Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - July 9, 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 - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative, 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
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group 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

Lorna Dumba - Framestore
Lee Kerley - Apple
Mark Jackets - Dreamworks
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
Randy Packer
Alex Forsythe - Academy / ACES
Jim Helman - MovieLabs / Zero Trust WG
JT Nelson - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Karen Ruggles - DeSales University / D&I WG
Olga Avramenko - Sony Imageworks
Juan Buhler - Imageworks

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Agenda

General Updates
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
New Project/Working Group Proposal: RMTC (Rongotai Model Train Club) #1075
New Project/Working Group Proposal: Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) #1091
Annual Review: USD Working Group #518
Dev Days recap May 15, 2025 #1070

Notes

General Updates
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
- David: schedule is up with most of the presentations, a great program. Emily is on vacation, are there any questions / pending items? Virtual town halls all lined up?
- Registration Link
New Project/Working Group Proposal: RMTC (Rongotai Model Train Club) #1075
- Larry: do we have a representative from RMTC? Anyone from WETA?
- Let’s move to next item in case someone shows up.
- Larry wanted to allow company experts in ML to comment. Being proposed as sandbox prooject, coming in sponsored by a well known member company we have a lot of trust in. Do people feel like they need more time?
- JF: how does this interact with ML WG? Larry: explicitly came in under WG, analogy to ORI is apt. ML WG doesn’t really run those other projects, but coordinates between various ML efforts and projects to spin off, the more mature they are, the less they need to be under ML WG. Both are brand new sandbox projects.
- John: LFX vote coming after the call.
New Project/Working Group Proposal: Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) #1091
- Alex Forsythe presenting
- New ASWF Project Proposal: ACES
  - Propose to move ACES to ASWF
  - Short history
    - Grew out of Academy investigation around a lack of digital filmaking best practices and standards circa 2005
    - Convened many dozen of industry’s top engineers, color scientists, researchers, creative technologies, VFX and post experts, and filmmakers
    - Framework for a solution proposed by Ed Giorgianni (Sr Research Fellow, Kodak, retired) in 2006
    - Tested various beta versions with filmmakers and productions before releasing ACES 1.0 in dec 2014
    - Post 1.0 launch: focussed on filmmaker education, encouraged high quality implementations, collected feedback, refined the system, international standards where appropriate, added new transforms
    - Released ACES 2.0 in 2025 - new output transforms based on a unified model
    - 10 years is a long time between major releases! It’s a balance. ACES provides a reference implementation, then vendors re-implement in their specific products to support their customers. It’s about standards and best practices, walk the line between updating software yet providing a stable platform. Carol led group on Gamut Compression.
  - Why move to the ASWF?
    - Ensuring long term stability
      - Transition ACES into ASWF’s open development model, built on transparent governance, shared infrastructure, and collaborative engineering practicesn
    - Fresh momentum through open development
    - Expanded community participation
    - Aligned with ASWF ecosystem
      - OCIO is an enabler, allows us to get into wide variety of platforms with minimum of work. Can use OCIO to implement ACES
      - EXR is major file format
    - Shared stewardship
      - Combine ASWF’s strength in managing open-source projects with the Academy’s…
  - Transition Plan Overview
    - New ACES TSC at ASWF
      - A new TSC, chaired by SCott Dyer, will include key members of the current ACES leadership, providing continuity and historical context, with new voices from ASWF community who can bring experience in open-source development and governance.
    - Ongoing Academy Support
      - The Academy continues to provide support on standards, ACES branding, engagement with the creative stakeholder, and operates ACESCentral as the filmmaker community hub
    - Infrastructure Migration
      - Code, documentation and development infrastructure move to ASWF systems, adopting their tooling, workflows, and release process.
    - Joint Communication and Outreach
  - ACES Top Priorities under ASWF
    - Expanded documentation, user guides, and reference implementation specs
    - Stronger unit testing and continuous integration infrastructure
    - Development of enabling tools to support adoption and integration
- Q&A
  - Eric: who owns ACES now? Alex: project under Academy, has its own license, planning to move to Apache 2.0, current license is MIT-ish in its structure, very permissive, some language about “no endorsement from Academy”. Eric: under Sci-Tech council? Alex: yes work fostered under Sci-Tech.
  - Doug: there’s already success stories between ASWF and ACES: OCIO, DPEL (StEM v2). I see why this makes sense. Original motivation was related to archiving, people were concerned about archiving digital movies. A key deliverable is standards to preserve creative intent. This is outside normal ASWF concern. How do we ensure that archiving remains a concern under ASWF? Alex: relationship with existing group, and Academy still engaged with this project, but in a different form. Standards piece is a big piece of it, and will continue to develop standards for those goals, in ISO and SMPTE, and will adopt new standards. Also a digital preservation project at Academy (picture and sound), Doug: will standards efforts still exist within Academy rather than under ACES project? Alex: there will be a close relationship, Academy is good at ushering documents through standards process, anything we can do to advance the goals of ACES, the Academy will continue to want to do.
  - Carol: an opportunity for ACES to benefit from joining ASWF, but also ASWF can benefit as well. As an open source foundation there are things we don’t currently do, but we would get access to people who have experience (like driving the standards process). The Academy “isn’t going anywhere”. Alex: an opportunity for Academy to advance ACES and to benefit the ASWF. There are certain things the ASWF is very good at, we want to take advantage of these for this project, but ASWF can learn from what ACES has done well, and communities ACES has built.
  - Larry: in ASWF the projects are very animation / VFX centric, but not a goal of the foundation. Helps to broaden our reach into broader film applications, this will be good for ASWF. Can you explain what you are bringing in code wise, and what you see developing going forward? Alex: we have a reference implementation, broken up into separate repos in 2.0, language is CTL (Color Transform Language). These would come over. We have input transforms, output transforms, look transforms. Using mkdocs for documentation generated from Markdown. Some ancillary tools, some are specifications like AMF (ACES Metadata File), an XML that allows you to describe a pipeline used to generate a set of images. People are building automated production that generates or reads AMF and processes images based on those files. Also an IDT generator for cameras we don’t have a full characterization of. A lot of opportunities to build this toolset, like AMF tools others are building. Get closer to production and make integrations smoother.
  - JF are these tools used in production and do you want binary releases? Alex: yes they are, although tools can use improvement. Have worked with partners like Netflix to rebuild these tools to rebuild them in a way that’s more amenable to production workflows. We’re trying to make these tools production oriented.
  - Eric: looking at the website (gorgeous!), the software side I’m not worried that ASWF can manage, but what about marketing program, logo program, vendor list. Looks like this is done by Academy Staff? Alex: ACES may be different than OpenEXR / OpenVDB, primarily a best practices and standards project with some software to enable it, Academy feels we need to be engaged with ASWF to bring what it is good at, Academy will continue to engage with the community? Eric: would we have access to Academy resources for logo program et al? Alex: yes, our contractor (Steve…) should continue to serve in his role.
  - John: would TAC do a vote? Do a LFX vote? Larry: is there anyone who feels there are burning questions? This is the right time.
  - Larry: have talked to people around my company, answers were either “yes please” or “it wasn’t already the case?”. Eric: I’m asking about funding but have high confidence it will get sorted out. There’s good expertise in the foundation that can help. Alex: your questions make a lot of sense, who is the Academy involvement structured. We feel like we have good answers.
Annual Review: USD Working Group #518
- Alexander Schwank / Nick Porcino: USDWG TAC Review
- Presentation Slide Deck
  - What is USDWG?
    - Primary USD community place
    - Raise ASWF + M&E community issues
    - Showcase community contributions and work
    - Highlight OpenUSD-proposals of note to ASWF
    - Educate on topics around USD
    - Working groups have defined work products
  - 1 TAC Vote
    - USDWG is now a long-term working group!
    - Thanks to TAC for trusting us
    - Trust in the community we are building
  - New Logo!
    - Tesseract with USD colors, smiley face, represents our community
    - Use as a language for sub working groups: assets, camera, games, materials, web
  - 1260 members on Slack
  - Growth
    - USDWG continues to grow membership
    - 200 new members since 2024 TAC review
    - New members are a diverse mix of ASWF members and non-members
    - Not just from the “usual suspect” companies
  - 90+
    - 90+ meetings per year
  - SWG work products
    - Assets
    - Camera: established as a cross body meeting place for camera standardization (VES, ASC, ASWF, SMPTE)
    - Games: driving adoption in games industry
    - MaterialX: glue between MaterialX project and AOUSD Materials WG.
    - Web: matured to fully transition to AOUSD. Getting USD into web standards.
  - 48 Presentations
    - Just in the main group
    - Keep spreadsheet of presentations, have presenters from many different orgs
    - Nick: cooperation from students for this spreadsheet effort. Callout to our members and D&I group, looking for someone to edit, we had backlog of presentation recordings. Within 24h we had 5 volunteers from D&I group which came from SLP, helping us get through videos, editing them.
  - 15 proposals
    - USD profiles
    - OpenExec
    - Alternate implementations of libwork
    - LODs
    - Physical Lighting
  - 5+ ASWF Collaborations
    - OCIO + CIF: color management in OpenUSD
    - MaterialX: shipped 1.39
    - CI: learn from CI work
    - D&I: promote D&I
    - DPEL: close collaboration with Asset SWG
    - {add more here} <- ask for TAC, we want more! Anyone interested in closer relationship with USD WG, let us know
  - 1 Community Production
    - Collective Project 001
    - Came out of Assets WG
    - Putting together a proper shot, full USD pipeline, collaboration with o3de project (robot asset)
    - Trying to show project at SIGGRAPH
    - Explore a full USD pipeline
  - 16 bake-off entries
    - Virtual pastries
      - entries from very various sources
      - Someone from Sweden, Japan, India…
  - Q&A
    - Carol: I always look to USD WG as inspiration, an amazing model you have developed
    - Nick: thanks to all our sub WG leaders, they keep the efforts going
    - Alex: same to whole community. Nick: every group has unique leadership
    - John: we will send LFX voting, any concerns?
Dev Days recap May 15, 2025 #1070
- John / Carol: let’s bump this to next meeting.
- John: OpenFX review at next meeting, and maybe another project proposal. Gary: we’ll be there!