ASWF adopts ACES
Color management standard ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) has become the latest project to be hosted by movie industry standards body the Academy Software Foundation.
The change is intended to drive open-source contributions to the project, and increase integration between ACES and related ASWF projects like OpenColorIO.
The industry standard for color management throughout a movie’s life cycle
Becoming an Academy Software Foundation project is something of a sideways move for ACES, since it was developed by ASWF founder AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences).
The movie industry standard for color management, the open source framework is intended to ensure consistency in the way that colors are displayed throughout a project’s entire production life cycle, from the live shoot to VFX, post-production, mastering and archiving.
It was originally developed to address issues resulting from the increasing range of digital cameras and RAW image formats in use in production.
ACES 2, launched this year, introduced new output transforms for rendering ACES images to displays, intended improve color rendering, make display more consistent across different dynamic ranges, and to expand support for custom output devices.
Now an ASWF Incubating project, alongside rawtoaces
ACES becomes ASWF’s latest Incubating project: its terminology for an intermediate level of maturity for an open-source project.
It joins a related Incubating project, rawtoaces, the RAW to ACES Utility, for converting digital camera RAW files to ACES container files.
AMPAS will “continue to participate actively” in the development of ACES, with Scott Dyer, Senior Imaging Engineer at the Academy, chairing the new ACES Technical Steering Committee.
Its ACES Central website will also remain the core platform for community news and resources.
However, becoming an ASWF project is expected to drive open source contributions to ACES, and to align it more closely with related ASWF projects like color-management solution OpenColorIO, HDR image standard OpenEXR, and material standard MaterialX.
Read more about ASWF’s adoption of ACES on the Academy Software Foundation website
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.