ASWF TAC Meeting - 31 May, 2023

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Note: attendance record may be incomplete for this meeting.

Premier member representatives

  • Bill Roberts - Adobe Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano - Google LLC / OpenCue
  • Cory Omand - The Walt Disney Studios
  • Eric Enderton - NVIDIA / DPEL
  • Eric Reinecke - Netflix
  • Esteban Papp - Amazon Web Services
  • Gordon Bradley - Autodesk
  • Greg Denton - Microsoft
  • Jean-Michel Dignard - Epic Games, Inc
  • Kimball Thurston - Weta Digital Ltd / Chairperson / raw2aces
  • Larry Gritz - Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Mark Visser - Unity Technologies
  • Matthew Low - DreamWorks Animation
  • Michael B. Johnson - Apple Inc
  • Roy C Anthony - DNEG
  • Sean C McDuffee - Intel Corporation
  • Sean O’Connell - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Project representatives

  • Carol Payne - OpenColorIO
  • Cary Phillips - OpenEXR
  • Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language
  • Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
  • Joshua Minor - OpenTimelineIO
  • Ken Museth - OpenVDB

Industry representatives

  • Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Other Attendees

  • David Morin, ASWF
  • John Mertic, LF
  • Emilly Olin, LF
  • Yarille Kilborn, LF
  • Andrew Grimberg, LF RelEng
  • JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
  • Doug Walker, Autodesk
  • Ben Schofield
  • Erik Strauss, ORI
  • Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
  • Deke Kincaid

Apologies

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Agenda

  • Updates
    • GH issue review
    • Working on agenda improvements - more to come
    • Was going to spend more time, but have been caught on other event. All the feedback is important, have ideas on how to make this easier.
    • Investigate using GitHub Issues
    • JF: “Paste Without Formatting” helped to move agenda items from spreadsheet to agenda
  • LFX Meeting Management updates (John Mertic)
    • LFX Meeting Management v2
      • For ASWF Projects and Working Groups
    • Feedback on how to improve this tool, want to make it easier to manage and work with meetings. The more we can streamline the tools the better, the better the communities and projects will be, and help you as participants in the community.
    • Benefits of LFX Meeting Management
      • East scheduling / managing meetings for organizers
        • New: Join meetings as a guest or with a registered LF account
        • Schedule meetings for an entire committee in one step: meeting invites are updated / removed / added as partitions or the meeting changes
        • New: single link for all participants to join a meeting
        • Benefit from our enhanced Zoom security measures to prevent unauthorized participants in your scheduled meetings
        • Automatic attendance tracking
      • Single view of all your meetings
        • Keep all your meetings, public or restricted, organized in one place within your LFX individual dashboard
        • Recordings and transcripts of your meetings are automatically shared on your Individual DAshboard. If you missed a meeting, you can simply replay the recording and review the meeting and chat transcripts
        • Easily customize your preferred meeting invitation email from your Individual Dashboard, ensuring that existing and new meetings are updated accordingly
        • Explore all your open source contributions and community activities conveniently from your Individual Dashboard
      • Just like code contributions…
    • Your existing meetings
      • On 17 May you should have obtained an updated invitation email for all your existing meetings
      • Before joining any existing meeting, make sure that you are using the new meeting link
    • Changed Meeting Links
      • New Links:
        • New Link format contains Meeting ID and Password
        • The link can be shared with other participants
        • Can join up to 10 minutes before meeting
    • Joining a meeting through LFX Meeting Management
      • Clock on the join link in the invitation email or your calendar
      • If you are logged into your LF Account, you will be automatically redirected
    • Or you can join as a Guest
      • You can join a meeting as a guest by providing your name and email address
      • In case of a restricted meeting (by invitation only), invitation email address is mandatory
      • In case of a public and unrestricted meeting, your email address will be optional
    • Why you should create and use an LF Account
      • Browse your contributions and community activities
      • Access to all meeting recordings and transcripts
      • Easily manage your communication preferences
      • Ensure your participation gets properly associated with your organization
    • Trying to Join with Incorrect Email Address
      • If you are trying to join a restricted meeting which you are not invited to, you will see an error message similar to the one in the screenshot
      • If you have been invited to the meeting, please provide your invitation email address here or speak to your Project Administrator
    • Kimball: tried to join WGs I don’t normally join, couldn’t find the meeting management links for those? John: we have some things in progress, a global iCal calendar.
    • More coming to LFX Meeting Management soon!
      • Review accept/decline status from the LFX Meeting Management Console
      • Pin meeting time to a particular timezone (i.e. DST won’t wreck all your meeting scheduling)
      • Subscribable iCal calendar
      • Associate mailing lists with meetings (i.e. one gets all the meeting invites when they subscribe to a mailing list). So everyone on a mailing list can get invited to a meeting.
      • And more…
    • John: one thing you may want to do for each of your groups in your repo, ways to engage with your project (mailing list, slack channel), might be good to have the link to join the meeting and schedule.
    • Rolling this out to ASWF
      • Right now, we use LFX Meeting Management for:
        • Top level ASWF meetings (TAC, GB, budget committee )
        • Some subprojects:
          • OpenFX
          • OpenVDB
          • OpenAssetIO
          • ORI
          • DPEL
          • OIIO
          • USD WG
      • By the end of 2023, we would like all ASWF meetings to use LFX Meeting Management
      • ACTION: Work with project TSCs to transition over
    • TODO: Link to product board
  • Kimball: for SIGGRAPH, if we do virtual townhall / BoF, does that preclude in person? Emily: projects can do one or both, if you are doing only one, would suggest virtual to allow wider participation. Ideally virtual town halls are replacing project presentations we have done in the past, major milestones in last year, upcoming, presenters, Q&A. Pushing people towards virtual town hall, the BoF can be a follow on, can be more in depth, doesn’t need to be the same content.
  • Emily: CFP is open until next Friday. If you want to submit a talk for the main day, please submit and share with your colleagues. Doesn’t have to be ASWF related, but should be open source related.
    • Larry: which day is main event vs bof? Emily: Main open source day is Sunday, Bofs are Monday / Tuesday, working with SIGGRAPH to have the BoFs at the convention center, but not confirmed yet.
  • Emily: if you are colleagues in London, we are doing a Beers of a Feather on June 6th, hosted by Foundry, if you know junior people you want to get involved, this is a good opportunity to meet the community. TODO: add link
  • Emily: starting to think about keynote speaker, what would be topics you would want to hear about, or any speakers at other events that you really enjoyed. David: Andrew Glassner was really good at Open Source forum, he had a topic on AI. Any good topics emerging right now? David: AI has become even more of a hot topic since Andrew Glassner presentation. Any new efforts on AI in your companies? So if you have anything in that field. Kimball: a really good talk at CPPcon was Herb Sutter’s talk on CPPNext, how yo have a C++ that’s secure and fast. Carol: I would prefer to pick a speaker that’s good for our organization rather than a good topic, I feel the topic is less important than a good speaker. Larry: would rather have someone talk about AI issues in VFX studios rather than a more general talk. Kimball: think about that, send ideas to Emily.
  • Cinepaint Update (Robin Rowe)
    • Since 2002, it had existed under a different name before I arrived.
    • Someone in this group I met at in person event was working on a generative AI for image sequences, but don’t remember who it was? Does anyone remember / could be someone who could present?
    • Open Source High Fidelity Image Editing
      • Flipbook playback with Onion Skinning
    • Was writing the graphics column in Linux Journal, ran across Cinepaint being used on Scooby Doo, used for dust busting, wire removal. Pretty mechanical, but advances frame by frame quickly.
    • UI looks a fair amount like Photoshop, does the things you expect a Photoshop like tool to do, but supported HDR images from the start.
    • Used in Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, several more, mostly for dust busting (back when we shot film)
    • CinePaint Overview
      • HDR 2D painting features, free alternative to Photoshop
      • Forked from orphaned Film Gimp, renamed CinePaint in 2002
      • Sony (Stuart Little) and ILM contributed patches
      • Single codebase POSIX-style C/C++ for Linux, Windows, macOS
      • Cmake build system replaced GIMP automake framework
      • 64-bit GTK1 GUI library, extensive GUI sample code
      • …
    • CinePaint Operating Systems
      • CinePaint for Linux
      • CinePaint for Windows, uses libunistd for Linux POSIX API, builds natively in Microsoft Visual Studio, not with mingw gcc
      • CinePaint for macOS, GTK1 64-bit Cocoa port in development to replace obsolete 32-bit Carbon port
      • CinePaint for FreeBSD, untried, should work
      • CinePaint for Android, port of GTK1 Android untested
      • CinePaint for iOS, no work yet
    • CinePaint Future
      • SoundSweep audio editor contributed by Pixar, Pro Tools alternative
      • Live chat with desktop sharing, collaboration, i18n, help system
      • Storyboards, Cartoons, Toon Boom and Storyboard Pro alternative
      • Comics with Generative AI, Clip Studio Paint Pro alternative
      • Slide shows, PowerPoint alternative
      • GUI mock-ups, Invision and Figma alternative
      • Render 3D models as objects in 2D layers
      • Game engine with SOUTH PARK style animation, Flash alternative
      • Manage projects, Bill of Materials, scheduling and costing
      • Online marketplace for hiring photographers and artists
    • CinePaint Project Next Steps
      • Cinepaint.org website overhaul
      • CinePaint book: CinePaint Users Guide in first draft
      • Interactive localization, about 20 languages that existed before, but are now somewhat broken.
      • CinePaint users gallery
        • Show off what people have done
      • Kickstarter campaign
        • Sponsorship support
    • Main reason to present is if people have suggestions of how it could be done better. People think it was “gone”, trying to find best ways to bring it back. Mission has changed, it was used for dust busting in the past but that’s gone.
    • JF: what about comparison with Krita? Robin: the sequence based support makes it quite difference. I am asked whether you could merge back into GIMP? These projects are not very collaborative. The film industry initially paid for “Film Gimp”, but this was abandoned by the GIMP community, which disliked the effort. On the Krita side, I don’t necessarily pay that much attention to the other open source projects, more to PhotoShop. In the past would donate to GIMP plugins, but GIMP wouldn’t accept a plugin contribution. It’s unfortunate that even in free software, there’s egos, competitiveness. I don’t see CinePaint as a profit project.
    • Question to the team: is this a good idea? Do you want to see CinePaint come back? Do people still remember it? Deke: I worked at R&H and used CinePaint: a lot of work isn’t done the same way, paint is done with 3D, OCIO, so anything that works outside of that, Substance Painter was an issue until they added OCIO. At DD we compile all our own software, we didn’t get a request for it. Kimball: lack of OCIO is a big deal in the industry. People’s way of working has changed a lot since CinePaint was predominant. Not sure how to bridge that gap? Deke: everyone is talking about generative AI? Robin: may happen in a year or so, looking at open source. But depends on funding a lot, since I’m doing everything myself, makes everything quite slow. Carol: used Cinepaint in college, but haven’t used it professionally. If you want to give it new life, find a niche it does that everything else doesn’t do, have to give people a reason to use the tool instead of something else. Pipeline integration is often the barrier to entry, as well as OpenEXR and OCIO integration. Some interesting things to do: meaningful support for HDR in a way that interacts with the OS (Windows, macOS, hard to do on Linux). Make paint tools work in the context of HDR, happy to talk to you offline as to what the current limitations of tools are. For instance on a macOS laptop, can view HDR images to some degree, making the application use with that display, and make it possible to control it, don’t want it to do something you don’t know what it’s doing.

Notes

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