OCIO Studio Config for ACES

The OCIO Studio Config for ACES is the successor to the widely used ACES config for OCIO v1.

It contains the complete set of ACES color spaces, displays, and views. In addition, it contains some extra color spaces that are not officially part of ACES but that are widely used in the VFX, animation, games, and post-production industries.

Users who need a simpler config that contains just the basics needed to use ACES color management in common DCC tools are encouraged to check out the OCIO CG Config for ACES.

The latest version of this config may be downloaded from the Releases page of its GitHub repo.

The Studio Config leverages the high quality ACES implementation built into OCIO itself and so requires no external LUT files. In fact, even the config file is built into OCIO and users may access it from any application that uses OCIO 2.2 or higher by using one of the following strings in place of the config path:

ocio://studio-config-v2.1.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.3 (for OCIO 2.3 or higher)

ocio://studio-config-v1.0.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1 (for OCIO 2.2 or higher)

These new configs adopt an advanced naming convention so that they can be uniquely identified:

studio-config-v1.0.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1.ocio

|-----|-------------|---------|---------|---|

|Type | Colorspaces | ACES    | Profile |   |

Where:

  • Type: The type of the config, e.g., CG or Studio

  • Colorspaces: The version for the color spaces and other config features

  • ACES: The aces-dev version being used

  • Profile: Minimum required OCIO version

The OCIO Configs Working Group collected input from the community and simplified the naming scheme relative to the earlier OCIO v1 ACES configs. However, aliases have been added so that the original color space names continue to work (if there is an equivalent space in the new config).

Please note that with OCIO v2 we are trying to be more rigorous about what constitutes a “color space”. For this reason, the new configs do not bake view transforms or looks into the display color spaces. Therefore, it is necessary to use a DisplayViewTransform rather than a ColorSpaceTransform if you want to bake in an ACES Output Transform. This is not only more rigorous from a color management point of view, it also helps clarify to end-users the important role of a view transform in the process. Baking in a view transform is a fundamentally different process than just converting between color space encodings, and it should be perceived as such by users.