If you’re a cinematographer, editor or colorist you’ll have heard of ACES (which stands for Academy Color Encoding System). This article explains what ACES is, and why it is important you start looking into it.
What is the goal of ACES?
Preserving art is the goal. In their own words:
ACES is the final movie with the full fidelity of the original source material
Today, a typical workflow is to master to the required delivery format. E.g., if you make a movie and your intended goal is a theatrical release, you will master for DCI or its equivalent. On the other hand, if your project is a simple web video, your master might be an H.264 file, or sometimes a Prores or DNxHD file.
Whatever your current ‘master’ workflow, it shares the following common disadvantages:
What if you want to preserve your video and need to re-release it at some point many years from now? We can already see a sample of this problem when we watch badly scanned movies from the past. The ‘usual’ solution is a restoration and/or a complete rescan, with the best technology possible. But, there’s a problem.
Film is on its way out. Today’s movies don’t have the luxury of being on film. Nor do they have the luxury of being preserved as RAW files, simply because RAW files cannot have effects, transitions and other important data. The most common delivery formats (H.264 and MPEG-2 in Rec. 709, Rec. 2020, DCI P3, etc.) are based on current technology. When technology improves, we will be left holding a sub-par version of our original movie.
To avoid this problem, and to embrace digital technology to its fullest ‘unknown’ potential, a new methodology is required – one that will preserve the ‘best possible copy’ of our art. Enter ACES.
What is ACES?
ACES is an encoding system that tries to take in as much dynamic range and color information as possible, so you can never complain that your master is limited by technology.
Some of the characteristics of ACES are:
Imagine the ability to encode to possibly the best file format available for video (OpenEXR), with a color space so big that any future display technology can use it, with a color bit depth far greater than what is necessary, and which can hold more dynamic range than the human eye can see!
The ACES Workflow
Today, a software or hardware encoder has to account for the input format as well as the output format. E.g., if you’re converting from Prores to H.264, the encoder must be able to read the latest version of Prores and output to the latest version of H.264.
When a new codec appears on the scene, software developers scramble to rewrite their encoding apps to account for these. The permutations and combinations of moving between one codec to another are staggering. Now, I really don’t care what software developers do, but unfortunately, these complexities are passed on for us to deal with!
What if, instead of having to deal with two codecs, the encoder just has to deal with one codec?
Instead of X codec —> Y codec, we have ACES —> Y codec. You could replace Y with any future encoding system, however advanced. It doesn’t need to worry about the ‘source’ codec, which will always be ACES.
Imagine filmmakers, web video makers, wedding videographers, etc., all using the same workflow! Simplification without compromise. That’s the plan.
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