The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES): A Professional Color-Management Framework for Production, Post-Production and Archival of Still and Motion Pictures

Abstract

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been pivotal in the inception, design and later adoption of a vendor-agnostic and open framework for color management, the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), targeting theatrical, TV and animation features, but also still-photography and image preservation at large. For this reason, the Academy gathered an interdisciplinary group of scientists, technologists, and creatives, to contribute to it so that it is scientifically sound and technically advantageous in solving practical and interoperability problems in the current film production, postproduction and visual-effects (VFX) ecosystem—all while preserving and future-proofing the cinematographers’ and artists’ creative intent as its main objective. In this paper, a review of ACES’ technical specifications is provided, as well as the current status of the project and a recent use case is given, namely that of the first Italian production embracing an end-to-end ACES pipeline. In addition, new ACES components will be introduced and a discussion started about possible uses for long-time preservation of color imaging in video-content heritage.

Keywords

• ACES
• scene-referred
• output-referred
• color gamut
• transfer characteristic
• reference rendering transform
• look modification transform
• color look-up table
• ColorLUT
• Color Decision List
• technicolor
• primaries
• illuminant
• white point
• film look
• VFX
• Input Transform
• Output Transform
• RRT
• LMT
• interoperable master format
• CLUT
• LUT
• CDL
• IMF