This document provides guidelines on the encoding of the color information for the Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) and for the decoding of the color signal in the projector. A series of standards and recommended practices define exactly what to do to encode and decode the color for digital cinema. This document leads the user through all of those documents so that an image, once created, will both match the creator's intent and will be displayed as the same image in every theatre within the recommendations of these documents. In addition to the guidelines on how to do the color encoding and color processing, this document will give some historical background on the development of the color encoding. In order to make this document more readable, the historical information will be put in a series of annexes after the guidelines. Therefore, this document describes the color transformations required for encoding an image into the DCDM X′Y′Z′ code values in mastering and the reciprocal process of decoding these code values in the exhibition projector. Because the appearance of any color patch is dependent on the viewing conditions under which the color patch is seen, this document will also describe how the contents of the standards and recommended practices relating to the display of images using digital projection relate to the color encoding and decoding. The purpose of this guideline is to show how to use all of the Digital Cinema color-related documents in order to achieve the objectives of interoperability and color consistency.