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.
Highlights
As the acronym indicates, the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is a system championed by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Science and Technology Council, whose head organization is best known to the world for setting up the annual Academy Award, aka “the Oscars® ”
ACES colorimetry is intended for all color-critical processes and, being based on standardized color-spaces (Section 3.3) with fully invertible cross-conversion formulas, the interoperability is guaranteed as long as images are transported in this colorimetry; creativity is not hindered by technical constrains posed by the use of different products, toolsets available to colorists are ACES-agnostic, so artists can decide exclusively based on creative evaluations, product, cfr.3,Section
ACES colorimetry is intended for all color-critical processes and, being based on standardized color-spaces (Section 3.3) with fully invertible cross-conversion formulas, the interoperability is (a) guaranteed as long as images are transported in this colorimetry; creativity is not hindered by technical constrains posed by the use of different products, toolsets available to colorists are ACES-agnostic, so artists can decide exclusively based on creative evaluations, while engineers may remove many technical constrains off the color pipeline
Summary
The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is a system championed by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Science and Technology Council (hereinafter referred to as AMPAS, or as “the Academy”), whose head organization is best known to the world for setting up the annual Academy Award, aka “the Oscars® ”. Sharing financial and content-security risks, reducing production times, and improving realistic outcome of the overall Computer-Generated Imaging (CGI), due to the differentiation of assets among several artists and VFX companies The downside of these new industrial-scale processes, worsened by the rapid inflation of digital tools emerged even before economically-feasible workflows (e.g., cloud media processing), is the lack of technology standards and procedures. As said at the beginning of the paragraph, while this may have had some business/marketing sense in the film era (in the role of Technicolor color consultants, for example, [12,13]), it is just a threat to the average lean digital workflow It is exactly in this context [14], that ACES was born back in 2004 by an effort of the Academy which, like it did in the past many times with theatrical technology breakthroughs Video games and virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) are soon expected in ACES, due to recent efforts to bring professional color management to those industries
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