ACES in Action Part 2 – Breaking Down the Imaging Pipeline

Implementing ACES In a Blackmagic/Adobe Workflow

In Part 1 of this series, I shared the inside story on the production of HOAX and our path to implementing ACES. I also shared a few overall thoughts and challenges in executing ACES. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. In Part 2, we start dancing with the devil (so to speak) as I share the details of our workflow. Keep in mind, our entire image pipeline went: Camera > DaVinci Resolve (dailies) > Adobe (editing and VFX) > DaVinci Resolve (finishing and delivery). Within the Adobe workflow, we needed both Premiere Pro and After Effects to work within this pipeline. We built our pipeline so only After Effects needed to work in ACES – allowing editorial to focus on editing.

In this Insight, you learn the details of our image pipeline (and some of the tools we used to get ACES to work for us, end-to-end). Then, I call out a few specific challenges in this pipeline and how we worked around them. I also talk about one of my favorite ‘features’ of the ACES workflow, the Graded Archival Master (and why it’s both powerful and useful). Finally, you get a look at a few grading techniques I used to create our Look and my long-term plans for (eventually) executing an HDR deliverable.