DJV Player

Software:
DJV View 1.2.3

A highly effective and useful open source frame sequence player, indispensable in an animation studio.

DJV allows smooth cached playback of float EXR file sequences (and many other formats) at a variaty of frame-rates, image / pixel diagnostic tools, view EXR layers, quick mp4 export, and more.

Download DJV here:
http://djv.sourceforge.net/

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Saving multi-channel EXR with Arnold for maya

Software:
Maya 2018 | Arnold 5

  1. In the Render Settings > Common tab, choose EXR as the output file format.
  2. In the Render Settings > AOVs tab, open the drop-down menu on the right side of one of the AOVs in the list, and choose Select Driver.
    This will bring up the defaultArnoldDriver node Attributes.
  3. In the defaultArnoldDriver node Attributes, under Advanced Output, check Merge AOVs.

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Extracting image layers from a multi-channel EXR file sequence in After Effects

Software:
After Effects CC 2018

  1. Apply an EXtractoR effect on the layer.
    * Effects > 3D Channel > EXtractoR
  2. In the EXtractoR effect parameters, Click the RGB Channels to open the EXtractoR dialog box.
  3. Choose the wanted layer from the Layers drop-down, or select individual channels from the B, G, B, Alpha drop-downs.

Note:
The Layer will be displayed darker than the original EXR main layer display because it will not be Gamma corrected (linear display).
A Gamma correction should be applied on the result of the composite via an adjustment layer or ‘pre-comping’ the layers and applying it on the containing composition.
* A Gamma correction can be applied using a Levels effect.
* In most cases the Gamma correction need to be with a value of 2.2 (sRGB).

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Photoshop CC 2018 EXR Loading Freeze

Software:
Photoshop CC 2018

Iv’e encountered a problem with loading EXR files into Photoshop CC 2018.
About 50 percent of the times the software would freeze during the load operation,
It would happen on files that I have opened many times before with previous versions of the software, and also on different PC’s.

After some testing it seams that maybe the problem is with EXR files that are compressed using PIZ Wavelet compression, although I can’t be sure because I couldn’t reproduce the problem with such files created with Blender, the problem only seams to happen with files created with 3ds max.

Does it make sense that Photoshop CC 2018 would have a problem with PIZ Compressed EXR files created with 3ds max?

I don’t know, but from the tests I did at the studio this seam to be the case…

I would love to get more info or clarification on this.

Adobe Bridge Warning

Software:
Adobe Bridge CC 2017

Adobe Bridge is very useful for browsing media in a CG \ Animation workflow,
mainly because it displays thumbnails and previews for EXR files, something that Windows Explorer doesn’t do, and also because it has cool batch functions like loading files as layers in a new Photoshop document and so on,
But I encountered a behavior that can be problematic,
The software uses caching for the thumbs and filmstrip preview in order to display the images faster,
And in some cases where you render updated files with the same folder structure and same names, Bridge will display the older preview images from it’s cache even if you manually deleted the whole folder structure prior to re-rendering!!
I stumbled across this issue when browsing render tests being confused as to why Blender rendered images with old settings, I naturally thought Blender was to blame (I tend to think that a media viewer can’t be the problem because it just displays images..) and looked through the render setting trying to understand what went wrong,
Eventually I found the cause of the problem in Bridge,
And there’s a simple solution with the command:
Tools > Purge > Purge cache for _______ folder
But you still have to be mindful that you might be seeing old renders, otherwise you won’t perform this important action.