Hi ACES Central Users!
I wanted to make my first post here and introduce myself and the studio I am working at a bit as I expect we will become more active on this forum as we wind our way through the adventure of color managed production work. I hope a few people will be interested enough to read and perhaps have some insights to offer about our questions.
I am the post producer at IKEA communications, we produce the IKEA catalog here in house as well as all global media. This means we don’t make the TV commercials that air in specific markets. Through a quark of the business structure each market is responsible for that on their own mostly. We produce media that all markets can use, which generally means limited dialogue and on screen text as we have about 80 languages we have to support.
Until recently we have relied nearly exclusively on external production companies to support our “film” production, while maintaining an army of still photographers and 3D artists to produce the catalog. We have recently begun the adventure of standardizing our productions for both the media we produce in house and requiring our vendors to follow the same rules.
We have also begun to build out a very robust internal camera department with the addition of an Alexa SXT-W, a few Blackmagic Ursa mini pro 4.6k cameras, as well as some other various camera systems. We are currently growing rapidly and building production infrastructure.
What brings me here is that we have standardized and built our pipeline around ACES color management. As stated before, we are requiring any production companies we hire to also work in ACES. This has just started and is, as expected, a significant challenge. We have found that even the highest end production companies seem to be poorly informed or educated regarding color managed workflows and why they benefit everyone particularly when sharing work product.
Below are some questions we have not been able to solve, or have low confidence we understand well.
- How should VFX artist be rendering their work? I have some ideas about this workflow, but I would love some real documentation about how rendered pixels are handled.
- What is the preferred color space for texture libraries? Does it even matter if the source textures are ACES? We would love some clarity in general on the process of computer generated imagery and ACES.
- I am shopping around the idea of unifying our color management across video and print, as we deliver our print material for the catalog in an RGB space already and ACES seems like an ideal way to allow us to work free of delivery intent across all media formats. Have any other large scale operations used ACES to color manage print and video in the same studio?
- Does anyone have experience using express dailies, DaVinci Resolve, and premiere with EDLs to move between premiere for edit and DaVinci for grade?
- Has anyone been using any ACES support in the newest version of premiere? I believe it is claimed to support it but I have not had my hands on it yet to check it out.