Blender Support for ACES (Academy Color Encoding System)

Hello,

I am Chris Brejon, author the CG Cinematography website.

I unfortunately do not have the time to read a thread of 168 messages but I would like to state a few things.

Indeed, I have written an article last September to update my past mistakes about OCIO and especially ACES. It is a mea culpa. I would like to state very clearly that 90% of the content of this article comes from my conversations with Troy over the last year. I have tried to re-formulate and illustrate it with examples so it is easily understandable to anyone.

If you pay attention to the Chapter 1.5 of my book about ACES, it has gone through several updates over the past year. Going from “ACES is awesome” to “ACES has issues and limitations”. I have tried to update as best as I could every time I discovered something new or relevant and that was able to test it myself. I still need to update the article during holidays because I don´t think I am explaining clearly enough what ACES really does.

Let me give you an example. I was helping a French studio last October about color management. They told me that they wanted to switch to ACES because they were currently clipping their values on display. I replied to them : this what ACES does as well ! If you look at the CTL code of the Output Transforms, there is a clip in there.

I would like also to state that Troy is probably the most helpful and patient person I have ever met. You have no idea how many times he has explained to me Gamut Mappping, what his FIlmic does, what “Chromaticity linear” means, how 3x3 matrix works… It is also important to note that Troy has always pushed me to test and see for myself. Hence the article.

So please do not use my website as a justification to use ACES. It is used to be the case but hopefully it is not anymore. I know I had an active role into this whole ACES fashion and hopefully with my latest article, I make up for my past mistakes.

If you really want to know what ACES is and how bad the situation is, I would suggest you have a look at any TAC meeting or Output Transform VWG from last year… And see for yourself.

Chris

26 Likes