In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a lot of “new “ advances in camera technology. Here’s an update.
4k is the new 2k which last year was just High Def. With 8k images looming just around the corner it brings up the question of,“ How do I get these great Images from the camera to the screen?
I’m not sure if this is a problem that everyone has but delivering Camera original files to Post Production has become a major problem that seems to be getting in the way of Production.
Things used to be easy: a camera was just a camera. Producers new how to budget for a camera package before hiring a Director or Cinematographer for the project.
Today, every camera is different tool with its own attributes, and every camera has a different kind of workflow. Some of the new questions that have to be answered are thins like …
How are we delivering to editorial? Do we set the “color “ on set or do we do a color pass in postproduction? Are we screening “dailies “ how and who gets to see them?
These are just a few questions there are many more that were not even thought of a few years ago.
The Technical folks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have come up with a proposed answer, which SMPTE has endorsed. It’s called “ The Academy Color Encoding System” known as ACES.
To quote “ACES utilizes a 16-bit floating point OpenEXR file container with an extraordinary wide color gamut whose range easily encompasses all existing color spaces. To utilize the ACES container, Footage from each camera would be processed through an Input Device generally created by each camera’s specific manufacturer. These IDT’s serve to translate each camera’s native color space into the 16-bit floating-point color space of the ACES OpenEXR format.”
What this means in a nut shell is that we’ll have a standardized color management workflow that works with any camera system so images from those cameras can be easily exported thru the production/post production process while maintaining the best quality of that image. It’s a “ Standard,” a common starting benchmark in which everyone is on the same page. I would like to have this adopted as best practices it could cut back on some of the head aches that we are dealing with today.
Tell me what you think.