The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is a set of components that facilitates a wide range of motion picture and television workflows while eliminating the ambiguity of legacy file formats. The system is designed to support both all-digital and hybrid film-digital motion picture workflows.
The basic ACES components are:
This toolkit is intended to serve as a distribution mechanism for key components of the system, including the reference implementation transforms, reference images, and documentation.
formats/
- ACES file formats code and examplesimages/
- "golden" images created using the reference implementation transformstransforms/
- ACES reference implementation transformsThough the "master" branch is 1.3, the current major version of ACES remains 1. The 1.3 update adds transforms but does not change the look or modify the existing core transforms (beyond addressing reported bugs and/or inconsequential formatting/whitespace changes).
The dev branch always reflects the "bleeding edge" and indicates new features or updates that will ultimately be rolled into a future release version of ACES. Improvements are staged on the dev branch for testing as they become available.
Included in ACES 1.3:
outputTransforms
directory to outputTransform
(singular)outputTransform
directory to be consistent with the odt
directoryFor a more detailed list of changes see the CHANGELOG and the commit history.
The gamut compression transform is the result of the work of the Gamut Mapping Working Group, to create a more robust solution to issues with out of gamut colors and the resulting artifacts (loss of texture, intensification of color fringes). The delivered gamut compression transform performs well with wide gamut, high dynamic range, scene referred content and is robust and invertible.
The gamut compression replaces the simple and less robust LMT.Academy.BlueLightArtifactFix.ctl
. The ACES gamut compression transform has numerous advantages over the BlueLightArtifactFix LMT. In particular, the gamut compression transform avoids changing colors that are well inside the destination gamut. Only colors that are out of gamut or very near the gamut boundary are affected.
As of this release, the Gamut Compression Implementation Working Group is working to provide recommendations and guidance to vendors to implement this transform directly their in products.
For those looking for more detail, the Gamut Mapping Working Group delivered a report to accompany the technical deliverable.
ACES 1.2 included the release of the Academy Metadata Format (AMF) specification. Since that time a working group has been formed to provide guidance to vendors on the implementation of AMF into products and end-user guidance on production usage. In the process of testing and working with the initial specification, the group suggested extensions to the AMF specification to make it more useful in meeting specific use cases. ACES 1.3 includes an updated AMF specification and associated schema that allow all transforms to now be referenced by UUID, relative file path, or TransformID.
The links to the current and all past versions of the ACES Developer Resources can be found at https://github.com/ampas/aces-dev/releases.
Source code is version controlled using the git version control system and hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/ampas/aces-dev/.
File names conform to the ACES System Versioning Specification. Details can be found in the Academy Specification "S-2014-002 - Academy Color Encoding System - Versioning System" included in documents/
Master Branch
The current official release version of ACES can always be found at the HEAD of the master branch. The master branch contains no intermediate commits and all commits on the master branch are tagged to represent a release of ACES.
Dev Branch
Intermediate commits between releases are staged on the dev branch. Commits staged on the dev branch, but not yet merged into the master, should be considered as "planned for inclusion" in the next release version. These represent the "bleeding edge" and development and, in turn, pull requests should be based against the dev branch.
Hotfixes Branch
In some instances it may be necessary to create a hotfixes branch. The hotfixes branch will include critical fixes for bugs found in a particular release. Hotfixes should only be implemented by developers if the bug they are intending to correct is encountered in the course of production and is deemed to be a barrier to using a particular ACES release. Hotfixes, once fully tested, will be merged into the dev branch, and ultimately the master.
Color Transformation Language (CTL) can be downloaded from https://github.com/ampas/CTL
Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) software and tools are provided by the Academy under the following terms and conditions: A worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive right to copy, modify, create derivatives, and use, in source and binary forms, is hereby granted, subject to acceptance of this license.
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