Tutorial: Real-time EXR Workflow | DaVinci Resolve + Blender

Let's reap the benefits of Blender's extremely high dynamic range, using the OpenEXR format. Learn how to play back EXR sequences with filmic view transform - in real time!

Software used:

Filmic view transform as LUT:

DJV Colour Settings tutorial by @ldm:

#Blender #DavinciResolve #DJV

Chapters:
00:00 Part 1: Intro & problem
01:40 Part 2: How to export in EXR
03:06 Part 3: From Blender to Davinci Resolve
05:42 Part 4: Filmic view transform in Davinci Resolve
09:40 Part 5: DJV: Open source EXR viewer
12:52 Thanks for watching!
13:30 Format comparisons

Music:
Purchases made through the links below may provide some compensation to Polyfjord. (This is a great way to support the channel!):

[MrMesropa]

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.

[SirWrender]

Awesome video!! I’m a huge EXR fan. I did not know about the EXR viewer program though, so thank you!

[rgferreira]

This was a knowledge void that somebody had to fill. Thank you for making it. I look forward to watching it thoroughly.

[damian_madmansnest]

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)

[Virtual_brain]

The file size was the main thing stopping me from changing to EXR. I suppose is time for some changes in my workflow 🙃

[Penetratore]

cool! Now is time for an AGX workflow tutorial

[sidjain]

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! ♥️♥️

[extrudedknowledge]

What a "nice" easter egg at 14:02 :) Thank you very much for this walkthrough. EXR is a beast!

[baldpolnareff]

You've literally solved all my issues with EXR, which I had to discard a while ago. Like, seriously, THANK YOU

[PhillusionXX]

That level of dedication (using animations for the sections of the Video) is outstanding. Keep up the great content and happy holidays :)

[z-beeblebrox]

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!

[DerekElliott]

small jpg good for my small brain ... but maybe I will try .. great video :)

[Fubicken]

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 :)

[klknv]

Happy to see that somebody finally explained proper Blender - EXR - Davinci workflow to the rest of the world. Great job!

[paolaanimator]

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 YouTube 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.

[dzintisruzaikis]

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.

[GianlucaPizzaia]

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.

[OhluhKayTall]

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'.

[BerkeAydin]

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.

[KIndustries]

I didn't know EXR existed until this tutorial and I've realized I was missing out alot love ur tutorials very informative ❤