ACES 2.0 Volumetric Gamut Mapping – In Action

Series	Getting To Know ACES

Understand the new JMH gamut – and why ACES 2.0 hands you more headroom than 1.3

If you have ever pushed a clip with neon or LED light sources through ACES 1.3 and watched the red channel suddenly flip to purple at the top of the trace, you already know the older standard had a structural problem at its gamut edges. ACES 2.0 fixes it by abandoning the cubic gamut entirely. The new working volume is non-cubic, mapped through the Hellwig 2022 color appearance model (also known as CIE CAM 2022). The result is less hue shifting, less clamping on individual color channels, and no more inversions on extreme luminance values.

The trade-off is that ACES 2.0 hands you a less contrasty, less “print-ish” image out of the box. The 1.3 Output Transform was famously crunchy by design, leaning toward a print look without committing to one. ACES 2.0 takes the opposite stance: it gives you more headroom and a smoother gamma curve, but the punch you used to get for free is now your job. If you want it back, you add a trim node after your initial offset and shape the contrast yourself.

In this Insight, you will see exactly where 1.3 falls apart at the gamut edges on a piece of Blackmagic Design test footage with an aggressive red channel cast, then walk through the structural reasons why the tools you reach for – exposure, log wheels, HDR wheels – behave differently in the new color space. Along the way, you will get the AP0-to-AP1 working space change in action, the system-level vs OFX management gotcha that bit Resolve 20 (now fixed in Resolve 21), and the JMH transform pipeline that replaces the old RRT plus ODT pair with a single combined transform.

Key Takeaways

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

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