AWSF TAC Meeting - August 23, 2023

Voting member attendance

Premier member Representatives

Project Representatives

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

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Other Attendees

Yarille Kilborn, Linux Foundation
Emily Olin, Linux Foundation
Erik Strauss, Open Review Initiative
Stephen Mackenzie, NVIDIA
Sean McDuffee, Intel
Danny Greenstein
Nick Porcino, Pixar
Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks
Lee Kerly, Imageworks
Jeff Hodges, Frame.io

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Agenda

Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
Annual Review - Open Review Initiative #436

Notes

Project Proposal - OpenQMC
- If we don’t have Quorum, may not be able to vote on that.
- Larry: we’ve not had follow up since last time we met and said there was homework to do, unless someone has something interesting to report?
- Eric: I believe that’s correct.
- JF: were most of the concerns around IP? Larry: yes, those were the concerns that made everyone say we need to resolve this before we decide to vote on the other merits. JF: should LF legal be engaged on this? Yarille: we could run it by them. Larry: we are waiting for a member company who may hold some of this IP to provide some guidance.
- Erik: Does OpenQMC people know there is an action item? Eric: have action item to meet with John Mertic and speak internally at NVIDIA, should be able to sort it out but may take a couple of weeks.
- Yarille: we can push to next meeting for this.
Virtual Town Hall recordings (Emily)
- I am working on getting all the virtual town hall recordings posted, and they should be up by Friday
Erik: meeting schedule vs AMPAS Sci-Tech Awards
- Larry: it is Sci-Tech investigation season and several TAC members may have conflicting schedule requirements.
Dev Days Plug
- Larry: coming up in October, want to make sure people know about it, make sure if people in your organization wish to participate… Having Good First Issues markers in GitHub helps. Does everyone know what we are talking about.
- Matthew: looking forward to it!
- JF: do you already have commitments? Larry: that’s a good question! Several companies have expressed interest, but not necessarily hard commitments. Even if only a few companies participate, that will be a good learning experience. But sometimes getting all the ducks in a row can take time, so don’t wait until the last minute to get a CLA in place for instance.
- Carol: have time set aside on Friday to work on this, start conversations, how are we going to get people signed up, leverage LF infrastructure. Figure out logistical aspects. If anyone is interested in helping to wrangle, feel free to reach out. If you have filled out company interest questionnaire, thank you for that, you will hear back shortly. Start planning on what people would be working on. Working with LF to put together a one page web site so people can see who is participating, and show what projects can pick to work on (not every project will participate). If you are a project leader and haven’t expressed interest yet, reach out to me or Larry.
- Larry: of course a project wouldn’t reject a PR coming out of this effort, but may not have people “on call” to help. Carol: want to have projects committed to the event to give a good first experience, and it may not be in scope for this event. Larry: in no way limited to member companies of ASWF, anybody can participate, students, non member companies… Carol: we have heard from member companies that there may be many developers who could be interested so that’s the target focus, but registration will be open.
- Gordon: sent you confirmation of Autodesk’s participation, Doug Walker is our point person. Carol: sounds great!
- Eric: no consolidated list of starter tasks? Carol: will leave this to the individual projects to do, since they are so different. Want folks to chose the project they are interested in, and each project will approach their Good First Issues differently. But they should have a plan for what they want participants to contribute.
- Matthew: Dreamworks is having an internal Hackaton that week, so will work well with this.
Open Review Initiative Annual Review
- Erik Strauss, TSC Chair for Open Review Initiative
- This will be a bit different than other reviews, we are an umbrella projects with 3 projects: 2 projects, and a set of reference implementations and test suites. Will talk on progress on all 3 projects and general direction, but not deep dive into each project.
- We are a sandbox initiative, so this is supposed to determine whether we are ready to move to incubation stage
- Bried description: An umbrella project containing multiple review oriented project repositories. As of 8/23 two content review applications, an encoding test suite, and a shared infrastructure repo for future collaboration.
- Contributions from DNEG, Autodesk, Disney Imagineering, Sony Imageworks
- Incubation criteria
  - Have completed and approved the Technical charter and agree to transfer relevant trademarks
  - …
  - Have achieved and maintained a CII Best Practices Badge at passing level
  - Have had a successful license scan with any critical issues resolved
  - …
- 3 separate projects
  - OpenRV
    - Good progress
  - X-Studio
    - Less progress (priorities)
  - Encoding Guidelines
- Contributions
  - Encoding guidelines
    - Mostly Sam Richards driving this work, but consistent contributions. Relatively small project, about the guidelines and enhancing the test suite, make sure color can be reproduced accurately. Sam is extending this into HDR and other codecs.
  - OpenRV
    - A much larger footprint of resources, and has all the infrastructure that Autodesk brings to the table. You can see that to the consistency of the contributions from original release to current time.
  - X-Studio
    - A bit spottier: original release, then intermittent contributions. They are an in-house developed tool, the dev team is focussed on internal application development and less outwardly focussed for now
- Key Achievements in the past year
  - 3 initial projects released in Jan 2023
    - Open RV
    - X-Studio
    - ORI Encoding Guidelines and test suite
  - X-Studio Windows port released Aug 2023
  - Shared open development happening on UI skinning, common plug-in API, synch schema for interop between systems
  - Finding our mojo. Leading up to SIGGRAPH the collective group has started to find its path forward as a collection of components that enable interop between arbitrary playback systems with OpenRV and X-Studio providing the platform for this shared development concept.
- Areas the project could use help on
  - Each project is at a different level of maturity based on its maintainer’s experience with OOS and available resourcing.
    - Less experienced teams need guidance and support
  - The barrier to entry for developer contributors is high
    - We’d like to lower the barrier by building a community based plugin ecosystem, but need advice on management, curation, and contribution strategies so it doesn’t turn into a sea of 1000 RV playlist manager Python plugins from every TD who has ever worked in M&E
  - Many open questions from both the community and internally require legal consultation
    - Binary distribution with non-compatible licenses
    - Input Codec licenses: (VP1/AV1/ProRes)
    - Output Licenses: DolbyVision/Atmos/Opus
- Assessment
  - ORI is still in a SANDBOX project
    - The project mission has recently gelled, and there is excitement behind it, but no real validation of success via shared code
    - User engagement is high (packed houses at all three BOF sessions) but developer engagement is low
    - The projects are complex and easy entry points for contribution are required
    - …
- Wave: a fair assessment of where you are at, it’s a complicated space. Erik: most focussed on engagement piece, want to get it into people’s hands, gap between what we can offer today, and the goal of accessibility. Had offline conversations with John during SIGGRAPH, is there a way we could distribute binaries with a compatible license with FFMPEG. Have some homework to do on our side to come up with something we think is the “least offensive” collection of FFMPEG compilation flags. Will follow up with John. Also onramping folks into these complicated code bases is not easy. Initially a lot of excitement from the studios of moving towards X-Studio, but since there are only a few developers, there are core features missing in X-Studio which are barriers to assumption. So need some basic functionality around timeline, tracks… For now development is driven by internal DNEG needs. So RV remains popular, but it is a complicated beast for even a senior developer to jump in. How do we get to a plugin ecosystem where people can contribute, learn about APIs by interfacing with them, even if they can’t immediately contribute to the core.
- JF: how did the Windows port for X Studio happened? Erik: that was driven by Epic, Michael had been working on this for a while, so happened outside of TSC, a contribution from Epic since they care about the Windows environment and care about X-Studio as a product. But it seems like a win, spontaneous contributions from companies is a positive. But suffers from the fact that it’s still source code and requires compilation. Potentially can grow the addressable market of users and contributors, but not a complete solution.
- Yarille: do we have quorum? JF: we have 13 of 25, so we do. So we are good to go to proceed (50% quorum).
- Erik: motion is to extend the status of Sandbox until the next review. Wave: I will make the motion to extend for year. Larry is seconding. All yeahs, no abstains, no nays, motion carries. Congratulation on another year!
- Eric: this is not an easy project to manage? Erik: yes, getting good at herding cats.
New membership at Intel
- Sean: will become board member and Laura will be alternate
- Erik Niemeyer is a senior optimization engineer at Intel and will represent on the TAC.
- Have been at Intel 23 years, worked in industy for 12 years, worked in creator industry, optimization on the x86 platform. Excited to contribute to develop new projects and help optimize existing ones. Spearheading effort at Intel to help optimize dependencies in the content creation space.
- Everyone: welcome!
Did we discuss doing a SIGGRAPH / Open Source Days retrospective as a TAC / Board activity (Carol)?
- Can talk to John / Emily
- Yarille: had a meeting today, gathering information, will bring to them.
- Wave: have been at two meetings at work doing a SIGGRAPH post mortem, if there’s a condensed version of what worked at Open Source Days, that would be very valuable. Yarille: yes, there will be a recap
- Carol: ways for us as projects to pass on feedback to the “power that be” would be good, discussed this at recent OCIO TSC. Mostly positive! Larry: anything you want to repeat here? Carol: general sentiment is that we had pretty good attendance at virtual town hall and BoF, but didn’t have a good overlap between the two. Had anticipated that people would tune in to virtual Town Hall before SIGGRAPH, but we asked people at the BoF who had watched the Virtual Town Hall and it was only 2 people. We hadn’t planned to do project update at the Bof, so we pulled a couple of ad-hoc slides, but ended up doing a mini project update at the BoF, since most attendees had no idea what we had previously presented. Larry: maybe if Virtual Town Halls were earlier it would have helped? Carol: don’t want to sound too negative, but most people didn’t know the Virtual Town Halls had happened. People expect the presentations to be at SIGGRAPH. So maybe giving it another year, will be interesting to see how it works.
- Wave: a lot of coworkers in LA went to Digipro, ASWF and SIGGRAPH, for the local people, it may have “snuck up” on them. There was a lot happening at the same time. Last year felt like a trial run, this year was full on SIGGRAPH craziness. Carol: overall it was good, having the recordings ahead of SIGGRAPH would have helped. Understood that this is not simple.
- Yarille: if you want to gather your feedback, will let John know to put this on an upcoming agenda so that we can discuss this, we did talk about this earlier, but will be good to capture all the points brought up. Carol: also we’re thinking early as possible what things are going to look at with SIGGRAPH in Denver next year.
Robin: is anything going on with X3DE (?), is it under this group?
- Larry: no, it wasn’t under this group
Robin: do we have a date for Dev Days?
- Carol: yes, 2nd week of October, 2 day period