Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - September 4, 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 - OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

Alexander Forsythe - rawtoaces Representative
Daniel Greenstein - OpenImageIO Representative
Erik Strauss - Open Review Initiative Representative
Gary Oberbrunner - OpenFX Representative
Jean-Christophe Morin - Rez Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Scott Wilson - ASWF Language Interop Project Representative
Stephen Mackenzie - Rez Representative

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

JT Nelson - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Youngkown Lim - Samsung
Lee Kerley - Apple
Josh Bainbridge - Framestore
Joe Bryant - O3DE
Victor Lu
Lorna Dumba - Framestore
Michael Min - Adobe
Rob Rowe - CinePaint

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Agenda

General Updates
- OpenQMC #434
- Update on Atlassian Cloud Migration #755
- Dev Days 2024 #662
- Project Leads Office Hours #760
- Change to public calendar for Academy Software Foundation #782
OpenAPV #803
Zero Trust Working Group #621

Notes

Dev Days 2024 - Carol
- Please share the [blog post with your networks / companies / projects even if you don’t participate.
- Office Hours start on Monday, once a week every week until Dev Days. Each has a team:
  - Session One – September 9 at 4:00 pm PT: Picking a project, CLAs, and general participation questions. Meeting Link. Session Two – September 16 at 10:00 am PT: Picking an issue and GitHub related questions. Meeting Link. Session Three – September 23 at 4:00 pm PT: CMake and build environments. Meeting Link.
- If you want to support office hours / participate, that would be more than welcome.
Office Hours Update
- Brain Dump from Cary on security work done on OpenEXR
- Call for action: implement signed releases and signed tags for every project
- Let’s have all projects work through small chunks, and iterate through the requirements.
- All leads were invited, but anyone can join
- Meeting Link
- Recording
- Matthew Low (chat): Would it be possible to reschedule Project Leads Office Hours to a time that doesn’t conflict with existing ASWF meetings? The current schedule conflicts w/ the USD Working Group
LFX Voting - Yarille
- Two votes went out via LFX voting, if you didn’t get an email with the call for vote, it goes directly to voting members. Would be great to close out these two votes.
- John: we got positive feedback from the process.
- Kimball: yes, was easy to login and click vote
Update on OpenQMC
- John / Framestore: talked to Eric E at SIGGRAPH, got a lot of feedback, should be able to come back to TAC at next meeting.
- John M: yes should be able to cover in next TAC meeting
- Eric E: may take a bit longer to get feedback from NVIDIA
OpenAPV Project Proposal - Youngkon Lim
- Slide Deck
- Main reason behind joining ASWF activities
- APV - Advanced Professional Video Codec
- Motivation
  - Improvement of smartphone cameras
    - multiple lenses, 100x zoom, 200M pixel, RAW formats
  - Increasing demands on beyond consumer quality video with smartphones
    - Smartphones are much easier to carry and convenient to set up
    - Content creators targeting SNS platform uses smartphone
    - Cloud based post production tools are getting popular
  - Conventional video codecs such as AVC, HEVC, VVC, AV1 are not suitable for professional use as they have been designed for lossy compression of video for mass distribution
  - Professional Video Codec
    - main purpose: capturing video for post production (multiple rounds of various types of editing)
    - coding tools: intra frame coding only
    - target quality: visually lossless
    - target bitrate: 200 mbps - 2gbps
  - Conventional Video Codec
    - Encoding video for mass distribution
    - Coding tools: Intra and Inter frame coding
    - Target quality: lossy
    - Target Bitrate: 1mbps - 50mbps
- Strategy
  - Industry needs a free public open professional video codec
    - No professional video codecs available as open standard, open source SW, royalty free
      - APV at intersection of:
        
        Royalty Free
        
        Public Standard
        
        Open Source: easily accessible / implementable
- APV - Advanced Professional Video
  - Professional video codec designed for resource constrained devices
    - Very low complexity (less than JPEG)
    - SW implementation on encoders on smartphones and desktop/laptop/cloud computers
  - High throughput, high fidelity oriented
    - Intra-only coding for supporting easy editing
    - tile structure coding for parallel processing
    - entropy coding for high-birtate up to several gbps
    - no loop/post filter to increase pixel precision
  - Better compression efficiency than other professional video codec
    - around 20% better than well-known professional video codec for 2K, 4K video (4:2:2)
- OpenAPV
  - Advanced Professional Video Codec has been developed with the technologies more than 20 year old only to be royalty (risk) free
  - Specification of APV will be published as IETF RFCs for free public access
    - Advanced Professional Video
    - RTP payload format for APV
  - OpenAPV project to develop / distribution open source SW of APV
    - Preferred license is BSD 3-clause (no concerns about the patents)
    - Samsung is ready to contribute the complete encoder / decoder implementation to kick start the process
- EVS Essential Video Codec
  - Royalty (risk) free video codec for general contents distribution
    - Baseline profile is built with more than 20 year old technologies
    - Standardized as ISO/IEC 23094-1 (MPEG-5 Part 1)
  - Compression efficiency of baseline profile is comparable to HEVC and encoding profile…
- Questions
  - Eric R: how would you compare to JPEG-2000, and have you had dialogue with Alliance for Open Media who developers AV1.
    - Don’t have direct comparison against J2K, but can ask engineers
    - Samsung is member of AOM, had considered AOM venue for this codec, but it was complicated. The codec is very simple compared to AV1, so OK to developer by ourselves.
  - Larry: a very exciting project, would like to touch on licensing issue. Based on my experience, a lot of people would be more comfortable with Apache 2, I appreciate that you are trying to make it low risk by only using 20 year old technologies to mitigate patent issues. But Apache 2 can be helpful since the project won’t be static, there will be contributions, Apache gives more insurance that additions to project don’t add patent encumbrance. I understand the difficulty of releasing under Apache 2, but in order to consume the resulting code, Apache 2 gives more guarantees in the future. Extra safety from Apache 2 may be worth it in the future. Great presentation.
    - We are already comparing Apache 2 vs BSD internally, also if ASWF prefers Apache 2, that’s a factor. We feel that BSD 3-Clause may be more open, but Apache 2 may be better for future contributions.
  - Kimball: remember to consider that we often need tiled capabilities so we don’t have to decode the whole frame, is that possible? Also we typically need higher bit depth.
    - We definitely consider that point, we have tiled support, each tile can be individually encoded / decoded.
    - You can look at IETF draft and see the supported profiles, including 10 and 12 bit.
  - Eric R: support for Alpha channels?
    - Yes, support for additional channels
  - Eric R: ability to store 4:4:4?
    - Yes, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4
  - Carol: we talked a bit about ASWF vs AOM, what do you expect from ASWF, why is it important for you to join ASWF for this project? Visibility / adoption from our members?
    - AOM is super busy for AV2 which is more a distribution codec, so don’t want to divert their focus. Also for this type of codec, more aligned with ASWF requirements (professional grade codecs). So for APV we feel it aligns more with ASWF.
    - Carol: that makes sense. When we accept new projects in sandbox mode, I like to ask what the contributing company expects to get out of it. Commitment to making it open is awesome. People from our community should have some interest.
    - We’ve looked at other projects in ASWF and saw synergies with other projects.
  - JF: where do you see initial resources commitment coming from?
    - This may not require initial development, but we may want to see this integrated in multiple projects, optimization, integration in apps. We have some pre-discussions with several companies interested in joining the activity, so there could be people outside ASWF interested in joining the work. ORI could be interested in using the codec. So we can have some contributions this way. And Samsung will dedicate some people to support the activity. We expect engineers to join.
  - Larry: is the codec GPU friendly?
    - Not tested yet, codec targets resource constrained environments but we can test.
    - We support HDR
- John: TAC will take some time to digest the proposal and take a vote offline. We will work to “tee this up”.
Don’t think we have anyone from Zero Trust WG on the call, so we will reschedule.