Would love to hear about any examples of film schools teaching or using ACES! Let’s start a conversation about who’s doing it, what the experience is like and what should be best practices!
Steve Tobenkin
ACES Adoption/Comms Lead
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Hello, thanks Steve for creating this thread.
We have with Philippe Llerena from “Guerilla Render” and Gaetan Jayle from “Tu nous za pas vus” “installed” ACES at ENSI (Ecole des Nouvelles Images) in Avignon, France.
As you may know, I am a big ACES fan. So for me it was the only choice we could have done in terms of Color Management. Prior to this installation, there was no Color Management at all in the short films.
The response from the student has been great so far :
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To try it is to adopt it. There is no going back after trying it. It would be like going back to “dirty”. Only issue : I would love if it would be easier to use in some software.
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It changes everything in a good way, everything is closer to reality. We hope that it will become a standard in every software used for Computer Graphics.
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A bit difficult to setup at first but it was worth it. Highlights and Shadows look much better. You can really tell the difference visually. Ideally we would use the OCIO config in any production software.
At ENSI, if I am not mistaken, we use Substance, Mari, Photoshop, Guerilla Render, Nuke and Resolve. I guess the two softwares that gave us more hassle are Substance and Photoshop. I know you guys are talking with Adobe… So hopefully a standardization will come soon. For Photoshop we have used a workaround that has been explained on the forum and for Substance we have used an exr provided as well on ACEScentral.
Our setup is pretty much basic : we paint textures in Rec. 709 with a display LUT matching the ODT Rec. 709 ACES. In our shaders, we have a node to load any Color texture as ACEScg which is our Rendering Space. Any Grayscale texture is simply loaded as linear. Since it has no color information I guess we do not care about primaries.
We display everything in Nuke and Resolve with the Rec. 709 ODT which is perfect for our needs.
Thanks ! I hope this answers your question. 
Chris
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Hey there! Thought I could chime in on this one for my first post here on ACES Central.
I’m Andrew Sevigny, a senior at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. I actually interned with the image engineering team at AMPAS this summer - one of a long long lineage from my program at RIT: Motion Picture Science.
Motion Picture Science is a BS degree that incorporates a hybrid of imaging science coursework, traditional film school experiences, and unique motion picture engineering in once program. We spend 2/3 of our time as imaging and color scientists, while the other third is spent amongst creative filmmakers and animators. All in all, we like to describe ourselves as the bridge between creatives and engineers in the industry.
In a few courses, we dive into the intention, theory, color science, and mathematical processes that ACES uses to accomplish its goal as both an intermediate and archival encoding. Some of us even have the great pleasure of learning digital color management from Ed Giorgianni - one of the key members in the creating of ACES.
Our use of ACES within our film school is mostly as a scientific research tool for the Motion Picture Science degree. We have yet to incorporate it into the standard workflows of the BFA and MFA filmmakers. This may change moving ahead with the introduction of our new post-production facility/studio/screening space, MAGIC Spell Studios, that aims to join may areas of media, arts, games, etc. It also introduces digital cinema, HDR, and WGC display capabilities of which ACES would be useful for.
For current student workflows, ACES can have some benefits regarding live-action/graphics interchange. However, trying to introduce the workflow without having substantial benefits for students (who may be unfamiliar with how or why it works) may introduce unnecessary complexity and system/storage requirements.
My hope is that upperclassmen MFA/BFA students in the near future who have more experience will be able to work alongside the MPS students to incorporate ACES into their workflows - this may be for standard films or those who take advantage of the HDR/WGC/graphics interchange capabilities.
I think this comes down to education and appreciation of what ACES is trying to do. For us engineering students, we can appreciate the color science aspects and talk about why ACEs is important. But, as translators for the creatives, we also have to be able to educate them in a way that allows film students to be able to appreciate it as well! And that’s exactly what we are trying to do here!
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Just a precision here : we only use an exr as a display lut in Substance Painter. Substance Designer does not have anything similar.
Thanks
Hi all, I believe I’m the first school in Brazil to introduce ACES. Graduations that will take advantage of that are the Multimedia (Animation) and Cinema ones.
The link to our school is https://ecdd.infnet.edu.br/
I even created a public document (in Portuguese) that’s linked from another one where I created, specifically for the school, a Online Editing Manual with best practices and procedures, similar to BBC and Netflix ones.
Here is the link to the ACES workflow doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mamBBgj174zBkY3yOzMoBTeNfyvS1RHLI30T_kPOpcY/edit#
Regards
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