Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
48 CINEMONTAGE / SUMMER 2015 DI suite, and the director sees different colors there. More sophisticated projects generally incorporate some form of color management, but many projects don't have the resources to do that. "ACES provides specifications and best practices for color management with standardized metadata and transforms that can be supported by the editing systems that editors are using so that, even if they make the simplest color adjustments in the editing suite, they will be doing so in a way that can be communicated to the DI suite," he continues. "The pieces that the editing systems need to support are the ACES Display Transform, ACES clip metadata, and the ASC-CDL [American Society of Cinematographers Color Decision List format for exchanging color-grading data between platforms manufactured by different manufacturers], so that when you get to dailies created by a dailies generation system, the files were produced knowing what the display color chain is, and with the metadata files necessary to communicate the editor's color adjustment to DI, visual effects or anywhere else." Maltz adds that the ACES initiative therefore "makes a very strong statement about monitor calibration throughout the entire imaging chain," including the editorial suite, since "ACES provides the mechanism to communicate the color intention from set to editorial to dailies viewing to DI — and to and from visual effects — all in a standardized way. ACES provides display transforms for the most common display types and viewing environments." And the issue of monitors has been a question that concerns editors, since some of them point out that many editing suites rely on prosumer monitors at best, if not solely on computer monitors, with limited calibrating capabilities, even under the best of circumstances. Editor Shelly Westerman is one editor who worked on recent major features entirely within the ACES workflow. She used pre-release versions of ACES, when she co-edited The Wedding Ringer in late 2014 and also used ACES protocols while co-editing About Last Night between 2012 and 2013. Westerman reports that on both projects, the involvement of ACES was "really quite transparent" for the editors in most respects. But she does add, "We still struggled with monitor setups; we work in an offline environment and traditionally there have always been monitor variances and struggles to be able to confidently judge color." She attributes this to the fact that her team relies on prosumer monitors in the editing bay limited to Rec. 709 calibration, and feels it is likely impractical to think that editing rooms will ever be routinely configured with the same kind of monitoring technology as digital intermediate suites. But nevertheless, Westerman says, "We clearly have more consistency than we had before." Besides, there were other obvious efficiencies working under the ACES umbrella from the editorial department's point of view. For one thing, the creation of preview versions of the films was more Shelly Westerman.