Colour Management (What's New in 2026)

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OpenColorIO (OCIO) is an open-source colour management framework designed to handle colour transformations in the film, TV, and animation industries. It allows for consistent and accurate colour representation across different applications and display systems, ensuring that colours appear as intended from start to finish in a production pipeline.

OpenColorIO supports workflows involving scene-referred and display-referred colour spaces and integrates well with popular applications like Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, RV, and VRED, Adobe After Effects, Blender, Foundry Nuke, and many others. It’s particularly used in visual effects and animation to manage complex colour transformations across tools and devices.

• Find more information about OpenColorIO on the Academy Software Foundation and OCIO websites. The OCIO documentation website is also a great resource for studios and users who want to know more about this framework.

Flame Family 2026 adds support for OCIO, which replaces Autodesk Color Management (SynColor) and provides backward compatibility for content created in previous releases. It has been implemented so that users with knowledge of SynColor should not struggle upgrading to OCIO-based workflows. The transition from SynColor to OCIO should be smooth while adding new capabilities and easing colour management workflows between Digital Content Creation applications supporting OCIO. For users not using colour management workflows, the addition of OCIO in Flame Family products should not cause any major workflow changes.

The current version of OCIO supported in Flame Family products is 2.4.2, released in March, 2025. This version contains new capabilities, including the release of the ACES 2.0 Output Transforms.

OCIO is backward compatible. OCIO configs from version 1 are generally compatible in the application, though the functionality is limited. We recommend using OCIO V2.2 configs and above, please see: Getting the Most from OCIO in Flame.

The OCIO workflow is based on configuration files, called "configs". The OCIO config concept is similar to the SynColor Policy idea: a package of Colour Transforms and rules. The OCIO config for your project could be one of the default configs shipped with the application, a studio OCIO config, or any OCIO config that can be downloaded from the internet. The OCIO config can be centralized to ease collaborative workflows. It is also possible to use an OCIO archive file (.ocioz).

Migrating from SynColor

Projects created in previous releases will be automatically migrated from SynColor to OCIO. A collection of OCIO configs for SynColor compatibility has been provided that may be helpful for using Batch setups created with earlier releases. If you have created Media Export presets that reference SynColor colour spaces, you may need to update those to use OCIO if you don't have an older release installed on the workstation.