The Academy Color Enconding System (ACES) in a video production and post-production colour pipeline

Colour management for video-based projects involves transferring large quantities of data —currently 1–3 TB (terabytes) per shooting day, or 1–6 TB per finished full-feature Digital Cinema Master— around different locations and facilities, during a timespan of several months, and having them processed by highly heterogeneous IT infrastructures, each with its peculiar viewing environment at the end (displays, TVs, monitors, projectors). Add to this the different imaging characteristics of camera sensors and purely artificial imagery / computer graphics (CG). To cope with such a diverse ecosystem, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), as it did many times in the past (from the silent-film era up to current immersive-sound, HFR and HDR breakthroughs), gathered an international group of scientists, cinematographers, developers, colourists and engineers —which the author is among— to came up with a framework called the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES, [1]) encompassing colorimetry, advanced mathematics ([2]), metadata and computer-science security to streamline an easier, more interoperable and durable process which is colour-accurate for every creative, technical and archival needs of visual contents. After a general understanding of ACES as a whole, the author will focus on his own contributions to the project: some of the ACES colour-mathematics internals, and aspects of colour representation and transmission as metadata, [3]–[6].