Color Management with OpenColorIO

OpenColorIO (OCIO) is a color management system used primarily in film and virtual production. OCIO guarantees that the colors of captured video remain consistent through the entire film pipeline. This pipeline includes initial camera capture, all the compositing applications that need to work with the captured media, and the final render.

Unreal Engine (UE) offers built-in support for using OCIO to convert the colors of linear media in several ways:

• When you use media sources like captured clips or live feeds in your project, you can apply color conversion to make those media sources match your computer-generated elements in UE.

• While you're working in the Unreal Editor, you can apply color conversions to your Viewport. This is helpful so that the reference frames you see as you're working in the Editor will be consistent with your chosen color space.

• You can re-apply another color conversion to the composited feed you output from Composure. This helps make your CG elements and live frames blend more convincingly, while preserving the colors of the original shots faithfully.

• You can apply color space transformations to nDisplay renders on monitors and LED walls.

• Finally, when you export a video through Movie Render Queue, you can apply a color space transformation to your output video.

All of these uses of OCIO rely on one Asset, called an OpenColorIO Configuration Asset, which you use to manage the color profiles that you want to work with.

The OpenColorIO Configuration Asset references an OCIO configuration (.ocio) file, which contains detailed specifications about multiple color profiles, and how to transform between them. Unreal Engine currently supports OCIO v1. For more details on OCIO configuration files, refer to the OpenColorIO v1 documentation.

This page contains links to documentation about creating an OpenColorIO Configuration Asset and applying color transformations in various systems of Unreal Engine.

Getting Started

This page guides you through creating an OpenColorIO Configuration Asset.

Converting Colors in the Viewport

The Editor supports applying OCIO color conversions to the Level Viewport through Viewport View Modes. This page shows how to apply color transformations to the Level Viewport.

Converting Colors in Composure

Composure supports applying OCIO color conversions to input and output media. This page explains how to apply color transformations in Composure.

Converting Colors in Blueprints

This page describes how to use Blueprints to apply color transformations.

Converting Colors in nDisplay

nDisplay supports applying OCIO color conversions to nDisplay renders for the entire cluster, the inner frustum, or individual cluster nodes. This can be useful for managing the color spaces of specific displays. This page explains how to use OCIO with nDisplay.

Converting Colors in Movie Render Queue

Movie Render Queue supports applying OCIO color conversions to media exports. This page shows how to set the color conversion in Movie Render Queue.