Color Management Part 25: Corporate Brand Colors and ACES by Chris Zwar

ACES is the industry standard for large scale VFX, but not motion design

December 21, 2024

For certain sectors of the industry, working with corporate branding colors is a critical aspect of the job. In Part 24, I looked at how we can deal with corporate branding guidelines when working with regular Standard Dynamic Range projects. The key takeaway is that corporate colors are always defined using the sRGB colorspace, and we need to convert those RGB values accordingly if we are outputting to Rec.709.

Because Prores Quicktimes are always assumed to be Rec.709, ignoring color management can result in color and brightness shifts, often incorrectly blamed on a “Quicktime gamma bug”.

In this video, a direct follow-on from Part 24, I look at how we deal with sRGB branding colors when we are working with High Dynamic Range and ACES.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time pondering whether or not this is a niche topic. But having spent the previous week dealing with exactly the issues outlined in this video, it’s certainly going to become increasingly relevant.

This video is tying together several topics that have been covered previously. Firstly, ACES was introduced back in Part 12, and it provides an industry standard for working with High Dynamic Range video. In Part 19 we introduced High Dynamic Range video, and then in Part 20 we looked at a number of scenarios that all demonstrate how and why working with HDR simply looks better. In Parts 22 & 23 we looked at how HDR video is tone mapped for Standard Dynamic Range outputs. Most recently, Part 24 emphasised that corporate brand colors are always defined using sRGB values, and we need to use color management so they remain accurate when they are output to Rec.709 Prores.

So what’s the problem with ACES?

The answer is partly to do with the state of the corporate industry in 2024. After Effects is a hugely popular application, but it’s dominant in the areas of the industry where High Dynamic Range and ACES are yet to make an impact. Every motion designer I know is still working with Standard Dynamic Range projects – that’s 8 or 16 bit, using sRGB or Rec.709. There are many areas where After Effects has a dominant market share – advertising, live events, product launches, conferences, large scale projections, broadcast promotions, POS displays and that’s before we even start to consider social media platforms and the massive amount of content uploaded every day. All of these areas are still using regular SDR video – often Prores Quicktimes for “masters” and MP4s for streaming.

The types of productions that are most likely to use After Effects are also the types of productions where corporate brand guidelines are critically important.

ACES was designed for large scale, high-end productions including feature films and premium TV shows. I don’t think they had motion design at the top of the list when it was being developed, and I don’t think the average VFX artist needs to worry about RGB brand colors when they’re compositing Hollywood blockbusters.

But the technology for HDR production is here, and compositing using HDR & ACES just looks better. So After Effects users are going to see an increase in HDR and ACES productions – maybe not overnight, but certainly over the next few years. On a personal level, the majority of advertising projects I’ve worked on over the past 4 or possibly 5 years have been completed using ACES. It’s just a matter of time.

So tying all these previous threads together: it’s easy to make the decision to work in an ACES project, because it simply looks better. And we can composite in High Dynamic Range while rendering and delivering a Standard Dynamic Range Prores master. But this process will result in changes to the brightness of the final result, and this includes any branding colors used. Obviously branding colors need to be accurate in the final, delivered masters – and so here we are.

This is part 25 in a long series on color management. If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO