are important differences with cameras, such as the mentioned bayer filter which CGI images don't have (unless you simulate it).
I love how simple you made this for people to understand! I think the second half of getting filmic in Resolve is interesting, but not really required at all, since once you're in there, you might as well use the aces workflow and built in LUTs, no real need to import third party LUTs since you'll always want to apply further grading to it anyway to help it feel more real & ideally to stand out and feel different than 'filmic'.
Nice! I've never tried ACES, but I really enjoy that you can render something with default settings in Blender, and it will look identical in the timeline of the video editing software!
Interesting. So how do you use the color management and existing LUTs? Color Space transform? What do you use as Input colorspace, Input gamma, output colorspace and output gamma and so on? Which LUTs?
That is not the case with too bright scenes. ACES falls short as it clips the values and get everything flat after some point. However, if you apply ACES after applying the Filmic look it works properly.
Usually the Tutorial videos on UA-cam are full of boring waste time stuff that we have to skip most of the timeline to get to the point. But your videos are so perfect that there are no boring parts!!
A lot of things that were missed about the advantage of EXR is that if you do lots of passes into the EXR, like Ambient Occlusion, Specularity, Diffusion, etc..., then you can readjust those particular layers in the EXR without having to fully render the whole scene again. Makes it a lot easier to work when needing to mix and match different things, like CG with live-action.
This is the knowledge that makes the difference between hobbyist and professional. Doesn't mean that hobbyists aren't great artists and shouldn't exist, I'm also a hobbyist, but there is a reason why high quality productions will take a lot of time, effort and knowledge. And if you teach it yourself, there is a high chance that you will miss a lot of professional basic knowledge, that you would learn from a teacher in a apprenticeship. Therefore I'm really thankful that videos like this exist for the public!
i always do a stupid amount of post for my animations and renders. ive never heard of exr format before.. this vid completely changed my workflow and if it isnt too dramatic, my life. oh my god i love you.
Nice video!!, but there's a bit of an oversimplification of the role bit depth and file formats play in the data that you're storing. The only reason that your PNG format was clamping and not retaining the exposure is because it was set to 8bit while your EXR was set to 32. Both of this formats can handle 16 bit (way more than enough for anything you might want to do on a render, unless you need to work with data passes), which means that you can use png instead of exr. BUT, of course, exr has advantages, like multichannels, ability to go to 32bit, compressions that are optimized for VFX softwares, created for linear workflows. For 3D renders it should be the standard, and while you can bake the luts in the exr too to make them view as the PNG, it breaks the point as EXR is intended to be used in a linear workflow so that you can use math operations that are valid with what you do. Reason why the EXR ends up looking darker. I would not suggest to use a lossy compression at 32 bit on an EXR file, if you can keep it at 16 instead, still fit all the data you need, and use RLE as a compression. 16bit is still a lot for this case, using position passes or deep passes will need 32bit to avoid "loosing numbers" in there, but for renders and most AOVs you are good with 16, which will size at half of the 32bit already. Lossy compression, you don't notice, until you do :) even more if the idea is to do color operations afterwards.
...thats not 100% true. the data in the EXR files is stored linear and the data on the PNG is stored witch a color profile baked in (probably sRBG). With the color profile baked in you lose precious data. I agree that in most cases you can get away with 16 bit EXR files
16-bit PNG does nothing to prevent clamping over 8-bit. It’s still stored as integers where the maximum 16-bit value, i.e. 65535, means the same thing that 255 does in a 8-bit PNG. What you can do in principle is use an encoding like PQ or HLG where that maximum value means something significantly brighter than diffuse white, but support for such PNGs is not great. It will work with either 8- or 16-bit PNG, but 8-bit is likely to exhibit banding due to the lower precision within the (identical) range. EXR (whether 16- or 32-bit), in contrast, stores values as floating point numbers which can trivially go above 1.0 (equivalent to PNG’s 255 or 65535).
This is great and really thorough. I struggled with getting Filmic to work properly in Resolve and Nuke for a while and eventually settled on using ACES to maintain color consistency. ACES makes it much simpler but is of course not right for every project.
ACEScg is the best! I’d rather Blender had (an option) to use ACEScg by default without the necessity to have a separate copy of Blender with replaced colormanagement folder or starting Blender with scripts.
Very good tutorial! And just some extra note for anyone who sees this comment: combining the EXR with ACES is also a very useful workflow too. And the ACES support in Davinci Resolve really beats AE.
@@shamaiahellis8810 I'm not really the expert since I just started using this in less than a year. You can find a lot of posts online about this topic. I guess the main difference for me is I just set Blender to use ACES and export EXR in 32 floats without composition nodes. One promising feature of ACES is its ability to contain all the color spaces and convert to any of them to your need (If I remember it correctly). And also future-proof since it saves really a lot of data outside of ordinary color spaces. Please correct me if I was wrong on anything. Really a newbie here anyway.
I don't know anything about most of this, but you're still interesting enough for me to have watched half of the video before I event realized it. Great stuff, can't wait to see more
For some reason the Blender 3.3 and 3.4.1 OCIO isn't compatible with DJV on my system. This is a great help though! Thanks for doing this work and sharing with us! Such a time saver.
Just FYI: For animation you can use 16-bit half float instead of 32-bit and save a lot of storage space. You get the same benefits with a negotiable loss of precision. 32 bit is really only needed for displacement maps AFAIK.
@@juliocargnin True, and then you also need to save as multilayer exr. Those files tend to get quite large. That's a drawback to using Cryptomatte, but having access to cryptomatte in compositing is also pretty amazing.
I'm a five-percenter, I've been using EXR to export into Resolve, but I didn't know about the LUTs...! This is a fantastic improvement, and I'm loving DJV! Thank you for the tutorial!!!!!! :D
I had just about lost my mind before I found this tutorial. No clue why blender has no way to export EXR with filmic applied. Thank you so much, I was literally going to die if I didn't find an answer to this question haha
I mean I think agx's whole point is to prevent you from having to do stuff like this. Also, if you're using this in a VFX shot you want to use filmic even though agx looks better because everything works in filmic.
Hey Polyfjord! Love your Tutorials! Any chance you could do an in depth tutorial on merging cg elements with real live footage shot in log (like s-log or n-log) with davinci resolve?
The llink to the filmic-resolve from sobotka doesn't work anymore. Can't find the cube files, just the spi1d. Can you upload them somewhere please? Thanks!
@@Polyfjord It's almost absurd, because EXR (in Zip coding) is basically industry standard for VFX (along with DPX). I'd expect Adobe AE to work with it just fine... Good to know.
@@Fionor01 Yeah, it honestly breaks my heart. I grew up with After Effects and it has shaped me so much as an artist. It was a painful goodbye, but every since I unsubscribed from Adobe and uninstalled the entire Creative Cloud, my PC is almost never crashing and mundane tasks like working with EXR is no longer stressful
Using EXRs was already workflow standard by the mid 2000s for many VFX houses since it retains the exposure data which allowed for adjusting any bright whites or dark blacks. Not to mention the ability of EXRs to save out and store AoVs. Blender is almost caught up to Maya, Softimage, Max, from 2007 in that regard. I am starting to use it more now that one can adjust the 3d nav controls to be more like Maya. It took it almost 20 years but I am starting to see it used more often than usual finally. With the advent of Redshift available for Blender it really has a nice path to the production houses now.
I used to follow this workflow professionally for a year now and it's awesome 🙏 However blender as now integrated the AgX color technology, which also is very nice but don't work anymore with this workflow Any idea?
hey, am I the only one getting this error message when trying to load the "OCIO" config color space file into DJV? Can anyone help me out? ERROR: Error: Loading the OCIO profile 'C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.6\3.6\datafiles\colormanagement\config.ocio' failed. Unsupported transform type ! in OCIO profile.
@@PRIMEmcPapercraft you need to download an older version of Blender (like 3.5 or below) and look for that OCIO from it's folder. It will work OK with Blender 4.0, maybe with just slightly outdated color profiles
EXR is like Raw files of Photography. In photography, we have Raw files which contain all Camera sensor data without losing any data so you can edit in a software layer. Theres also Raw Videos too but that one is too expensive. EXR files looks exactly the same. I can really just render it rightaway and handle the post processing on other software instead of adjust it to the so-limited tools inside blender! Glad I found this when I'm just starting to learn rendering in blender.
One of my developments for 2022 is to learn Resolve, and I think going forward to break way from using PNG sequences entirely, is to use EXR. But would you say that I should EXR for all my renders? or is it like for particular scenes that have a lot of bright exposure like flames or bloom effects?
Great question!! I have ended up always rendering everything in EXR, simply because it has more data and takes less space on my hard drive. PNG feels almost outdated, but I sometimes use it (or JPG) for still images that I share on social media
@@Polyfjord okay, so would you say moving forward, for a Blender and Resolve workflow, it is always better to use EXR. I'm not a major grader, so what would be the best tips to be good at grading to make it look super good?
(in emperor Palpatine’s voice) Do it! The only case I’d use PNG is if the rendered file goes directly to the internet. If you plan to do any color correction or compositing to the render, EXR is the best option because it does not burn color space into the pixels and retains all the color information.
PNG can capture this (you call it "exposure") data as well, but the image format needs to support far more than just 8 bits per color channel, and 8bpc is what most tools default to if you are using PNG. Fortunately, PNG supports up to 64 bits per channel. OpenEXR only supports up to 32 bits per channel (32 is plenty, don't mistake what I'm saying). So there's freedom to use either format if color depth and dynamic range are concerns for you, you just need to make sure that your tools know what you are trying to do. OpenEXR makes that easier, because tooling often assumes that the user is a professional and wants professional color depth and so on if OpenEXR is used, and only professional-level tools support OpenEXR (more or less). So, if you use OpenEXR, you're telling the software that you're working in a certain way, and PNG assumes another way of working that isn't readily usable for HDR imagery. So, it's not so much a failure of PNG, but of the way it's normally used (web imagery). PNG supports more color depth per channel than EXR, but PNG tooling is mostly lackluster in my experience, compared to OpenEXR. So, the OpenEXR ecosystem is maturing very rapidly, and it seems to be getting tool authors to make the right choices when it comes to defaults for color depth and grading and LUTs and all of those things.
No, PNG does not support more than 16 bits per channel. Per the PNG specification: “Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits.” It’s also integer-only, not floating point like OpenEXR, and regardless of the bit depth, the maximum integer value still represents the same thing, so increasing bit depth in PNG does nothing to extend the range of representable values, it only increases precision within that range.
I always used EXR. I do product renders in blender, these EXR has so much information. BUT the problem I am facing everytime is when I open EXR in photoshop, the render is very high in exposure. Do I have to use an Exposure adjustment to bring it down all the time ? Render looks extremely good in viewport and composite but whenever opened in photoshop it's blown out wit exposure in all the bright places. Is there any fix for it ?
Hi! following this thread I also do product renders, typically render to tiff. After seeing this I am curious if i should do all my renders in EXR as well?
@@Coco-xi9hq I do renders in 4k and Use layermasks diffuse mist pass and lots of other passes to enhance the render in photoshop. This is why I usually export in EXR multilayer 32 bits. If you want to have all these passes, you can use EXR. But the down side is the size. Usually 1.5gigs + psb file size for a simple adjusted render.
Thanks!! Honestly I've spent some money on expensive software myself, but I keep coming back to these free solutions. So I'm not only doing this because the software is free, it's also genuinely really good software
I've been looking at Davinci for a while but I was always intimidated. I followed your video and I feel like I have walked into another world! This is exactly what I was looking for and you explained it beautifully. Thank you so much!
Super! Thanks Update 27. Dec. It's really a great work from you. I'm a colorist and VFX artist with DaVinci and never come to your idea. So I have a little tipp for DaVinci Resolve User: If you are in the color workspace and made your two LUTs in the two different nodes, go to the picture and then RMB -> select Grab Still. Now in the Gallery Window you see a thumpnail. Go with the mouse over the thump RMB -> change label -> type your solution. Then move the thump into the power grade bin on the left window. If it's not there, then goto the menu -> view and select "Show Power Bins". The effect: Now you have every time, when your open a new DaVinci Resolve project in the Power Grade Bin your EXR LUT. Take and put it in the Display on new exr clip and you get the two nodes with the Luts automaticilly. Sorry about my english - it's not my native language... :-)
Great video. Just one little thing. If you do your color management in Resolve using LUTs, put the LUTs on separate Nodes like explained in the video, but if you do additional grading place those nodes BEFORE the LUTs in the node tree. LUTs should always go last in the tree, because they can potentially clip image data.
Really, thank you for shedding light on stuff like this. There are so many settings in Blender and tutorials I've watched that gloss over things like this and say 'Use this setting but don't worry about how/why it's used'.
DUDEEEEEE so i have started doing 32-bit workflow to create HDR10 content but i needed a lot of testing because i don't render them in my little notebook, and i've been doing that with blender which is slow AND YOU'RE HERE THANK YOU ABOUT THE DJV SOFTWARE IM GONNA BE A BIG FAN OF THIS
I came across your channel accidentally I'm so glad finally somebody that can really learn from link under this comment playlist for beginners in blender
I like your videos, very informative. Though for this I think you can use another route which is more simple as I use it. Open Fusion > drop "OCIO Colorspace" in between input - output > in control tabs brows and put Blender "config.ocio" + Source as Linear + Output as Filmic sRGB. And you are done!!
Amazing tutorial - people really need to switch to EXR DWAA for many many reasons, not only for file size. Just for having all sorts of metadata embeded is helpful as well.
WOW, EXR has been doing my head in for ages. The massive file sizes were crazy. Thanks so much for telling us about DWAA. Just did some tests and I am really impressed. It even makes multi layer useable! The 16 bit PNG frame (no compression) render in my test was 23MB while the EXR Multilayer, Full float, DWAA was........... 7MB. Next was to add passes, so I added all of them - EXR Multilayer lossless file size - 182MB while the DWAA render was 32MB for a single frame render. I am so happy.
Holy crap dude amazing tut I have been for almost a decade at this and turn myself away from renders for a while now just as I'm coming back found this amazing tutorial thank you
Quality information. The file size was the primary reason why I didn't use it much. I'll do some tests to see how the lossy files differ from the lossless.
Thanks! Although I've been working with EXR for 10 years, I've learned a lot of new and interesting things! There are a lot of problems with importing After Effects. Very good!
Watching this tutorial made me decide to go Davinci and Blender than Maya and Adobe. I've been using Maya and Adobe since college cause its the software that was taught to us but now I am thriving to become all around artist. I think its times to make a switch
I'll say that some of my "down the road" projects were going to run into the problem you are detailing here, and I'm super excited to get used to this workflow early! I've used at least two of your tutorials so far, and because of it made a joke animation for a friend who I feel needed a good laugh. Keep being open with your discoveries and how many down/up sides they have. It is why I keep looking trough your stuff to get better workflows, ideas, and just learn new tricks.
Thank you very much for the advice. I used to save the normal maps in EXR format (many problems in PNG), but without any compression, now using the compression you suggested I can save them in higher resolution without any noticeable loss in minimal space files.
Your enthusiasm for these programs and tools make me interested in getting back into 3d work again. It has been a couple for years though so I would have to learn it again but it would be so much fun.
Awesome video!! I’m a huge EXR fan. I did not know about the EXR viewer program though, so thank you!
Legit was just thinking about you and how this could be used at Corridor haha what are the chances!
Thanks so much man! That makes me a huge fan of a huge EXR fan!
Get the tick mark already wren
This is how you're sure the tutorial is great quality! When are you starting to make tutorials as well Wren? Everyone is just waiting for it!
Beat me to this by a day.
VFX pros tend to forget that something that's common knowledge for us may not be widely known or understood. Thanks for enlightening the community.
I was gonna say...what? I've been using EXRs for 13 years. I guess it's not as common knowledge as I thought.
@@dbroadwayvfx Yep, it honestly surprised me the amount of people that didn't use it (or even know about it)
Haha exactly
I didn't even know about it till now
@hjf4a2 I mean, Eevee is way faster and easier to use. I think it's appropriate to recommend it for starters, as it's easier to see the final result and they're probably doing simple stuff.
This was a knowledge void that somebody had to fill. Thank you for making it. I look forward to watching it thoroughly.
Thanks so much man!! It felt like the MultiLayer aspect of OpenEXR has been getting all the attention, but very few seems to mention that regular OpenEXR is such a fantastic format to knock out some unclipped HDR renders from Blender! And the DWAA codec is absolutely amazing the more I look at it
@@Polyfjord I abandoned the multi-layered EXR because there are a lot of problems on the edges of the masks! I usually render masks in black and white mode. since I'm new to the blender, there are some problems. The output from 3d max is very simple)))
@@Polyfjord One quick note (after i was following your workaround): DWAA (or any lossy compression) is amazing, if you don't want to use cryptomatte. But DWAA is totally ruin the crypto-channels. So, it was a long time, when I figured out what is the problem... :)
DWAA is the same compression that is used in JPEG. The trouble of JPEG mostly comes from the fact that each time you save it the information is lost, and if you only save the DWAA EXR once, you only lose it once, that’s why it’s not very noticeable, however…
However, lossy compression ideally should be used only to backup the final version of the file at the end of the pipeline, and it’s better to use lossless for all intermediary transformations.
- for images without grain: ZIP for 32-bit or PXR24 for 16-bit gives the best results
- for images with grain, PIZ
- for stereo images, ZIP
- for solid color images, RLE
(There’s an article called Understanding EXR Data Compression which contains this information)
ya'll nerds
What's a stereo image?
I need a full video of this
@@cdscissor Probably Stereoscopic 3d. Surprising he listed that as only a few people (including myself) use blender for that.
Goddamn man, you saved my life. I was trying to uses cryptomattes for my last 2 projects, and since I saw this video I've always set exr codec to DWAA, and it was just fine until this projects. On that compression DWAA does, it seams you lost crypomattes data, and it brokes up. I'm now testing which codec would be the best to hold cryptomattes but getting less space on the disk than ZIP. Maybe you know the answer(?)
this is pure gold. Thanks!
I was looking for gold, I found diamonds
That is just becuse EXR is preserving HDR.
The information this guy is providing us through his tutorials is just a crazy amount of knowledge and really imp stuffs to learn! Also, the intro, outro, thumbnail of his every video is just so amazing, it just makes me fall in love with the tutorial! Thank you for doing all this hardwork for us! ♥️♥️
Then why don't you marry it?
The file size was the main thing stopping me from changing to EXR. I suppose is time for some changes in my workflow 🙃
I had a suspicion that the file size was the biggest hurdle. With that said, I may consider using it anyway.
Mine too.
Use DWAA for visually lossless and as small as png
But at the same time, I see kids nowadays running around with 4TB+ hard drives. Are people really routinely rendering out 60 minutes worth of 30MB/frame footage to fill up these drives? I suppose backing up each project could become a pain...
@@e-mananimates2274 It doesn't have to be, if you use DWAA
You've literally solved all my issues with EXR, which I had to discard a while ago. Like, seriously, THANK YOU
What a "nice" easter egg at 14:02 :) Thank you very much for this walkthrough. EXR is a beast!
That level of dedication (using animations for the sections of the Video) is outstanding. Keep up the great content and happy holidays :)
Thanks so much!! Happy holidays to you too!!!
OMG literally the DWAA advice flipped my world upside down. As someone for whom file sizes are a big deal, I never used EXR because of how massive they are, and what an enormous RAM hit big files take on editing software, but DWAA actually being *SMALLER* than PNG?? I never knew this!
1:30 into the vid and im already convinced to use EXR from now on
small jpg good for my small brain ... but maybe I will try .. great video :)
if we’re chosing formats based on brain size, i should stick to single syllable .txt files
Lol
Happy to see that somebody finally explained proper Blender - EXR - Davinci workflow to the rest of the world. Great job!
... theres a problem ...
@@aegisgfx care to elaborate instead of 'just there's a problem?'
@@sleepyreapy1222 it's what the host keeps saying in the vid
OMG thank you, everywhere i read people talking about EXR, they just said they don't use it because of the file size. And now you just went and showed us that actually EXR can have a smaller file size than PNG. Good thing i participated in that poll ( i am one of the basic PNG user.... :D ) + how much more information EXR holds than PNG.
Yes! Thank you so much for this! The last couple of months I've dived deep into Davinci Resolve but there's almost no info on how to correctly grade CG footage if it's not through very complicated VFX comping which I do not do - this was exactly the kind of video I needed! I would love to see more of your grading workflow if you have any tips and tricks, developing different looks etc :)
+1 Just started working in Resolve and would LOVE more CG specific Resolve editing content like this.
There's plenty of information on how to grade footage out there.
This is awesome! I've always avoided EXR because of huge file sizes. Now I can have extra control over my renders for free! Downloading Davinci Resolve right now, thank you for sharing this.
are you getting gpu cannot process this image error for the first try?
I've been using Blender since high school, currently a college student and still using Blender for my Senior animation project. I never heard of OpenEXR format, always rendered in PNG or MP4 format. This is really new to me, it looks like somehow it keeps the data of the fire and not effecting the rest of the image? Never even knew this is a thing until UA-cam recommended me this video. I don't know much about video editing, just basic putting clips and sounds together, but this looks interesting. Thanks for sharing, and I'm thinking maybe I should dive into learning video editing to help improve my animation shots.
PNG (and most image formats) have a limited range, for example from 0 to 255, where the maximum is white, and there's nothing after that. EXR uses floating point, that means the number doesn't really have a maximum value. 0.0 is black, 1.0 is white, but 2.0 is even more white.
Additionally, most formats use gamma correction (particularly the standard sRGB) to preserve darker tones (which we are much more sensitive to than lighter tones) in just 8 bits per channel, while EXR is typically stored in linear format (no gamma correction at all), because floating point has more precision on small numbers, and because each floating point number typically has at least 16 bits (usually 32).
Just use exr, the rest is old pre ACES garbage
It is like in photography using RAW files.
@@Vectorr66 no it’s not, exr are debuyered
It's the "raw" of CGI but there are important differences with cameras, such as the mentioned bayer filter which CGI images don't have (unless you simulate it).
DID ANYONE NOTICED?..AT 14:02 THE MOUSE CURSOR WITH SELECTED/HIGHLIGHTED REGION WAS EDITED WITH THE WORD "NICE"...😳😳🤯.THAT'S AMAZING DUDE!
I love how simple you made this for people to understand! I think the second half of getting filmic in Resolve is interesting, but not really required at all, since once you're in there, you might as well use the aces workflow and built in LUTs, no real need to import third party LUTs since you'll always want to apply further grading to it anyway to help it feel more real & ideally to stand out and feel different than 'filmic'.
Nice! I've never tried ACES, but I really enjoy that you can render something with default settings in Blender, and it will look identical in the timeline of the video editing software!
Interesting. So how do you use the color management and existing LUTs? Color Space transform? What do you use as Input colorspace, Input gamma, output colorspace and output gamma and so on? Which LUTs?
That is not the case with too bright scenes. ACES falls short as it clips the values and get everything flat after some point. However, if you apply ACES after applying the Filmic look it works properly.
Usually the Tutorial videos on UA-cam are full of boring waste time stuff that we have to skip most of the timeline to get to the point.
But your videos are so perfect that there are no boring parts!!
A lot of things that were missed about the advantage of EXR is that if you do lots of passes into the EXR, like Ambient Occlusion, Specularity, Diffusion, etc..., then you can readjust those particular layers in the EXR without having to fully render the whole scene again. Makes it a lot easier to work when needing to mix and match different things, like CG with live-action.
Looks like I’ll be using exr from now on. That compression method is the biggest revelation in this video.
I didn't know EXR existed until this tutorial and I've realized I was missing out ............thanks alot love ur tutorials very informative ❤
This is the knowledge that makes the difference between hobbyist and professional. Doesn't mean that hobbyists aren't great artists and shouldn't exist, I'm also a hobbyist, but there is a reason why high quality productions will take a lot of time, effort and knowledge. And if you teach it yourself, there is a high chance that you will miss a lot of professional basic knowledge, that you would learn from a teacher in a apprenticeship. Therefore I'm really thankful that videos like this exist for the public!
Everything in your VFX pipeline should be rendered in EXR. Can’t wait for you to do a tutorial on ACES color space
i always do a stupid amount of post for my animations and renders. ive never heard of exr format before.. this vid completely changed my workflow and if it isnt too dramatic, my life. oh my god i love you.
Nice video!!, but there's a bit of an oversimplification of the role bit depth and file formats play in the data that you're storing.
The only reason that your PNG format was clamping and not retaining the exposure is because it was set to 8bit while your EXR was set to 32. Both of this formats can handle 16 bit (way more than enough for anything you might want to do on a render, unless you need to work with data passes), which means that you can use png instead of exr. BUT, of course, exr has advantages, like multichannels, ability to go to 32bit, compressions that are optimized for VFX softwares, created for linear workflows. For 3D renders it should be the standard, and while you can bake the luts in the exr too to make them view as the PNG, it breaks the point as EXR is intended to be used in a linear workflow so that you can use math operations that are valid with what you do. Reason why the EXR ends up looking darker.
I would not suggest to use a lossy compression at 32 bit on an EXR file, if you can keep it at 16 instead, still fit all the data you need, and use RLE as a compression. 16bit is still a lot for this case, using position passes or deep passes will need 32bit to avoid "loosing numbers" in there, but for renders and most AOVs you are good with 16, which will size at half of the 32bit already. Lossy compression, you don't notice, until you do :) even more if the idea is to do color operations afterwards.
Interesting information, you provide here. Thanks for your insights into this, seems that EXR is still the best way to go
So all in all what he said was right.
...thats not 100% true.
the data in the EXR files is stored linear and the data on the PNG is stored witch a color profile baked in (probably sRBG).
With the color profile baked in you lose precious data.
I agree that in most cases you can get away with 16 bit EXR files
16-bit PNG does nothing to prevent clamping over 8-bit. It’s still stored as integers where the maximum 16-bit value, i.e. 65535, means the same thing that 255 does in a 8-bit PNG. What you can do in principle is use an encoding like PQ or HLG where that maximum value means something significantly brighter than diffuse white, but support for such PNGs is not great. It will work with either 8- or 16-bit PNG, but 8-bit is likely to exhibit banding due to the lower precision within the (identical) range.
EXR (whether 16- or 32-bit), in contrast, stores values as floating point numbers which can trivially go above 1.0 (equivalent to PNG’s 255 or 65535).
Idk why I’m here, I don’t 3d model or edit renders… but I still am captivated and watch your videos all the way through. Bra jobbat!
This is great and really thorough. I struggled with getting Filmic to work properly in Resolve and Nuke for a while and eventually settled on using ACES to maintain color consistency. ACES makes it much simpler but is of course not right for every project.
ACEScg is the best!
I’d rather Blender had (an option) to use ACEScg by default without the necessity to have a separate copy of Blender with replaced colormanagement folder or starting Blender with scripts.
I don’t know why i’m getting all this quality content for free. Man you’re a Legend!
Very good tutorial!
And just some extra note for anyone who sees this comment: combining the EXR with ACES is also a very useful workflow too. And the ACES support in Davinci Resolve really beats AE.
What's the difference between filmic and ACES
@@shamaiahellis8810 I'm not really the expert since I just started using this in less than a year. You can find a lot of posts online about this topic. I guess the main difference for me is I just set Blender to use ACES and export EXR in 32 floats without composition nodes. One promising feature of ACES is its ability to contain all the color spaces and convert to any of them to your need (If I remember it correctly). And also future-proof since it saves really a lot of data outside of ordinary color spaces. Please correct me if I was wrong on anything. Really a newbie here anyway.
I don't know anything about most of this, but you're still interesting enough for me to have watched half of the video before I event realized it. Great stuff, can't wait to see more
For some reason the Blender 3.3 and 3.4.1 OCIO isn't compatible with DJV on my system. This is a great help though! Thanks for doing this work and sharing with us! Such a time saver.
Hey there, am encountering the same issue. Did you find a fix?
@@akruzerr nope for some reason it still isn't working. I haven't tried since updating to 3.5.1 yet though.
@@wellheytherehihowyadoin I see, guess I'd just have to wait for a while. Thanks for reaching out. Appreciate it.
Same problem here
Just FYI: For animation you can use 16-bit half float instead of 32-bit and save a lot of storage space. You get the same benefits with a negotiable loss of precision.
32 bit is really only needed for displacement maps AFAIK.
and also Cryptomatte for precision needs 32bit
@@juliocargnin True, and then you also need to save as multilayer exr. Those files tend to get quite large. That's a drawback to using Cryptomatte, but having access to cryptomatte in compositing is also pretty amazing.
I'm guessing we also use BW 32bits right?
It would make sense, because RGBA is 32bit with only the precision of 8 in each.
I am yet again floored by the production quality.
Hello - lovely video. But how does AGX figure into this now? :)
I'm a five-percenter, I've been using EXR to export into Resolve, but I didn't know about the LUTs...! This is a fantastic improvement, and I'm loving DJV! Thank you for the tutorial!!!!!! :D
sobotka link for download doesnt work
I had just about lost my mind before I found this tutorial. No clue why blender has no way to export EXR with filmic applied. Thank you so much, I was literally going to die if I didn't find an answer to this question haha
Any idea how to do the same with the new blender 4.0 agx setup?
I mean I think agx's whole point is to prevent you from having to do stuff like this. Also, if you're using this in a VFX shot you want to use filmic even though agx looks better because everything works in filmic.
Shoutout to everybody who puts out Blender tutorials, but something about your format inspires me. Thank you for this one!
Great tutorial! I'm wondering why you didn't use ACES, since Da Vinci Resolve has full support and you don't need to mess around with filmic LUTs
Gotta say... When Polyfjord uploads a video, I am really excited to watch it. Learned some interesting things from him.
Hey Polyfjord! Love your Tutorials! Any chance you could do an in depth tutorial on merging cg elements with real live footage shot in log (like s-log or n-log) with davinci resolve?
This guy is my most favorite person on the internet. Because I never used Blender, Davinci even I am not a digital artist. 💗💗
The llink to the filmic-resolve from sobotka doesn't work anymore. Can't find the cube files, just the spi1d. Can you upload them somewhere please? Thanks!
I have the files if you need them
noticed the same thing...
@@IdenCraven can you send them to me as well?
@@tmaattan drive.google.com/file/d/1mOcBu3BnvvO-Akij0V1YfOxI5b013F6v/view?usp=sharing
@@IdenCravenplease sent me the files. Please!
The reason I didn't use it was storage space, but then you showed how much less storage it takes with DWAA. I'm blown away
this is gamechanging for me, thank you so much for making this!
Do you have any knowledge on how exr performs in after effets?
Yes! It's so absurdly slow that I cancelled my 10+ year adobe subscription and converted to this workflow instead
@@Polyfjord It's almost absurd, because EXR (in Zip coding) is basically industry standard for VFX (along with DPX). I'd expect Adobe AE to work with it just fine... Good to know.
@@Fionor01 Yeah, it honestly breaks my heart. I grew up with After Effects and it has shaped me so much as an artist. It was a painful goodbye, but every since I unsubscribed from Adobe and uninstalled the entire Creative Cloud, my PC is almost never crashing and mundane tasks like working with EXR is no longer stressful
@@Polyfjord good to know!
Trying to figure out how to get Adobe to read this comment thread
Using EXRs was already workflow standard by the mid 2000s for many VFX houses since it retains the exposure data which allowed for adjusting any bright whites or dark blacks. Not to mention the ability of EXRs to save out and store AoVs. Blender is almost caught up to Maya, Softimage, Max, from 2007 in that regard. I am starting to use it more now that one can adjust the 3d nav controls to be more like Maya. It took it almost 20 years but I am starting to see it used more often than usual finally. With the advent of Redshift available for Blender it really has a nice path to the production houses now.
I used to follow this workflow professionally for a year now and it's awesome 🙏
However blender as now integrated the AgX color technology, which also is very nice but don't work anymore with this workflow
Any idea?
me too, havent found how to work on this agx
Honestly I did not understand a lot of it but I loved how much fun he was having while talking about this subject
hey, am I the only one getting this error message when trying to load the "OCIO" config color space file into DJV? Can anyone help me out?
ERROR: Error: Loading the OCIO profile 'C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.6\3.6\datafiles\colormanagement\config.ocio' failed. Unsupported transform type ! in OCIO profile.
i also am getting this error with blender 4.0
@@PRIMEmcPapercraft you need to download an older version of Blender (like 3.5 or below) and look for that OCIO from it's folder. It will work OK with Blender 4.0, maybe with just slightly outdated color profiles
@@mrdol yeah, but i need the AgX color profile since its more accurate than filmic
@@PRIMEmcPapercraft @mrdol did you guys figure it out? I'm also stuck there
@@PedroScherz I did give an answer, but not understand why it has been disappeared...
EXR is like Raw files of Photography. In photography, we have Raw files which contain all Camera sensor data without losing any data so you can edit in a software layer. Theres also Raw Videos too but that one is too expensive. EXR files looks exactly the same. I can really just render it rightaway and handle the post processing on other software instead of adjust it to the so-limited tools inside blender!
Glad I found this when I'm just starting to learn rendering in blender.
I'll stick to my JPG to BMP to JPG to .PDF to .M4A to JPG
If a person exports a render in png, that person does not know anything about the world of 3d.
Thank you for giving this information to other people.
This file format also works with GIMP for still image editing.
the facts that i just took in this video are mind blowing. thank you from the bottom of my heart for the knowledge.
One of my developments for 2022 is to learn Resolve, and I think going forward to break way from using PNG sequences entirely, is to use EXR. But would you say that I should EXR for all my renders? or is it like for particular scenes that have a lot of bright exposure like flames or bloom effects?
Great question!! I have ended up always rendering everything in EXR, simply because it has more data and takes less space on my hard drive. PNG feels almost outdated, but I sometimes use it (or JPG) for still images that I share on social media
@@Polyfjord okay, so would you say moving forward, for a Blender and Resolve workflow, it is always better to use EXR. I'm not a major grader, so what would be the best tips to be good at grading to make it look super good?
(in emperor Palpatine’s voice) Do it!
The only case I’d use PNG is if the rendered file goes directly to the internet. If you plan to do any color correction or compositing to the render, EXR is the best option because it does not burn color space into the pixels and retains all the color information.
You're the best blender teacher
Don't believe ? Just see the views on his every video
PNG can capture this (you call it "exposure") data as well, but the image format needs to support far more than just 8 bits per color channel, and 8bpc is what most tools default to if you are using PNG. Fortunately, PNG supports up to 64 bits per channel. OpenEXR only supports up to 32 bits per channel (32 is plenty, don't mistake what I'm saying). So there's freedom to use either format if color depth and dynamic range are concerns for you, you just need to make sure that your tools know what you are trying to do. OpenEXR makes that easier, because tooling often assumes that the user is a professional and wants professional color depth and so on if OpenEXR is used, and only professional-level tools support OpenEXR (more or less). So, if you use OpenEXR, you're telling the software that you're working in a certain way, and PNG assumes another way of working that isn't readily usable for HDR imagery.
So, it's not so much a failure of PNG, but of the way it's normally used (web imagery). PNG supports more color depth per channel than EXR, but PNG tooling is mostly lackluster in my experience, compared to OpenEXR. So, the OpenEXR ecosystem is maturing very rapidly, and it seems to be getting tool authors to make the right choices when it comes to defaults for color depth and grading and LUTs and all of those things.
No, PNG does not support more than 16 bits per channel. Per the PNG specification: “Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits.”
It’s also integer-only, not floating point like OpenEXR, and regardless of the bit depth, the maximum integer value still represents the same thing, so increasing bit depth in PNG does nothing to extend the range of representable values, it only increases precision within that range.
I only started using this format a few weeks ago. Cannot believe how helpful it is.
I always used EXR. I do product renders in blender, these EXR has so much information. BUT the problem I am facing everytime is when I open EXR in photoshop, the render is very high in exposure. Do I have to use an Exposure adjustment to bring it down all the time ?
Render looks extremely good in viewport and composite but whenever opened in photoshop it's blown out wit exposure in all the bright places. Is there any fix for it ?
Are you viewing the exr in the correct colourspace?
Hi! following this thread
I also do product renders, typically render to tiff.
After seeing this I am curious if i should do all my renders in EXR as well?
@@Jaredvic yes I do. I searched a lot on various threads but there isn't any thing to fix the issue.
@@Coco-xi9hq I do renders in 4k and Use layermasks diffuse mist pass and lots of other passes to enhance the render in photoshop. This is why I usually export in EXR multilayer 32 bits.
If you want to have all these passes, you can use EXR. But the down side is the size. Usually 1.5gigs + psb file size for a simple adjusted render.
Check your exposure settings in blender, I had the same problem, realised its because i had a custom exposure in the render properties.
I really like your videos, they are not your basic tutorials, there is a lot of advanced stuff and work progress
I love the way that you're using free software than any paid software so that we can follow along without having to pay or crack them
Thanks!! Honestly I've spent some money on expensive software myself, but I keep coming back to these free solutions. So I'm not only doing this because the software is free, it's also genuinely really good software
I've been looking at Davinci for a while but I was always intimidated. I followed your video and I feel like I have walked into another world! This is exactly what I was looking for and you explained it beautifully. Thank you so much!
Super! Thanks
Update 27. Dec.
It's really a great work from you.
I'm a colorist and VFX artist with DaVinci and never come to your idea. So I have a little tipp for DaVinci Resolve User:
If you are in the color workspace and made your two LUTs in the two different nodes, go to the picture and then RMB -> select Grab Still. Now in the Gallery Window you see a thumpnail. Go with the mouse over the thump RMB -> change label -> type your solution. Then move the thump into the power grade bin on the left window. If it's not there, then goto the menu -> view and select "Show Power Bins".
The effect: Now you have every time, when your open a new DaVinci Resolve project in the Power Grade Bin your EXR LUT. Take and put it in the Display on new exr clip and you get the two nodes with the Luts automaticilly.
Sorry about my english - it's not my native language... :-)
Great video. Just one little thing. If you do your color management in Resolve using LUTs, put the LUTs on separate Nodes like explained in the video, but if you do additional grading place those nodes BEFORE the LUTs in the node tree. LUTs should always go last in the tree, because they can potentially clip image data.
This man could stream him using blender (and others) to me any time of the day and I'd be entertained
Really, thank you for shedding light on stuff like this. There are so many settings in Blender and tutorials I've watched that gloss over things like this and say 'Use this setting but don't worry about how/why it's used'.
DUDEEEEEE so i have started doing 32-bit workflow to create HDR10 content but i needed a lot of testing because i don't render them in my little notebook, and i've been doing that with blender which is slow AND YOU'RE HERE THANK YOU ABOUT THE DJV SOFTWARE IM GONNA BE A BIG FAN OF THIS
My life has been changed! Thanks a ton! Never doing png's again!
I accidentally exported a small Blend project in exr. Ran into this video and now I am a convert. Subscribed!
The Smoothnes of blender will come with the realtime compositor ;)
this is what i like to call "Una joyita" thanks for sharing
I love how excited you are about this. It’s contagious
I struggled with the same stuff 15 years ago when I started getting serious with DSLR's and RAW is just sooooooo much better than anything else.
hands down the best blender channel out there, and I've been saying this since I saw your stuff years ago. You keep raising the bar!
As a visual effects artist, using EXR renders is more the norm. So, it's great to see this brought forward for others to see. Nice work.
I came across your channel accidentally I'm so glad finally somebody that can really learn from link under this comment playlist for beginners in blender
The quality of these tutorials is getting always so much better...and i like it!
This is like the 8th video I watch from you. Congrats, your presentation style n delivery is amazing!
I don't use any of these softwares and I understood everything you said. You are an amazing teacher!
I like your videos, very informative. Though for this I think you can use another route which is more simple as I use it. Open Fusion > drop "OCIO Colorspace" in between input - output > in control tabs brows and put Blender "config.ocio" + Source as Linear + Output as Filmic sRGB. And you are done!!
Amazing tutorial - people really need to switch to EXR DWAA for many many reasons, not only for file size. Just for having all sorts of metadata embeded is helpful as well.
WOW, EXR has been doing my head in for ages. The massive file sizes were crazy. Thanks so much for telling us about DWAA. Just did some tests and I am really impressed. It even makes multi layer useable!
The 16 bit PNG frame (no compression) render in my test was 23MB while the EXR Multilayer, Full float, DWAA was........... 7MB. Next was to add passes, so I added all of them - EXR Multilayer lossless file size - 182MB while the DWAA render was 32MB for a single frame render. I am so happy.
That’s amazing!! DWAA is awesome!
Amazing video! As a total beginner I'm so happy that the algorithm is recommending good habit forming tutorials 😀
Holy crap dude amazing tut I have been for almost a decade at this and turn myself away from renders for a while now just as I'm coming back found this amazing tutorial thank you
Never understood what is so great about EXR... now I do! Thanks for excellent explanation.
Quality information. The file size was the primary reason why I didn't use it much. I'll do some tests to see how the lossy files differ from the lossless.
Thanks! Although I've been working with EXR for 10 years, I've learned a lot of new and interesting things! There are a lot of problems with importing After Effects. Very good!
I have recently made the switch to Davinci. I am so happy about that!
This is probably the only tutorial I've been able to fully watch! Subbed.
Watching this tutorial made me decide to go Davinci and Blender than Maya and Adobe. I've been using Maya and Adobe since college cause its the software that was taught to us but now I am thriving to become all around artist. I think its times to make a switch
I'll say that some of my "down the road" projects were going to run into the problem you are detailing here, and I'm super excited to get used to this workflow early!
I've used at least two of your tutorials so far, and because of it made a joke animation for a friend who I feel needed a good laugh.
Keep being open with your discoveries and how many down/up sides they have. It is why I keep looking trough your stuff to get better workflows, ideas, and just learn new tricks.
Thank you very much for the advice. I used to save the normal maps in EXR format (many problems in PNG), but without any compression, now using the compression you suggested I can save them in higher resolution without any noticeable loss in minimal space files.
I knew about the multi-layer aspect of EXR, but was not aware of the other benefits. Eye-opening, indeed.
for a generalist blender 3d artist your content is always pure gold. Thank you so much for your work, sir!
Wow!! Will switch to exr now. Thanks. Came here from Blender Guru newsletter. That's twice now. You´re doing well.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm already an EXR adopter but knowing about this compression method is huge. Thanks.
Your enthusiasm for these programs and tools make me interested in getting back into 3d work again. It has been a couple for years though so I would have to learn it again but it would be so much fun.