There are a wide variety of colour transform (also known as "LUT") formats used in the media and entertainment industry. This creates workflow problems since you may receive a LUT which is not supported by one or more of the applications you use. Furthermore, most of these LUT formats are based on out-dated technology and lack the quality, flexibility, and metadata needed to meet today's requirements.
To address these problems, the technology committees of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Cinematographers convened a group of experts to design a common transform format that could become an industry standard.
Autodesk has chosen to adopt this format as the native format for our colour management technology and we provide a large collection of transforms in this format with our applications (e.g., to support the Academy Color Encoding System).
This guide provides information about the Academy/ASC format to help you author your own colour transforms. In addition it defines several Autodesk-specific extensions which you may use when authoring colour transforms solely for use in Autodesk applications. All Autodesk extensions are marked with the version in which they were introduced or updated. All other elements and attributes are part of the original Academy/ASC format.