The Academy Color Encoding System: Standards for Digital Image Interchange, Color Management and Long-term Archiving

The Academy Color Encoding System, known as ACES, was released to the industry in December 2014 as a production-ready suite of technical standards, best practices, and support tools. Developed and tested by equipment manufacturers, facilities, and filmmakers over the past 11 years, ACES is intended to be the standard digital production infrastructure that enables the industry to take full advantage of new high-dynamic-range and wide color gamut capture, processing, and display technologies. This paper reviews the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standards that are the foundation for ACES and how these standards are used in practice today, and discusses the road map for standardizing ACES transforms, metadata, and additional color encodings.