In this episode of the fxpodcast, we dive deep into the future of color management with one of the leading figures in the development of ACES 2.0, Alex Fry, with the ACES update that’s redefining the color pipelines of modern visual effects and feature production.
Alex is a senior color and imaging engineer at ILM Sydney, known more informally among his peers as their resident “color nerd.” He has years of experience in high-end feature film production and an artistry for turning complex imaging science into practical tools for VFX artists and colorists. With a background in compositing and supervision, and credits spanning from The Lego Movie to Transformers One, he’s uniquely positioned at the intersection of engineering precision and production artistry.
ACES 2.0, the Academy Color Encoding System is more than just a color space; it’s a standardized framework that allows VFX and post-production teams to work consistently across studios, cameras, and screens. Before ACES, color science was a patchwork of internal systems with overlapping concepts but no common language. ACES brought order—defining transforms, encoding spaces, and a reference pipeline to align color workflows from capture to delivery.
Fry and Kevin Wheatley (Framestore) served as co-chairs of the working group developing ACES 2.0. In addition to the co-chairs, Fry mentions many people who contributed along the way including Nick Shaw (Antler Post), Pekka Riikkonen, Scott Dyer, Daniele Siragusano (FilmLight), and many others over the multi-year project.
The newly released ACES 2.0 improves this framework in significant ways. It introduces an overhauled Display Rendering Transform (DRT), built to solve longstanding issues around hue skews and HDR/SDR inconsistencies, particularly under extreme conditions like saturated lighting or narrow-band emitters such as LEDs and lasers.
Where ACES 1.0 relied on separate rendering and output transforms, ACES 2.0 unifies the process into a single, sophisticated, color appearance model-based transform. It’s engineered not only to look better out-of-the-box but to handle a wider range of inputs while remaining invertible, consistent, and adaptable to emerging display technologies.
The episode gets technical, exploring how display-referred and scene-referred spaces operate and why bridging them correctly matters so much in the production chain. Using examples like shifting hues on vehicle lights in Formula 1 footage or the consistency of eye glows in characters like Megatron, we see how poor transforms can break the visual narrative and how ACES 2.0 fixes these in subtle but powerful ways.
The backstory is equally compelling. Alex was first exposed to ACES via an fxguide article while working at Animal Logic on The Great Gatsby. Intrigued, he began experimenting, adapting early versions of the framework into production workflows, and soon joined the Academy’s technical working group that would go on to develop ACES 2.0. Over several years, and countless video calls during lockdown, he co-led a team of global contributors in redesigning the display pipeline, testing against real-world footage, and fine-tuning for artistic fidelity.
His dual role on Transformers One as both compositing supervisor and color science lead gave him a unique chance to trial ACES 2.0 in production before its formal release. The new pipeline resolved color inconsistencies that previously plagued HDR and SDR delivery, especially around key plot elements like character eye transitions. For ILM, the benefits were clear: cross-site consistency, fewer creative miscommunications, and smoother integration with ACES-native plates from external vendors.
And now? With official support in OpenColorIO 2.4.2 and DaVinci Resolve 20, ACES 2.0 is ready for broad adoption. It’s no longer something you need to code or customize—just enable it in your software and let the color science do its job.
This episode is more than a technical overview; it’s a story about what it takes to standardize something as fluid as color perception, the challenges of keeping up with display and camera innovation, and the collaborative spirit of an industry that, despite its complexity, thrives on things just working.