Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - November 13, 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

LF Staff

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

Other Attendees

Joshua Minor, OTIO
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Sergio Rojas
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Andrew Pearce
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks

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Agenda

General Updates
- OpenQMC #434
- Project Leads Office Hours #760
OpenTimelineIO Annual Review #477
Evolving our working groups program #798

Minutes

General Updates
- OpenQMC #434
- Project Leads Office Hours [#760]
  - Next one is next week
- Threat analysis
  - Budget approved for MaterialX and OpenEXR
  - Once completed, bring back results to the TAC, which can determine if it’s worth continuing to invest in
OpenTimelineIO Annual Review #477
- Slide Deck
- Eric Reineke
- ASWF Project Review 2024
- Outline
  - 2024 Themes
  - 2024 Ecosystem Highlights
  - 2025 Areas of Focus
  - Project Lifecycle in ASWF
- 2024 Focus
  - (From our 2023 project update)
  - Adapter Break-Out
    - Beta 17 - Shipped in June
    - App-specific Python adapters removed from core codebase into separate repos
    - When you do a pip install of OTIO, just get core support with separate OTIO plugins package
    - All adapters can live in community supported space
    - Core team can focus on OTIO itself, adapters delegated to people in the community that better understand this
    - Several of these adapters still maintained by core OTIO members (CMX, AAF), so definitely not abandoned
  - Support Vendor Adoption
    - Nuke Studio Round-Tripe Support
      - Full export from Nuke Studio 15.1 and reimport without loss
      - Foundry has started sharing ideas on OTIO enhancements, strong partnership. Thank you Foundry for contributions
    - Avid preview of OTIO in Media Composer in Feb / Mar 2024
      - Participating in TSC meetings
      - Working behind the scenes
    - Adobe Premiere Pro
      - A few weeks ago in the beta release, OTIO import / export
      - Big step forward
    - Avid, Adobe, BMD, Foundry participate in community, provide feedback
      - Happy with how relationships are going
  - Documentation Refresh
    - Contributors led by Jeff Hodges (Adobe/Frame.IO) working on scrub of existing docs to refresh it.
    - Target different audiences: how do we talk about OTIO with post production supes, assistant editors, studio post execs. These are audiences that haven’t been targeted yet, we’ve mostly spoken to developers / pipeline TD
    - Putting together a landing site rather than going straight to GitHub page
    - WIP screenshots of the landing site
      - Making it look like an NLE in the web browser, each clip in pseudo timeline is a page
      - Various sections mocked up
      - A pane is Raven, OTIO viewer nested in web page
      - File format support matrix
    - High demand schema enhancements
      - Source Media Stream/Channel selection
        
        Not a lot of progress
      - Progress toward color effects
        
        Based on work from Foundry
        
        Fleshed out proposal, got feedback from OCIO / Doug Walker
      - Smaller enhancements
        
        Comments for markers
        
        Effect enabled field
      - Spatial Transform Effects
        
        Proposal from Foundry
- 2024 Ecosystem Highlights
  - Participated in NAB 2024
- Dev Days 2024
  - 10 PR submit
  - 7 Merged
  - Most attention on Raven - the OTIO viewer app
  - Honorable Mention: two fixes for documentation and build modernization
  - One PR waiting for CLA from ILM
- Contribution to Raven to accept timeline from URL
  - Can go directly from Shotgrid, timeline shows up in browser without installing any software
  - Want to take advantage in documentation so we can inline interactive / viewable timeline so you can see OTIO concepts visualized
  - Raven is part of “associated projects”
- 2024 New Subprojects
  - Toucan: Software OTIO Renderer by Darby Johnston, uses OTIO, EXR…
    - Here’s an OTIO file, make me a movie file / image sequence
    - Darby Johnston is long time OTIO contributor
    - Also supports OpenFX plugins, loads with OIIO, OCIO, a great example of ASWF projects coming together in one place
    - As OTIO develops color support, we need to express settings so they can be communicate, but also make sure we don’t reproduce work that other projects have already done.
  - OpenTimelineIO-AVFoundation
    - Apple AVFoundation Framework Integration by Anton Marini
    - OTIO has had Swift bindings around OTIO core data structures for a while
      - Can also build on Windows / Linux
    - Built on top of these bindings, provides support on Apple platform
    - OTIO composition can be loaded and played back using Apple native players / APIs, write out as movie files, manipulate compositions and export as OTIO timeline
    - Layering media playback elements so devs can deliver “first class” applications on Apple platforms but centered around OTIO
    - A very nice contribution showing how quickly something rich can be put together
- 2025 Focus
  - Meet requirements for ASWF Adoption
  - Deliver Major Schema Enhancements
    - Basic Color Pipeline Modeling (CDL, LUT Reference, colorspaces)
    - Spatial Transforms (lightweight compositions in timeline)
    - Input/Output Stream and Channel Mapping
  - Create documentation for people other than engineers and TDs
  - Being discussing a future where EDL/ALE are no longer needed
- ASWF Project Lifecycle
  - Incubation -> Adopted
    - Currently at 90% passing badge (up from 82% last year)
    - May not take into consideration some of the TAC exceptions
    - Getting close, work from Cary on EXR will help
    - Should get over the bar this year
- A Sentimental Note
  - Document details
    - Owner: Stephan Steinbach
    - Modified Jul 27, 2015
    - Created Mar 3, 2014
  - So it’s been 10 years, and we now see this in Premiere, Media Composer…
  - Nice to look back 10 years on
  - Credit ASWF to help create neutral collaboration space, it’s been key to being to have the right people working together, GitHub, Slack
- JF / Larry: Toucan is great integration test. Larry: if a project breaks compatibility, that could be a big problem. We should have a CI against top of tree for all those projects. Eric R: can have a sample composition that exercise everything, and do a visual diff. Joshua: a test app could be called “Canary”! Larry (chat): People interested in the Canary project, let’s meet to talk about it in the CI working group. I think we can cobble together something in short order.
- Eric R: name inspired by OIIO name. Larry: Jeremy Selan named OCIO, second project named this way!
- David: is the Toucan project ready for a blog post / announcement? Eric: at some point we own this as a reference renderer, if we escalate it to a certain point, and mismatch between Toucan and a commercial app, we’ve shied away from this. So not sure we want to go “big” on an announcement? Joshua: we can ask Darby if he’s ready for that. We’re starting on that road, Darby has also made tlRender which is GPU accelerated, it’s already in cineSync Play, OpenRV can also render OTIO. But we’re not announcing it as the “reference”.
- Carol: you’ve moved your adapters into their own repos, thinking about other apps in OCIO ecosystem like our CLI apps, ocio view. How do you handle that from a TSC perspective, are there separate maintainers? Joshua: work on migrating the commercial adapters, first step of separating took way longer than we expected. Next step of who is maintaining them, some clear / obvious choices for those under active development like AAF adapter (someone from Avid, Animal Logic). Rest is based on “who shows up”, some are file formats that aren’t owned by anyone like CMX EDL. We may drop some over time. Eric: some federated repos are not maintained at this moment which is a bit problematic. No official process around who maintains those.
- Nick (chat): OTIO has versioned schemas, including an upgrade and downgrade too
- Plugin Template Repo
- CPP example
- Will vote on renewal in LFX voting
Evolving our working groups program #798
- John: Discussion a few weeks ago, where are the action items?
- Larry: was starting to seem too complicated, OK to have WGs without a time horizon, but still things we want to elevate to project status
- Idea of having separate SIGs and WGs was too complicated, didn’t want to have big debates on the boundary between the two
- John: action would be about the CI WG and Interop as a project
- Larry: loosen up the definition of WG in the charter. D&I is not just a WG of people talking, they are doing work representing the foundation, they have budget to spend, they don’t have an end date. Very different with WGs with an end date / task. So WGs are a “scale”
- John: we can take this offline, will look at the language. Larry: may be minor edit.
- Alexander Schwank: what about USD? John: may stay as WG, but some subprojects may have IP they are developing? Larry: is there a threshold of how much code / artifacts a WG can create? Interop group may work on some code for a while, but eventually deliver code to projects. Can we keep the option of staying as a WG? John: more a question for downstream consumers, are we depending on this code in a way that it needs to be from a project, or does it not matter? For Rust WG, they had gotten to the point they would need to develop tools to build bindings, but they wanted to align IP of bindings to upstream project. Question is what label you want to give it.
- Scott: Interop WG has 3 outputs: code belongs to the projects, if a project doesn’t want to take ownership of the code, then maybe we can be the unofficial bindings for the project. Also tools that support the first set of bindings. And any kind of documentation. Most devs know how to write Python bindings, but can document how to write Python bindings for C++. Also dos and don’ts of writing Swift bindings, Rust bindings.
- John: will work on closing this one out.
- Nick: interested in the USD WG and our many sub WGs, some are long term, some are short term. Am I understanding that USD WG would lack a vote in this rote, but some some WGs could be promoted to incubation project which could eventually be promoted to adopted projects with voting rights? Seems to “invert the hierarchy”. Larry: is this an argument to make the USD WG to make it an incubation project? Other projects have multiple repos run by the same TSC. OpenEXR does that with iMath, OCIO. I suspect this will be expanding. So if USD WG fits that mold? Multiple projects run by a same TSC? Nick: that sounds like a possible path to a resolution, more active participation by us in this body, which would be appreciated by myself and Alex. John: WG is an earlier collaboration, earlier than sandbox. “We know something should exist, but need to get people to the same table”. USD WG could take that same path, could also take a path that separate parts could become project. There are a lot of different paths, now that USD WG is a real thing with deliverables and assets, now it may become a full project. Nick: was trying to map what we have against the structure we are proposing. Larry: if you want to elevate yourself to a project, you may need a mission statement separate from OpenUSD? Nick: want to be focussed on M&E and interests of this group, distinguished from USD which has broader focus. This is an important venue for a community that should have an equal voice in an equal forum instead of “a” voice in a much larger forum. That’s how I distinguish it in my mind.
- David: would USD WG have a repo of artifacts specific to M&E industry, under custody of the WG / project? Nick: John helped us set that up, have a hierarchy of repos under a GitHub org. John: there are some repos under there, including the assets which is probably the most used. Nick: the assets looks the most like a project of its own, work that they engage with Metaverse Standard and Khronos projects. Seems to have joined group of what looks like projects rather than WGs. John: Camera WG may also have some code deliverables? Overall goal is to have a voice for this community in the TAC, and with different work streams, what makes long term sense to organize them.
- Carol: when talking about who gets a vote, D&I group should get a vote. An additional factor to think about.
TAC Vice Chair
- Larry looking for a vice chair for next year
- Larry: is there a deadline for this? John: would be good to get closure on next TAC meeting in 4 weeks.
- David: Thank you Kimball for having been TAC Chair for many year, and thank you Larry for vice chair and now leading. Want to welcome anyone who wants to step up to vice chair. Looking forward to continue working with Larry!