Colors not matching between main timeline and fusion

Im new to fusion and trying to get my colors to match between my timeline and fusion page. This way my color adjustments made in the color tab are reflected in both the main timeline viewer and fusion page. I use aces, not sure if this is affecting anything. But in the two images I have uploaded you will see my highlights are much brighter in the fusion tab than they are in the timeline. Is there some kind of fusion node that would allow me to match with my timeline grade? Any insight would be much appreciated.

A response from someone would be much appreciated!!

Since you're new to the forum not all posts come through immediately.
I hadn't seen your post yet. Color management between Fusion and the timeline is a well known bag of worms, that I still haven't gotten the hang of myself, so I don't feel comfortable giving you advice on this subject. There have been quite a lot of posts about it on this forum. Did the search option, give you anything useful?

Are you using any color management in your project's "color science" ?
if so I recommend to watch : https://mixinglight.com/color-grading-t ... ide-gamut/
It covers some aspect of the issue
I wish strongly that BlackMagicDesign take care of it

Resolve 19 has solve this issue, I think

I'm not sure this is entirely practical.

Color page processing happens after Fusion page processing.

On the Fusion page, your preview areas could show the output of any arbitrary node - it is not tied to what is shown on the timeline on the Edit page.

This means that what you show in the preview area may be 100% unrelated to what is shown on the Edit page and the color grade from the Color page may be completely inappropriate to what you are previewing.

Particularly if you have any secondary grades in place, attempting to apply the Color page grade to an arbitrary node's output can actually make it harder to follow what is happening at some point in the composition, as it could distort your understanding of a mask you are creating, or of what might be feeding into some other node.

If this were to be implemented, it should be limited to being applied only when previewing the MediaOut node, and even then I'm not too sure.

Incidentally, you can have more than one MediaOut node, and each of them feeds one of the inputs along the left side of the node graph on the Color page, which can be rewired in the Color page much as nodes can be rewired in the Fusion page, so even with a MediaOut node selected there is no guarantee that the output of that node will translate to the image that is displayed on the Edit page, and it is possible to composite multiple such outputs using the Color page as well, so showing the grade output may give an incorrect perspective when looking at the MediaOut node also.

The MediaOut node represents what is being fed INTO the Color page, not what is coming out of it.

When using ACES color management
Color Page working ColorSpace isn't ACES (Gamut : AP0 & Gamma : Linear)
it is ACEScct (Gamut : AP1 & Gamma : ACEScct)
ANd
Fusion Page ColorSpace is ACEScg (Gamut : AP1 & Gamma : Linear)

So you're MediaOut ColorSpace is ACEScg
Then you need an Extra node for you video output
2 choices : CST or ACEStransform
Since you are using ACES colormanagement you should stick with it ➧ choose ACES transform

the Set It like this
Input ACESCg
Output rec709

Hope this helps

Since you are using ACES colormanagement you should stick with it ➧ choose ACES transform

the Set It like this
Input ACESCg
Output rec709

Hope this helps

Yeah. In reference manual they mentioned this for Color Space Transform: "While this plugin has ACES settings, it does transforms to the ACES color space colormetrically, which is not actually correct for ACES workflows. For actual ACES workflows, use the ACES Transform plugin, which uses transforms specified by the Academy."

Thank you both for your responses. However, both the aces transform node and the color transform node still produces very different images between the fusion viewer and the timeline viewer. Ideally, I want to have the output of my color tab go into fusion so that the same colors I have in my timeline are in fusion. I know that the output of fusion goes into the color tab but I feel there has to be a way to get the colors to all match up, otherwise I don't understand how professionals can work in fusion like this. I have left two pictures that display this issue again, one with aces in the fusion tab and the other with aces in the color tab. Also below I will list a google drive link with the project file and clip if anyone could help me

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... share_link

Thank you both for your responses. However, both the aces transform node and the color transform node still produces very different images between the fusion viewer and the timeline viewer.

Are you using the correct viwer luts in Fusion. The transformation that happens in the node area to for example linearize the nodes and processing will not look good on your monitor, image will be either darker or lighter depending on what conversions you are doing. Hence we have viewer luts to help us see correct and expected images, so we can work on them and judge what we are doing. Without the viewer you will see a diffence, because there is a difference.

Depending on what workflow you are doing, say its manual conversion, you would first convert all your nodes with media in or whatever method you use to bring footage into the node area in fusion. You would use Color Space Transform or ACES or way to conform everything to linear. Work on the nodes in Fusion and before you send it out to media out or out of fusion, you would convert them back either to original format or something you need for the edit or color page or delivery page.

This is for Fusion to work with nodes. But your viewer experience in fusion is going to be changed, as I've said, either too bright or typically to dark image. So for that we use viewer luts in viewers to see correct image for us to be able to judge what we are doing in expected way, while fusion itself works with linear space.

If you are not using correct viewer lut, you will see everything looks too dark or too bright or not enough saturated or too much. This is not wrong for the way fusion should work, but its wrong in the way you expect to see the image. So we correct it by using viewer luts. If you are using them, look into it, and all will work as expected.

If you let fusion manage everything to linear space, you might still have to assign each clip what source footage it is in the media pool and you might have to use viewer lut anyway, but this might have changed in fusion 19, I haven't tested it myself.

If you are doing everything manually, than what I suggested is the way.

both the aces transform node and the color transform node still produces very different images between the fusion viewer and the timeline viewer.

You were almost there. In Fusion you need to disable the viewerLUT (the grid icon top right of the viewer) and on the ACESTransform node after the MediaOUT, the input should be ACEScg and output Rec.709 like Olivier mentioned.

It's important to understand that when using project wide color management via RCM or ACES, Fusion is always in te linear variant of the chosen working color space. This is unfortunately hardcoded by BMD and can't be altered by the user. In the case of ACES it makes AP1 ACEScct (the log space for grading) AP1 Linear (ACEScg) the ACES linear space intended for compositing.

When it comes to viewing they never really bothered updating the tools to accomodate for these workflows until Resolve 19 came along. But it's still not where it should be because for some reason ACESTransform is still not an option last time I checked in Fusion's viewerLUT options.

You can work around this by what you were already doing, placing the viewerLUT as a node behind the MediaOUT. But this is very annoying because you need to specifically activate viewing that node to view your resulting image.

A better workaround would be to load an ACES OCIO config into the viewLUT with OCIODisplay. Resolve doesn't ship with it so you have to grab it manually if you don't have one already. You can grab the latest config here. Make sure to grab the Studio version. https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFound ... S/releases