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Colour management in Dragonframe (OCIO)

Dragonframe

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Definition

Dragonframe's built-in colour management, added in software version 2024.05, uses OpenColorIO (OCIO) -- the open-source colour-pipeline standard used across VFX and animation software -- to convert a camera's sRGB capture into an accurate on-set monitor preview, so what the animator and director see on the live-view display during the shoot matches the intended colour rather than an unmanaged sRGB guess.

OpenColorIO (OCIO) is an open-source colour-management standard built for motion-picture production, maintained as an Academy Software Foundation project and used across dozens of VFX and animation packages -- Nuke, Maya, Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine and others -- to keep colour consistent as footage moves between tools with different native colour spaces. Rather than each application guessing at a conversion, OCIO applies a shared, studio-configurable colour transform so an image looks the same whether it is being reviewed on set, composited, or graded.

Dragonframe added basic OCIO support in version 2024.05: a Preferences > Color Management panel lets the operator assign a monitor colour profile so the camera's sRGB capture is converted for accurate on-set preview, rather than displayed as an unmanaged sRGB guess on a wide-gamut or otherwise calibrated monitor. This matters specifically for stop motion because the animator is making moment-to-moment lighting and exposure judgements from the live-view feed during the shoot itself -- days or weeks before the frames reach a colourist -- so a monitor that is quietly misrepresenting colour can bake a wrong judgement into the puppet, set, or lighting rig long before post.

On-set colour management in Dragonframe does not replace a grading pass -- it only keeps the capture-stage preview honest. The frames themselves still move on to compositing and colour correction in tools such as After Effects or DaVinci Resolve (see After Effects compositing and Rig removal), where OCIO or an equivalent colour pipeline is applied again for the final look. Getting the capture-stage preview right is what lets a director trust what they are seeing during the shoot, before that separate downstream grade ever happens.

Workflow

  1. Open Dragonframe's Preferences and select the Color Management panel.
  2. Assign the correct monitor colour profile for the display the crew is actually viewing live view on, rather than leaving it at a default.
  3. Confirm the camera is capturing in its native sRGB (or equivalent) colour space so Dragonframe's OCIO conversion has a known starting point to work from.
  4. Treat this as an on-set preview correction only -- plan the separate downstream grading pass in compositing/colour software (After Effects, DaVinci Resolve) as its own step, not something the capture-stage setting substitutes for.

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