Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

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capthook

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Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

PostSun May 22, 2022 5:49 am

Here is the best way to fix the fusion text color problems IMO.
You know, white text turning gray etc.
Much better than switching back to 'normal' color space, rendering the fusion, and then switching back to Wide Gamut IMO.
Saw this video.
TLDR:
fusion color fix 2.jpg
fusion color fix 2.jpg (267.8 KiB) Viewed 850 times


And then save the group as .settings file and put in Fusion Macro Folder and Edit Effects folder for easy use.
Just drop the effect from the edit page onto the fusion clip.
Or bring up the macro in Fusion.

Search Youtube for the vid: AjushiPhotography or davinci wide gamut fusion

Davinci Wide Gamut is great.
Hopefully Blackmagic can get this fixed under-the-hood someday (soon?)
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shebbe

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Re: Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

PostSun May 22, 2022 12:14 pm

Interesting. But still not perfect. His explanation on the subject is a bit confusing but fair to say he does mention his knowledge doesn't reach that far into color science.

I think Fusion operates "as intended" by the design team but comes with a flaw for motion design. The problem here is that Blackmagic created an expected workflow for color managed to automate the process instead of giving the artist control over it.

If I'm not mistaken, what's really happening under the hood is this:
Whenever you work in DaVinci Color managed, the Fusion page automatically becomes a "managed" linear version of the working timeline color space. So for DaVinci Wide Gamut/Intermediate it becomes DaVinci Wide Gamut/Linear. The Fusion clip in your timeline is automatically converted from DaVinci Wide Gamut/Linear back to the working space DWG/Intermediate and then the output space follows.

In a way this makes sense for compositing tasks on camera footage but Fusion itself was never designed to operate with a working space to begin with making it more similar to After Effects than Nuke. In Standalone it's up to the user to work in whatever color space, gamma and bit depth via the use of nodes.
In ReFusion with color managed however, any MediaIn inside Fusion is automatically converted to the hidden working space which is also why the input gamut and gamma settings on that node don't do anything. It takes the Input Color Space from the Media Pool. This works fine for your footage because it creates a perfect roundtrip.

Where this idea breaks is when you want to deal with display referred color data generated inside Fusion itself. The range between 0-1 linear ( generated by your 8-bit style text color picker) is still living in the DWG/Linear values. Managed converts a value of 1.0 back to the log Intermediate and applies tone mapping. The resulting value doesn't come any close to display white and neither will any other color match.

For reproducing the chosen color you'd need to inverse the hidden color pipeline before it happens to cancel out it's operation so what goes in comes out. That's why you go from chosen display output back to DWG/Linear in this workaround.

I say it's not perfect is because while you do get an exact color match, I think the font aliasing/alpha data gets messed up no matter what because the alpha channel gets taken along in the conversion while it should be considered as 'raw data'.
1.jpg
1.jpg (80.19 KiB) Viewed 810 times
The other problem is your display output. You pick colors usually based on client brand books and those are pretty much always defined in 8-bit sRGB. If you need those colors but have a different deliverable format you still end up with the wrong colors.

I haven't thoroughly thought of an elegant solution for this ReFusion mess but I hope the design team can come up with something robust that also makes sense to the user. We at least need to get rid of the assumed workflow and either fully integrate DaVinci Managed into ReFusion's ecosystem with full control or totally separate it from it but give the user the option to define whatever the clip data is including an option to totally bypass management.
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capthook

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Re: Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

PostSun May 22, 2022 7:27 pm

Thanks for the very detailed post.
I watched the video from VFXStudy on the matter - made my brain hurt - ha.
I have very limited color space knowledge.

What are we looking at in your image?
Top version render-in-place, bottom using this workaround?
The top version appears to have better anti-aliasing.

So - to get perfect results, render or render-in-place is really still the best solution?
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shebbe

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Re: Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

PostSun May 22, 2022 10:58 pm

Yea it's a complicated topic.
My picture was demonstrating no color management on the top versus DWG/Intermediate color managed bottom with the workaround. You can indeed see that the alpha rendition is a lot smoother in the top picture. The lack of proper color managed implementation isn't only affecting Fusion texts. Also for general compositing the viewer is very unusable. The chosen viewlut often randomly jumps back to default and doesn't have the same implementation as what happens with DaVinci tonemapping when using color managed. A solution to viewing is to put a CST node after the MediaOut so it's visible but not rendered back to timeline but it becomes very annoying if you need to view individual nodes in the tree including that managed view output. Conversely you need to disable that 'fake' viewer CST node if you want to do color picking on your linear data.

I wouldn't mind if they just rework Fusion's color pipeline or rather create one because it doesn't exist at the moment. I mean in a similar way Nuke works where you are required to set up an OCIO configuration that defines your working color space and your display output/viewing condition. Heck even actually adding in OCIO as full project wide implementation would be miles better than what it currently offers. It's an industry standard that should be offered as an option in any 3d, edit, color and visual effects software imo. It's great that we have the nodes but you run into the same issues as I mentioned before.

capthook wrote:So - to get perfect results, render or render-in-place is really still the best solution?
I would say so yes. Render in place in SDR and switch back afterwards.
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Re: Wide gamut fusion text colors fix - best workaround

PostMon May 30, 2022 7:09 am

Yea, the VfxStudy vid mentioned the additional CST node and the (other) problems with it.
It would just be nice to be able to still edit the fusion rather than having to 'bake' it in,
and then the inevitable changes come up and etc.
Guess waiting until 'done' to render works - but will it really be 'done' this time. Ha.
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