changing CXR file extension to EXR loses post settings

[busseynova]

Happy to see Cryptomatte by material included in Corona since upgrading to 12, but I'm having some trouble with the workflow.

Docs say to render to CXR and convert to EXR, and indeed that seems to be the only method that works, but doing so produces a Beauty channel with no tonemapping.

I'm going to render to CXR for now and hopefully use the batch script to create PNGs of the Beauty, but can anyone tell me if there's a way to 'burn in' the tonemapping to the EXRs? This would negate the need to generate additional PNGs for me.

Obviously rendering directly to EXR would work but then I lose the cryptomatte

[busseynova]

Ok, so batch converting to PNG works to a certain degree... but, the process stops at 134 frames out of 176 (the sequence is actually every other frame, but that doesn't seem to affect things until this point.

Secondly this seem slightly less preferential to using multichannel EXRs, as it's going to create a lot of PNGs if I want to start using render elements in post, and possibly take up more disc space overall.

Lastly, does anyone know if it's possible to just do the tonemapping in After Effects? I'm guessing it would have to be done in a Linear sRGB colour space with 2.2 gamma transform at the end? Can't for the life of me work out how to do this in AE now, it doesn't seem possible to turn off colour managment.

[busseynova]

Ok so I think I'm just going to batch the CXRs to PNG for the purposes of this project under the principle of KISS, but here are my problems/observations summised after having done a few animations in V-Ray via EXR. I think Corona has room for improvement:

Cryptomatte doesn't work when rendering directly to EXR

No option as far as I can see to bake bloom and glare into the beauty pass and B&G pass didn't appear in the channels when I changed the extension to EXR despite having B&G render element active. I wonder if this is something to do with rendering on back burner and the B&G not generating properly at render end. It does show up when I open the CXR in CIE.

Batch processing is much less user friendly than V-Ray with no UI as such, and documentation pretty scant.

Batch processing script stalls after a certain number of frames and requires CXRs to be deleted to proceed with the rest.

[busseynova]

ok, so batch processing seems a bit broken. stops after 67 frames and duplicates frames in random places.