Academy Software Foundation - Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - August 21, 2024

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

Alexander Forsythe - RAW to ACES Utility Representative
Alexander Schwank - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Erik Strauss - Open Review Initiative Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Steven Mackenzie - Rez Representative
Scott Wilson - Language Interop Working Group
Gary Oberbrunner - OpenFX
Jean-Christophe Morin - Rez Representative

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation
Andrew Grimberg, LF Release Engineering

Other Attendees

JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Youngkown Lim - Samsung
Rob Rowe - Cinepaint
Deke Kincaid - Digital Domain
Lee Kerley - Apple
Lorna Dumba - Framestore
David Feltel - Foundry / OpenAssetIO
Robert Fanner - Foundry / OpenAssetIO

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Agenda

General Updates
- Update on Atlassian Cloud Migration #755
- Dev Days 2024 #662
- Schedule office hours for projects to complete OpenSSF Best Practices badge requirements #760
- Change to public calendar for Academy Software Foundation #782
- Reminder on project policies #806
Open Review Initiative Annual Project Review #809 436
- Slide Deck
OpenAssetIO Annual Project Review #516
Evolving our working groups program #798

Notes

Reminder on project policies #806
- Make sure you bring up the antitrust policy notice at beginning of meetings.
- Also code of conduct, just a friendly reminder (no specific issues)
Change to public calendar for Academy Software Foundation #782
- Let us know if you want to keep the groups.io calendars otherwise they are going after Sept 1st
Schedule office hours for projects to complete OpenSSF Best Practices badge requirements [#760]
- Next week with Cary
- For project leads working towards their badging requirements
Dev Days 2024 #662
- Carol: if you are signed up, you should have gotten email
- We like to get feedback from projects
- More things forthcoming, materials for member companies
- Registration is open, encourage people to register
- Will be doing more social media communications / blog post
- Only a month out!
Update on Atlassian Cloud Migration #755
- Andy: did a test migration without issues
- ASWF Confluence is a smaller instance, we’ve migrated larger ones which have went well
- LF Identity is not going to be usable with Atlassian Cloud, will need to create an Atlassian ID. Your email address will be your ID. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to use with other Atlassian Cloud sites LF is migrating too.
- Expecting to migrate this Friday. Outage window around 30 minutes
Evolving our working groups program #798
- John: several groups operating outside the original spirit
- How to adjust for this, create new WG types
- On the list for TAC members to read, will have a more formal group discussion in a future meeting
OpenAssetIO Annual Project Review #516
- Slide Deck
- Robert Fanner, David Feltell
- Interoperability standard for the tools and content management systems used in media production
- Marrying DCCs to assets management systems
- Introducing a standard and library we can introduce some commonality
- Incubation Project review criteria
  - No changes since 2023 review
  - Focus on dogfooding via DCC integrations and locking in a v1 API
- Contributions
  - 701 commits across 8 repos
    - 314 in OpenAssetIO repo / 377 in other repos
  - 272 GitHub issues closed vs 243 issues opened
  - Core contributors down frmo 3 to 1 currently
- Organizations contribution and/or using in production
  - Foundary
  - MovieLabs
  - ynput
  - OTIO
  - ORI
  - ftrack
  - Brazen Animation
- Key Achievements in the past year
  - OpenAssetIO v1.0 beta
    - C++ manager plugins (previously Python only)
    - Hybrid C++ & Python Manager plugins
    - Utilities to convert URL-to-path and path-to-URL
    - Token substitution for assets made of file sequences
    - Hoping to lock down API over next quarter
  - OpenAssetIO MediaCreation (alpha)
    - Building common ontology of traits for VFX industry
    - Future: can be based on Movielabs Ontology for VFX workflows
  - New Industry Integrations
    - Nuke
    - Katana
    - ftrack
  - Pending…
    - UI delegation loosely couples DCCs and Asset Systems
    - Further improvements to Nuke & Katana integrations
  - OpenAssetIO in Nuke
    - Asset references with Traits automatically ingested into Nuke
    - UI delegation preview
      - Connect UI from custom or commercial asset managers over core OpenAssetIO API
  - OpenAsssetIO in Katana
    - Work in Progress
      - Extends Katana Asset API
      - Supports USD AR2
      - Will be open sourced
      - USD asset by reference, not file path
- Areas we could use help on
  - Significant strides made on proving out in-anger DCC integration, and very close to v1.0.0 release now
    - Encouraging prototyping, feedback and real-world adoption
      - More DCC vendors, asset management vendors & studios wanted
      - Overall value proposition ramps up significantly as adoption goes up
    - Documentation
      - Already at a high standard, though users are keen on more examples and simple starting points
      - Help with resource on checking/writing documentation & example code would be very welcome
    - Trait Specifications
      - MovieLabs Ontology…
- TAC Open Discussion
  - JF: request to remain at Incubation? Robert: currently we don’t necessarily have adoption or resources. We prefer to focus on integrations to help drive adoption, help with examples, starting points.
  - John: at sandbox right? Looking for TAC guidance: looking at projects in sandbox stage to move out in a year’s stage as natural progression. Carol: we’d have to take a look at sandbox projects, the other one is ORI. It does feel like it’s the right thing, it’s a new project without a lot of adoption yet. JF: this is a from scratch project, not an existing one being onboarded. Carol: would have no issue with renewing in sandbox stage.
  - John: it feels like the adoption is the only blocker at this point, if that’s an area where we can help with, let us know. Everything else looks like great progress.
  - Larry: in the high level schematic, is there a “marketing” task to help drive adoption and we could help with? Are people who need to follow this helping to bootstrap? Robert: we’ve been working on getting things “ship shap”, Tom Cowland had been a fantastic champion early on, he is somewhat less involved now, so we need to ramp up the “evangelism”.
  - John: do we have quorum? JF: I don’t believe so. John: we will take vote offline to renew at sandbox stage.
Samsung becoming ASWF member, Youngwon Lim representing
- We are happy to be here, waiting for some internal things to be sorted out and will be able to contribute more
Open Review Initiative Annual Project Review #809 436
- Slide Deck
- Erik Strauss presenting
- Proposed last year to stay in Sandbox mode, were focussed on figuring out overarching strategy for the initiative as opposed to individual projects
- Collection of existing “adoption visibility challenges”, unknowns for us
- Up for consideration is whether it’s time for ORI to move from Sandbox to Incubation, will discuss the individual projects and the overarching strategy
- Open Review Initiative
  - An umbrella project containing multiple review oriented project repositories. As of 8/24 two content review applications, an encoding test suite, and a shared infrastructure repo for future collaboration.
- Incubation Project review criteria
  - List of requirements
  - xStudio folks in the UK, some are on vacation
  - Have achieved and maintained an OpenSFF Best Practices Badge at the passing level
  - Have had a successful license scan…
- Contributions to OpenRV
  - 53 Contributors
  - 148 commits
  - 54 issues
  - 195 PRs
  - 46 forks
  - 136 stars
  - Significant installed based, community is very healthy
- Contributions to xStudio
  - 29 contributors
  - 58 commits
  - 50 issues
  - 7 PRs
  - 24 forks
  - 101 stars
  - DNeg iterating faster internally than rate at which it is pushed to public repo
  - Official 1.0 to be released end of September / early October, new UI, timeline integration
- Contributions to Encoding Guidelines
  - 5 contributors
  - 62 commits
  - 11 issues
  - 73 PRs
  - 3 forks
  - 13 stars
  - Small team but has a lot of traction, mostly lead by Sam Richards
  - A solid foundation for collaboration
- Key Achievements in the past year for ORI
  - 2024 Deliverables
    - Public roadmaps using GitHub Kanban boards
    - Proposal and demo of OTIO based Synchronization protocol enabling playback sync between arbitrary players
    - First contribution to the Shared Platform Repository
      - Shared Plugin API
        
        To drive more sharing and collab between studios and help lower the barrier to entry for participation
        
        Example Color corrector plugin working across SPI’s Itview and OpenRV
        
        Should be straightforward to make it work in xStudio as well
        
        Could be supported by any other players, hoping to build a community around this interoperability and code sharing
- Key Achievements in the past year for OpeNRV
  - RV is now built on a common foundation shared with the open-source project, Open RV. This will benefit both Open RV and RV users, as all the innovations of the open-source community will be accessible in both OpenRV and Autodesk RV
    - As an example, a member of the community recently updated FFmpeg to the newest version. Contribution accepted in Open RV and is now also available in Autodesk RV
  - Introduction of a VideoOutputAPI allowing for the development of VideoOutput plugins and release of three new VideoOutput Plugins: SDI for BMD, SDI for AJA and NDI
  - Integration with Flow Production Tracking
- Key Achievements in the past year for xStudio
  - UI redesign and UI code rewrite
    - Focus on flexibility and configurability
    - NLE timeline interface
  - Windows port with minimal dependencies (yes this took longer than it should have)
    - Seeing people on Slack able to build on Windows
- Key achievements in the past year for Encoding
  - Fleshed out an editorial page with a number of community contributions
  - Added pages for MJPEG, HEVC, AV1, VP9 and VP8 encoding
  - HDR Encoding Guide
  - Created a white paper to encourage industry usage of VP8, VP9 and AV1 rather than HEVC
    - Some licensing ambiguities around AV1
    - Trying to find right balance and where to point people to
- Areas the preojct could use help on
  - Users are still desperate for downloadable binaries
    - The lack of a “try before you buy” for non-technical consumers is hampering adoption of both players
    - The Windows build on xStudio is down to 3 dependencies, but it’s still not something an artist can access and evangelize within a studio
  - Licensing rights to 3rd party Codecs continue to be the barrier to binary distributions
    - We’ve approached the license holders for the relevant codecs (Apple BMD, ViaLA, etc)
      - Each either wants a direct relationship with their licensees and/or is unwilling to give us terms as an OSS project that would enable us to build and distribute their libraries without royalty obligations.
      - There are mechanisms with “minimal threshold for distribution” (up to 100K units without encumbrance), but we would need some kind of accounting system, and don’t feel that’s the right approach
      - Larry: are some interested in royalties for the authoring, less incumbrance just for playback? Erik: yes, less requirements on decoding, but we want to drive studios towards encoding standards.
- TAC Open Discussion
  - Erik: we’ve been in sandbox for 24 months, we should be at good point to move to incubation. Does the TAC agree?
  - Gordon: very impressive progress, the source is out there, the plugin system is a great achievement. Tackling problems like codec standardization is important to solve. I have a vested interest in making this work, but impressed by the progress. Missed the criteria recap, but seems to be doing quite well and would support move into incubation.
  - Larry: my thoughts echo this, made incredible progress, and there are clearly people using the components in production, on a solid footing, and wanted to say that SIGGRAPH showing was great. You may have undersold how good the presentations were, and the impressive demos, showed a lot of momentum. This is a real project at this point!
  - John: some work on the badge requirements, not “impossible” work, that needs to come together, but it’s not that hard, mostly documentation. Erik: will reach back out to John once the Dneg folks are back from vacation.