Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - March 19, 2025

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 / Diversity & Inclusion Working Group 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

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

Other Attendees

Doug Walker - OCIO / Autodesk
Olga Avramenko - Sony Imageworks
Rob Rowe - Cinepaint
Lorna Dumba - Framestore
Sam Richars - OpenAPV
Jim Helman - MovieLabs / ZeroTrust WG
Mitch Prater - LAIKA
Alyssa Alexis - SIGGRAPH
Ben Schofield - CDSA
Deke Kincaid - Digital Domain
Erik Strauss - SohoNet / OpenAPV
Curneyt Ozdas - Autodesk

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days - May 2025 #966
- OpenAPV - defining 6 month milestones #877
- Identifying Long Term Working Groups #984
- SLP Volunteer Opportunities #992
Annual Review: OpenColorIO #474
Update on OpenLensIO #603

Notes

Dev Days - May 2025
- Larry: coming up on May 15th, projects should have their issues pre-selected and labelled, appropriate as one day project. Companies should identify junior devs who should participate. Anyone who wants to participate, start making contact with project and look at tasks. People who were successful were people who tried to build a few days earlier to “hit the ground running”.
- Olga: make sure to reach out if you have any questions.
SLP Volunteer Opportunities
- Carol: coming up soon, have volunteer opportunities launched as of yesterday, and learner registration is live on the web site. Forums are for the volunteers, lots of different types, Karen posted in #diversity channel. Many ways to volunteer such as application reviewers, mentor (1h per week for length of program). Ask to the TAC is that each member should find a way to volunteer in some capacity. Also ask to find at least 3 people in your company to volunteer in some capacity, we want to increase pool of mentors / guest mentors. We would like to have more mentors than we need so we can make best possible matches. And please share the SLP website and application on the social networks you participate in. If you have any questions reach out to me, Karen or #diversity channel
Identifying Long Term Working Groups
- Which ones should be projects / long term WGs
- CI should be a project
- D&I definitely a long term
- USD definitely a long term
- Zero Trust: a regular short term WG for now
- Larry: any reasons to prefer a Project to a WG for groups that produce an artifact? John: with code assets, a project could have a clear intellectual property policy. If the group wants to use a CLA, that’s also useful. If creating code, best to create it as a project so you can have a clear IP policy.
- Will have offline vote for D&I long term status (no quorum)
OpenAPV - defining 6 month milestones
- Presentation Slides
- Youngkwon: have prepared some slides, Sam and Erik Strauss were regular attendees
- 6 months Review for OpenAPV
- OpenAPV (sandbox project)
  - To develop a royalty-free, open-source, open standard video codec for professional video capturing and post-production
  - TSC Chairperson:
    - Youngkwon Lim, Samsung
  - TSC Members
    - Erik Strauss (voting)
    - Sam Richards (voting)
    - Kevin Wheatley (voting)
    - Eric Reinekey (non-voting)
- GitHub Activities
  - Fixes from extensive tests to improve stability and error resilience for commercial use of the software. All commits are from Samsung developers so far. ffmpeg integration is ready for commit soon.
- TSC activities
  - TSC has started to meet bi-weekly from 2024/12 at 17:00 CST on Thursdays
  - 6 months target agreed
    - Develop a comparative…
  - Comparative Analysis Plan (WIP)
    - Codecs to be reviewed
      - OpenAPV
      - ProRes: ffmpeg version and/or Mac hardware implementation
      - HTJ2K: OpenJPH
      - DNxHD: ffmpeg version
    - Datasets to be used: Netflix open contents
      - FHD, 4K
      - 24fps, 60fps
      - 4:2:2, 4:4:4, RGB
    - Metrics to be used: PSNR and/or VMAF
    - Axes of comparison
      - encoding/decoding time (Windows PC based)
      - file size vs quality
      - film grain presentation during encoding / decoding
      - durability: quality degradation after several rounds of encoding / decoding
- TAC Open Discussion
  - John: we will vote via LFX voting to extend to full year
  - Larry (chat): OpenEXR folks: we can probably learn from these comparison approaches for characterizing and evaluating existing and proposed compression methods for exr files
Update on OpenLensIO
- John: will work on re-scheduling
Annual Review: OpenColorIO
- Presentation Slides
- OpenColor - ASWF TAC Update - March 2025
- Carol / Doug will co-present
- A little over a year since last presentation to the TAC
- Contributor Update
  - Technical Steering Committee
  - Chair: Carol Payne (Apple) Chief Architect: Doug Walker (Autodesk)
  - TSC Members (11)
    - Remi Achard (DNEG)
    - Mark Boorer (ILM)
    - Mei Chu (Sony Imageworks)
    - …
  - TSC Emeritus (2)
    - Patrick Hodoul (Autodesk)
    - Carl Rand (Weta Digital)
  - Related to committers in GitHub repo
  - Leaderboard
- LFX Insights: I’m still a bit confused from yesterday’s status. Not sure how data is supposed to register in the system, and how to make good use of it.
  - Organization Dependency section seems broken, showing ASWF and Netflix as top contributors for last year, which is not the case
  - We’re still confused as to how to use the tool
  - Doug: it doesn’t seem to reflect the reality, over last year Autodesk / Epic / Weta / DNeg contributed most of the code. Individual contributors are OK, but not organizations.
  - Larry: not the only project that has this problem.
  - John: will work with LFX team
  - Carol: our concern is that people who have access to this page may see incorrect data. Doug and I know the data is incorrect, other do not.
  - Doug: we use the CLA system which is great, we know that we can map contributors to organizations via CLA, we want this to propagate to LFX Insights
- Release Cadence
  - Somewhat unusual this year
  - v2.3.1
  - v2.3.2
  - v2.4.0
  - v2.4.1
  - v2.4.2 : yesterday release, it has been a challenge, comes with library release, config release, full release of ACES 2.0
  - v2.5.0 for CY2026 VFX platform release later this year
- Development Highlights
  - OCIO 2.4
    - For VFX Platform 2025 in September 2024
    - Built-in ACES 2 Output Transforms
    - Updated configs for ACES 2.0
    - More LUT-free transforms
    - And many smaller enhancements
  - In-progress for a future release
    - NanoColor collaboration
    - Config merging: ability to merge OCIO configs into a single one, hearing a lot of requests for, working on for a future release
- ACES 2.0 Output Transforms
  - This work took a large share of our resources for last year
  - Very complex algorithm (much, much more than ACES 1)
    - New custom color appearance model
    - Advanced gamut mapping
  - OCIO is the first to do a non-LUT-based implementation
    - Runs as a shader on the GPU
  - Filled a vacuum for the industry as a robust, open source implementation
    - Supported the ACES team by validating, optimizing and productizing their developer releases
    - Even vendors who don’t use OCIO were waiting for OCIO to “go first”, taking research code from ACES project to something that could be shipped in a product
    - Can’t overstate the size and importance of this work, even though it’s in a “middle of the year” release. Making this a usable product within OCIO, it has been “wild” and we will have more learnings.
    - Documentation in release notes on optimizations and speedups, we would appreciate people taking this to their companies and trying it out and providing feedback. It will take a while to get adopted.
    - 2.4.1 release in December had a “preview” of ACES 2.0, 2.4.2 removes the “preview” label, we consider it finalized ACES 2 release
- ACES 2.0 Studio and CG Configs Release
  - Highlight: new ACES 2.0 Output Transforms
  - User facing artifacts - an unusual deliverable for an ASWF project
  - Lots of discussion about naming, user experience etc
    - Decisions show up directly in application menus
  - ACES 2 configs will be built into the OCIO 2.5 library
- OCIO Library Roadmap: roadmap.opencolorio.org
  - High level view of Now / Next / Later so industry stakeholders can have visibility
  - Want feedback as to how useful this is, what can you expect from OCIO next year
- Initiative Updates
  - ASWF Color Interop Forum
    - Goal: encourage color space interop across industry projects
    - Who: everyone who deals with color interop, even if not using OCIO
      - ACES, camera vendors, experts from VFX, animation, games, post
    - Why: color is hard enough without alignment - we aim to create a space to have conversation and tackle initiatives with broad industry impact
    - What: mainly documentation, implementation guides, recommendations. But sometimes supporting code in OCIO and other ASWF projects
    - Texture color space
    - OpenEXR Color Metadata
      - Current group initiative
      - …
    - This is new ground for the ASWF
      - Publishing recommendations instead of code
      - ASWF is not a formal standards group (eg SMPTE, ISO, IEC, ITU)
        
        Output of work may need to be put into a formal standards process
        
        Figure out what’s the right place, and how much “officialness” we need from this work
        
        Accelerating Open Standards development with Community Specifications
      - Have had some success
- NanoColor
  - Presentation at Open Source Days at SIGGRAPH
  - Initiative between OCIO, USD and MaterialX
  - Link to charter
  - Collaborate on the challenges of color management in the OpenUSD and MaterialX ecosystem
    - Code is being written, but focus is on documentation and test assets
    - Develop solutions that are technically sound and flexible while also adhering to the various requirements and constraints of each project
    - Deeply explore the implications of various color managed workflows
    - Easy to overlook requirements, need to trace pixel through entire system
  - Ensure smooth interop between projects
  - The group of OpenUSD, MaterialX and OCIO experts meets regularly and work continues
    - We think we have the right group of people
- Summary: project collaborations
  - Completed
    - OpenFX - Introduced OCIO support in OFX 1.5
  - In-Progress
    - OpenUSD: NanoColor collaboration
    - MaterialX: NanoColor collaboration
    - OpenEXR - Color Interop Forum project
    - ACES Output Transform working group
  - On our radar
    - OpenTimelineIO - thread started regarding color management
- Discussion
  - Carol: tried to keep it high level, if you want to stop by one of our meetings, you are welcome.
  - Looking for a bit of a breather after 2.4.2 release, but collaboration work is continuing. Library updates are important, but large amount of work goes into these collaborations, which may not result in actual code added to OCIO. This has been effective and betters the overall ecosystem. It’s not a much bigger project than “just” the library
  - John: should have LFX problem soon with org attribution
  - Larry: is there a plan to account for the fact that people don’t have “affiliations for life” and that association may be temporal at the time of the PR? John: LFX team will better answer that, we track through the work history, sometimes the issue is that when a profile is initially pulled in, it uses some LinkedIn data to help, which can throw things off. Will get LFX team to present, and see how we can all help in data cleansing process.
  - Doug: CLA would seem to be the reliable source of info? John: it is used as a data source.
  - David: with LFX, once we present a clear case that they can sink their teeth into, they do. So having them present here with their latest work will be good. Don’t hold back! ASWF is known to have comments and willingness to work with LFX.
  - David: a great update, thank you very much! This is a tremendous amount of work, and helping ACES 2.0 getting used in the ecosystem.
  - Carol: next Color Interop Forum meeting on Monday, will be discussing OpenEXR, want to be through with this since OpenEXR is used so widely. Monday Noon Pacific Time.
  - John: this will be vote #4 (no quorum)
  - Alyssa: is Monday’s meeting open to the public? Carol: yes, all meetings on calendar are open to the public, may need to update wording which says so.
  - Matthew: OCIO maintains its own Slack, which has a 90 day cap, which limits searchability. Carol: we’ve discussed in the past, I think we would be OK migrating, but last time we brought this up, would be influx of 100s of users into ASWF Slack, so need to be ready for that. There’s a lot of overlap, but not 100%. 90 day retention annoys us, but important discussion gets migrated into Confluence / GitHub, as a project we use Slack for conversations but not critical. Personally migration would be about ease of use, but there are pros and cons. And we may lose users who wouldn’t migrate, but would gain some from OCIO. It’s probably time to bring this back up with OCIO TSC.
  - Larry: Slack doesn’t offer a way to move a workspace from one org to another / redirect? Carol: I don’t know. John: we could research this and figure it out. Carol: would make life easier. We’re not opposed, it’s a historical artifact, it’s been “laziness” in last year. So we don’t have a stake in the ground either way. Matthew: about what’s best for community. Carol: but could hurt us as well to not be in core ASWF Slack.
  - Doug: Color Interop Forum is on the ASWF Slack! Carol: we wanted to make it clear that Color Interop Forum is an ASWF initiative, not just an OCIO initiative, to encourage cross project collaboration. But that’s an argument for other discussions on ASWF Slack.
John: upcoming meetings
- Rez will be next. Stephen are you good in 2 weeks? Stephen: yes
- Will revisit planning sessions
- Apr 16: OpenEXR annual review