ASWF TAC Meeting - January 27, 2021

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Mathieu Mazerolle, Foundry
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Greg Denton, Microsoft Azure
Ashley Whetter, Python 3 WG
Michael Kessler, Epic Games
Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures
Emily Olin, Linux Foundation
Carol Payne, Netflix, ASWF D&I WG
Daniel Flehner Heen, Storm Studios
Bill Roberts, Adobe
Andrew Grimberg, Linux Foundation
Van Bedient, Adobe
Mitch Prater, Laika

Apologies

Daniel Heckenberg, Animal Logic
Michael Min, Netflix
Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO

Agenda

ASWF Project and Community Survey (John / Emily)
- Emily: 165 responses, supposed to close at end of the week (Feb 1st)
- Lots of feedback on how it was structured, more geared toward studios
- For next survey, hoping to be more inclusive of software vendors
- Responses so far have been good
FMX
- Emily: ASWF curating an open source track, so anyone interested in presenting should send an informal abstract
- Wave: interested in putting together a short, 3 min presentation about Assets WG to generate interest / opportunity to socialize back to studios, is there a context for that?
- Larry: can include in his talk (overview of important studio open source projects)
- Emily: could also go into David Morin’s Foundation overview talk
- Wave: there may be other 2-3 min presentations from other groups
- Emily: we could create a separate talk on foundation working groups
- Larry: David’s talk might go into that as well
- Mathieu: one of the pushes this year is to grow the General Membership (represents general membership on the board). So raising awareness of general membership / plugging membership could be something worth doing at FMX. Encourage discussions within studios of general membership, especially in context of lot of studios making use of ASWF projects. Encourage “giving back”.
Open Source Forum:
- March 10th, each working group to present a brief 5 minute update
- Verizon and (?) will present
- HyperLedger will present
- Jim Zeller (LF CEO) will present
- Towards more exec level people
- Share at discretion with colleagues / execs who should be there
Working Group updates
- CI: no meeting since last TAC meeting, notes just got merged into repo
- D&I
  - Carol: by end of week / early next week, should have schedule and speakers locked down for webinar series, Emily working on copy so it can be shared, we should spread within our networks
  - First webinar on Feb 25th
- Python 3
  - Ashley: continuing to work on transition guide, another round of speaking to studios about how far they are in Python 3 conversion. Still very early days, several studios where Python 3 is more of a “grassroots effort” rather than an official program.
- USD
  - Wave: meeting on USD camera, good representation. Broke it up into a couple of parts: camera based on a physical rig, other part on the physically based camera optics, tracking, metadata that you would get from a live action shoot, how would you track that metadata through a CG pipeline. Handed out “homework assignments”, what would a USD hierarchy look like. Also looking at sensor, camera lens metadata.
  - Corey: will get update next session from Camera. Working on web delivery of USD assets using WebRTC, there’s a video to share, video size is too large for the Wiki. What about YouTube, do we need to clear with any presenters? Should come out shortly.
  - In upcoming sessions, will try to edit presentations out of Zoom calls.
  - Roman Zulak presentation, 3 or 4 different parties working on projects in this space (USD web delivery), is it worth creating a sub WG for this specific topic?
- Asset Group
  - Wave: presentation to the board
  - Trying to build OTIO timeline (reached out to OTIO)
  - Talking to Disney about Moana to leverage the asset, USD version coming soon
  - Discussions on licensing, John + LF lawyer shared some info, it’s complicated
  - Reaching out to Camera manufacturers to see if we can get production footage from them
  - Discussion about keeping the recipe for an asset around instead of a “backed good”: Moana asset is very large, does Disney want to continue to host it? Turns out it’s more of a “working document” than expected, do you really want to regenerate a 150GB asset every time you make a fix / change, or a set of pieces you can download, and a recipe / Python script to regenerate the full asset
- Rust Saturday
  - Sean: meeting went well, lot of energy and enthusiasm around Rust for the projects we oversee, as well as other ideas
  - Notes are posted to Rust Slack channel
  - Next step is to fill out the WG template so we can present a vote to the TAC, targeting next TAC meeting for a proposal vote, establish the goals of the WG
  - In parallel lots of other work being done, working on bindings
  - Next meeting in 2 days
- WG status and approvals
  - Need to access goals / non goals of various WGs, getting all the details right
  - Wave: discussed, seems not trivial
  - Sean: came up in Rust meeting, lots of different opinions. Scott taking the lead in distilling down to a set of goals / non goals
  - Kimball: we want to maintain a sense of engagement / excitement
Technical Project updates
- OSL
  - Chris: we have CLAs signed by all major parties, move the repo to the ASWF GitHub organization, which is a big step
- OpenCue
  - Brian: update from last TSC meeting, as part of drive to make OpenCue easier to deploy, starting to coordinate an effort between cloud providers and people who run infrastructure, putting together docs and scripts, for instance using Terraform. Please reach out to Brian to help work on publishing this information, and do a PR push on mailing list.
- OCIO
  - Michael: from last TAC meeting, changing of changing version in VFX Reference Platform, decided not to do it, staying with 2.0.x, makes more sense / safer
  - Plan on pushing v2 tag within next 24h, 3 years of work just about done. Exciting to finally get that out there.
  - Agreed to work towards changing CCLA over to the ASWF standard to be consistent with other projects. Not doing it yet since in support mode for new v2 release, but looking to do this in next couple of months.
- OpenEXR
  - Cary: switched over to the new CLA
  - Working towards 3.0 release and imath, nothing like being “really close” to realize how much is left to do. Chipping away at it, release should be soon
- OpenVDB, OTIO
  - No representatives
- RAW2aces
  - Kimball: need to have meeting with ACES
Goals for ASWF: 2021 redux
- D&I: Adobe
  - Bill Roberts: push for D&I at Adobe (with Van Bedient)
  - 10 minute summary
  - Kimball: ASWF has lots of projects / building blocks, but our group should figure out how to put these building blocks together so we can enable other communities to do interesting things. New projects that could reach out to newer generations to get them interested in M&E?
  - Adobe For All: how can we give back
  - Want to be agent of change beyond the company
  - Brought in guest speakers: Dr Gregory Carr, Nikole Hannah-Jones (1619 NY Times project)
  - Adobe allows employees to spend time on projects
    - Community
    - Growth & Advancement
    - Hiring & Recruiting
    - Responsibility & Advocacy
    - Transparency & Governance
  - Responsibility & Advocacy: trying to target 13-18 age bracket, people who are “selecting out” of technical or artistic tracks due to lack of representation. Providing software and hardware to help.
  - Creating a framework that can be shared with others.
  - Core Principles - Open Source Framework
    - There is no “winning” - only getting to what is right and fair as quickly as possible - for all
    - We need to move entire industries:
      - Photography and Imaging
      - Design
      - Video
      - 3D and Interactive
      - Other?
  - Adobe Contributions
    - Open Source repositories of areas of focus
    - Great response from other manufacturers
  - Model to drive adoption across creative industries
    - Interested organizations (creative tools, content creators, industry organizations)
  - Next Steps:
    - Feedback: Socialize and solicit input - internal and external to Adobe
    - Consolidation: look for similar programs - integrate, align or include
    - Roll Out: prepare the first repository and roll out
    - Inspect & Adapt: report out (quarterly and annually), modify per inputs
  - Kimball: there’s clear crossover with our own D&I initiatives, what ideas can we come up with
  - Carol: want to work together and be aligned, doesn’t necessarily need to happen as a direct part of the WG, but could be a separate ASWF project that the D&I WG could contribute and profit from
  - Kimball: software doesn’t have to be code, it can be web sites to help people communicate for instance.
  - We can bring this up at next TAC group, think of ideas / projects that could fit, get our companies to contribute.
  - Larry: Bill, do you have a slide deck you could share, also for the other groups and categories? Bill: yes, but have to clear what can be shared first. Applying Agile methodologies to what they want to achieve, should be able to share more soon.
- Google Summer of Code
  - Larry: deadline is coming up soon, we need to have an application finalized in next 3-4 weeks if we want to do this again
  - Google has changed the program, estimated number of hours cut in half (and stipend). “Worthwhile” projects where students could have a real accomplishment to point to seemed to already be on the edge of what an undergrad could do in 12 weeks, so before we make an application, asking project leads whether they have project ideas that could be done in 6 weeks. If we have the right projects, we can do an application, but otherwise we can skip it.
  - Kimball: if Google is cutting things in half, should we push for our own program? Carol: the current plan is to do that, we got budget approved for our version of inclusion-based summer internship (3 @ $6K each, this isn’t set in stone for now). Based on experience from GSoC last summer.
  - Emily: starting with 3 this year, can expand to more next year. If there are more projects that want a full length student, could ask for more budget.
  - Wave: Academy Sci-Tech may have other internship programs, for instance production-based projects (rather than code). Also we don’t necessarily have to do it in the summer (currently leading a “spring intern”). Carol: is this the Academy Gold program? D&I group working on trying to link up with Academy efforts.
  - Carol: efforts don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but if projects feel that a “full time intern” is more productive, they want to hear that feedback.
  - Larry: we don’t need to organize these efforts completely separately, we can think of it as “funding from different places”, between different programs, we have a set of resources to meet both D&I and technical goals.
  - Kimball: we should probably still target GSoC for smaller projects
  - Larry: talked to GSoC organizers, “the program doesn’t exist for the project but for the students”, so they felt they could reach out to more students, want to allow more students to “dip their toes” into participating to open source projects, rather than targeting larger contributions to those projects. They will try this for a year or 2 and adjust accordingly. For many open source projects, it’s probably a boon, our specialized projects which require specialist knowledge may benefit less from shorter involvements.
  - Kimball: what kind of contributions are they accepting? Cary/ Larry: has to be code, can’t be documentation, assets. Kimball: could it be regression testing? Larry: as long as the primary deliverable has to be code. They have a corresponding “Season of Doc” program for non-code contributions, which we could also look at.
  - Larry: still targets college / university level students, in general terms, looking to give more people opportunities, even if these are shallower
- New Projects?
Next meeting
- 10 Feb 2021
- Likely will have a proposal from Rust
- Wave: WG may also have proposal

ASWF TAC Meeting - January 27, 2021

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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