Getting Started

What is ACES?

The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is an industry standard for managing color and digital files throughout the lifecycle of almost any media production, from motion pictures to television, video games, or immersive storytelling projects. ACES can ensure a consistent color experience to preserve the creator's vision through all phases of prodution - from image capture through editing, VFX, mastering, public presentation, archiving, and future remastering. ACES can also help to "future-proof" your project and simplify the creation of the many deliverables required by today's productions.

Why use ACES?

ACES standardizes and simplifies color management to maintain the color fidelity of your production at the highest level throughout production, post-production, and archiving. Using ACES simplifies camera matching in DI; improves color and workflow communication; adds reliability to the color viewing pipeline; simplifies and "future-proofs" the creation of outputs; and creates a 'known quantity' master for the archive.

Using ACES should simplify communications in sophisticated multi-vendor workflows. When the decision to use ACES is made, there are only a few questions to be asked and answered for everyone to be on the same page. For example:

• What inputs (cameras, animation) are we expecting to use?
• Will we be managing color on set?
• What color correction and animation tools are we using?
• What are our anticipated outputs (cinema projector, streaming devices, etc.)?

Importantly, ACES is free and open-source, so dozens of companies have built it into their tools and continually innovate on top of its standardized framework.