Understanding ACES in VFX | Part 2: Display-Referred Workflows & DPX Log Footage

Part 2 of a series covering the essentials of ACES color management in both CG and VFX studio pipelines. This second part is focused on working with client LUTS from a display-referred non-color managed pipeline. This is typically the case with DPX log footage, although a show can have a display-referred pipeline and use scene-linear EXR files. The key issue is whether the target display EOTF (for example ) was baked into the LUT, making it display-referred. Here the camera native color space needs to be defined as well as the process space the LUT was generated in, which is defined in contextual variables in an OCIO config to define LMTs (Look Modification Transforms) for integrating display-referred LUTs into the Display Transform. You can find the full docs to my ACES OCIOv2 config :