Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
47 SUMMER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE Equally crucial has been the effort to educate the industry about how ACES impacts different sectors of the production chain. While much of the early focus was on bringing equipment manufacturers and service facilities into the ACES fold, educating the creative community will be an ongoing, long-term effort, Maltz suggests. Furthermore, until now, much of the initial outreach has focused on the image capture, dailies, visual effects and digital intermediate processes. For the color pipeline, ACES is "a defined color space and working space where you will do your color correction," in the words of Joshua Pines, Technicolor's vice president of Imaging Research and Development, but speaking as a member of the Sci-Tech Council. "It's the image state pipeline, and describes how you get from various cameras into a common color space where you do your color correction how you apply a viewing transform and how you then go out to different display devices. But ACES is very specific in that once you get all that material into the color space, it has nothing to say about how you do the color correction. We are merely defining how you transform the images and get into ACES, and then, how you view it when you are done doing color correction." ACES IN POST Now, the Academy is trying to get the message out to the post- production community on how ACES potentially impacts the editorial team specifically. The intent of ACES is to enable the highest quality possible color management all the way from image acquisition through distribution. It is also to simultaneously ensure that there is a common standard for all deliverables via the implementation of an encoding system that preserves as much dynamic range and color information as possible from the originally captured image. So how deeply do editors need to worry about all the associated details anyway? Yes, modern editors frequently deal with color for creative purposes or to solve problems, but don't they expect the nuances and technical details of "color management" to be left to others? According to Maltz, the answer to these kinds of questions is a basic "Yes." Editors do want such details to be largely invisible inside the editorial suite. And to a large degree, that is one of the key points of ACES; it can improve the product traveling through the editorial department and potentially make that journey more efficient, but without disrupting the nature of the unique work being done in editorial, he believes. "One of the biggest complaints we hear from productions, cinematographers, directors and colorists is that at some point along the line, if it is not a well color-managed project, when they get to the digital intermediate, the director says, 'That is not my movie,'" Maltz explains. "This happens because there was no color management that connects with editorial; if editors adjusted color because a director asked them to, there is no mechanism to communicate those changes to the colorist in the Andy Maltz.