Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - July 23, 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 Attendees

Ben Schofield, CDSA
Jim Helman, MovieLabs
Josh Bainbridge, Framestore
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Juan Buhler, Imageworks
Lee Kerley, Apple
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
Olga Avramenko, Sony Imageworks / Dev Days
Robin Rowe, CinePaint
Spencer Stephens, MovieLabs / ZeroTrust WG

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Agenda

General Updates
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
Annual Review: OpenFX #514
Dev Days recap May 15, 2025 #1070

Notes

General Updates
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
- Emily
- Leadership meeting on the 10th, please register, will be able to do in person or virtual.
- Virtual Town Halls participants should have received Calendar invite, template in #tech leads channels. Will be recorded and put up 2 weeks later.
- Projects have sent news to be shared on the blog, please share as early as possible. Ping me on Slack / email
- Schedule: August 10 8:30 leadership meeting
- Please show up early if in person to get a shirt, also for Beers of a Feather, will have limited space.
- BoFs have been posted, all on Monday, not recorded / in person only.
- We are printing project stickers, will have those onsite
- Larry: Leadership meeting isn’t open but includes (voting) TAC members.
- Main program on Sunday doesn’t need a SIGGRAPH registration, but the BoFs session do.
- Emily: if you are a voting tac member, you should already have leadership meeting on your calendar. Meeting also at Marriott Pinnacle.
- Eric: how many people does the room hold? Emily: 275, plus an overflow room. We expect half of registrations to actually show up. Had more people registering on site in Denver, hopefully in advance this year. Come early if you want to make sure to have a seat.
Annual Review: OpenFX #514
- Gary
- OpenFX Update 2025
- Presentation Slides
- Topics
  - Organization Status
    - Contributors
    - Users
    - Visitors
  - Project Status
    - Website
    - Github
    - …
- OpenFX Update
  - OpenFX is an open standard for creating visual effects plugins. It allows plugins (shared libraries) to interface with host applications, giving artists thousands of new tools and capabilities. It was created in 2004, and has evolved to become an industry standard under the ASWF
  - This year has seem some progress, but not until 1.6 is release
- Organization Status
  - Contributors
    - 8-10 people attend every TSC, sometimes we get 10-12, solid group
    - Only 3 github committers and 4-6 GitHub reviewers, need more! Skews older / commercial devs, not “sitting on GitHub” all the time.
    - Dennis Adams retired, he will be missed
  - Git stats
    - Commits, past 365 days: 102 vs 201 last year
    - PRs: 24 vs 53 last year
    - Active days: 49 down from 101
    - Merge lead time: avg 4 days, down from 27 last year (that’s good), down from 25 to 11
    - Contributors: 10, down from 12, 33% me, 10-12% next 4 people
  - Monthly TSC meetings are solid, reliable, helpful and well attended. ASWF membership is forcing TSC meetings, which is good.
  - Mailing list: 50+ members
  - Slack: 193 members, up from 148 (this is our primary communication channel now)
  - Discord: 50 members
- Updates
  - 1.5 release last year 7/24/24. 1.5s with colorspace updates on 11/26/24. We were aiming for 1.6 by this summer but progress has been slower than I hoped for. We have a set of features we want to get into 1.6.
  - We are moving faster than before ASWF, but have leveled out.
- Organization Status: Discussion
  - We are still moving much faster than we did pre-ASWF. Monthly meetings help a lot, and the ASWF’s resources really help offload the admin work, as well as helping set direction and us goals to reach for.
  - But we’ve leveled out, and in ways have slowed down since the big push for color support last year
  - I’m hoping the new C++ bindings will generate a flurry of interest this fall, and maybe even attract some new developers
  - We will always be slower than some open source projects because we have major commercial users, and because OpenFX is a mature plugin standard, so we need to get buy-in from both hosts and plugins before committing a change to the standard. But we can do better around release engineering and support libs
  - We’re trying to pull people together and get consensus on how to extend OpenFX both into new areas and deeper into existing us cases, to ensure OpenFX is the standard for Visual Effects for many years
  - We’re continuing to work with other ASWF groups where possible; we’re planning updates to our colorspace support in concert with OCIO, and still working with OTIO on how to encode effects based on the OpenFX model
  - We need commercial and open source products using OpenFX to send them to the TSC, so we get feedback on what they need. People really want camera metadata in OpenFX, so we have started on this. Hoping to have metadata support at API level in 1.6, plus specific support for camera metadata.
- Project STatus
  - Tech
    - GPU support
    - Auto CI builds, complete & working, release process is now automated, artifacts signed
    - Lots of doc updates and cleanups
    - Small features lik NoSpatialAwareness to satisfy old issues
    - Conan: I sent a PR in spring, but it hasn’t been reviewed, so that’s in stasis -> JF: I think it’s in and I’m using it for aswf-docker. Gary: it’s an old one.
    - In progress:
      - Camera and other metadata support (EXIF, source clip filename, timecode, etc)
      - C++ bindings based on recent C++ and machine-readable…
- Needs
  - More contributors / committers / reviewers (not a single person project for now)
  - More engagement from TSC and OpenFX users
  - More input from new people
  - More git and github expertise among the TSC (better than last year, but slow)
  - Help to support our example plugins, and plugin support and host support libs
  - Better documentation of host feature support
- Ideas
  - I’d like more engagement and leadership from others in the TSC
  - We need big users like Blackmagic, Foundry and Autodesk to weigh in
    - Timezones can be challenging
  - If we do another NAB event I will try to go, to represent our project
- Discussion
  - Carol: who is on your TSC? Gary: JP Smith from Boris, Pierre Jasmin from RevisionFX, people from FilmLight, Assimilate
  - Larry: you are doing well in many ways, people coming to the meetings, code reviews. Not all different than OpenEXR. If you can get 3-4 people contributing regularly, you are doing pretty well. No need to apologize for that. Wondering how DevDays went, pulling people in, what can we do to help with that. Also a couple of questions around collaboration:
    - People on your TSC and some clients of your project are outside the core animation / VFX group that other projects engage with. Or there more people / orgs you can pull in. We can help you get some engagement. Maybe some opportunity to leverage relations in other industries.
    - You noted a couple of cross project collaborations with OCIO, OTIO, any others we could help with? Any ties to OpenReviewInitiative? OpenImageIO? Should OIIO be capable of running an OpenFX plugin for image processing?
    - Gary: Darby Johnson working on Toucan, a OTIO renderer that supports OpenFX.
    - Matthew Low: camera metadata discussions with the USD Camera Working Group? Gary: yes, will reach out in a month or two. Matthew: they have good relationships with camera vendors, maybe a useful conversation. Gary: people in OpenFX want 3D camera as well, but EXIF data would already be good. We don’t even have timecode right now.
    - Gary: our community is a bit different, we mostly go to NAB / IBC, 2D / Image Processing, ASWF may be more of a “SIGGRAPH crowd”, but we see a lot of cross pollination. Anything we can do to help, we know folks in the broadcast / 2D space, may be able to make connections.
    - David: we first went to NAB, but now we’ve approved the ACES project, which has been going to NAB in a big way and to IBC. There’s a lot of activity around that, we are likely to follow in their footsteps to go to NAB and IBC with a stronger story. Would encourage you to think about how you want us to present OpenFX in that context, not sure there is affinity between ACES and OpenFX? Can OpenFX help run these transforms? Carol: lots of this comes through OCIO, which we can already talk about. Gary: most people using OCIO color management in OpenFX want to use it for ACES workflows. Will try to get to NAB this year.
    - Gary: we didn’t do anything for Open Source Days this year, I should have since I was in the middle of the C++ bindings effort. Larry: next one in September. Gary: yes, I will do that, I will have identifiable things people will be able to help with. In the past it’s been hard to find things to do. Larry: if you have bite sized projects… Gary: will def do that. C++ bindings already working for me, they’ve worked for some consulting projects.
    - David: also OpenAPV
Dev Days recap May 15, 2025 #1070
- Olga
- Dev Days 2025 May 2025 Report
- Presentation Slides
- Goals for 2025 Dev Days
  - ALl ASWF projects participate
  - Increase Participation amongst contributors
  - Create a replicable framework…
- Dev Days by the numbers
  - 78 registered, 29 participated
  - Majority from US, Canada, Australia
  - Majority were new / first time contributors, but also returning ones
  - Didn’t have a lot of answers to the questionnaire (17), take results with grain of salt
  - This year all 16 ASWF projects were open to Dev Days contributors
    - 10 projects had PRs
    - 34 PRs
    - 27 merged as of 05/23/25
    - MaterialX had the most
  - Dev Days 2023-2025
    - A bit of a fall from 2024 to May 2025 event, except for number of projects chosen
    - Didn’t expect high numbers, since not that much “marketing”. We’ll see what happens for September
    - Carol: this is on purpose from the organizers, an experiment to see what happens without the pull from SIGGRAPH / Open Source Days, and see how that changes with second event. Dev Days is still quite new, only our 3rd event, still in experimentation phase.
    - Larry: we’re not sure what the right basis for comparison: event to event? Year to year? We’ve only done half the year so far. Holding back on drawing too many conclusions.
    - Olga: excited to see what September and then 2026 brings. See what works, what doesn’t work.
  - Feedback
    - Only 17 responses, but some conclusions can be drawn
    - Need to send the form immediately after event
    - Main reasons no to contribute were technical and build difficulties. Also some people continued to work on their issues after the event.
    - Access to information was reported as easy, so not the barrier to contribute.
    - Results on “How satisfied were you with the Dev Days logistics from the #devdays channel”, but could still be improved
    - “How satisfied were you with the support from the project”: on average everyone was very satisfied by project support.
  - Feedback from Participant Questionnaire
    - Shout outs for MaterialX and others, people connected on a personal level
    - Variety of experiences, some returning contributors felt there was a lot of support. Some people felt they had trouble finding issues to work on. Also inconsistency between projects on the support offered.
    - Comments generally positive, we are happy with that.
  - Key Takeaways
    - Successes
      - Additional Dev Days Session “How to host a Dev Days at your company”
      - Increase in number of projects chosen by participants
      - Improved documentation and recorded sessions for participants
      - Improved project documentation and issue labels
    - Room for Improvement
      - Promotion, marketing, or publicity of Dev Days could be timed better with other Open Source events
      - Sending feedback form sooner
      - Room for improvement of organizational framework and documentation
      - Returning contributors…
- Discussion
  - Larry: open to all feedback, what was difficult, what is keeping it from being more successful for your project
  - Olga: also feel free to reach out at a later date. We want to improve the numbers and the support for the projects.
  - Cary: for OpenEXR, I struggled to come up with issues tractable for first time contributors. Sometimes we get someone very senior who wants to tackle something, but not easy for first time contributors. Struggle to come up with something for OpenEXR. I’m sure other projects have similar experiences.
  - Larry: Olga made reference in planning recap: some people had successful Dev Days the first time, but not sure to re-engage. Maybe we need a “good second issue” tag. Need to transition from a first contribution to next, bigger “bite”. Maybe some projects are more amenable to “good first issues”, maybe other projects can concentrate on “good second / third issues”, some people are not there for the first time, but still want to contribute.
  - Carol: I understand what Cary is saying, similar experience in OCIO. There are good first issues, docs related issues, one PR was changing an image on the web site, it was great and needed. It is a fine lance between balancing the work needed by the project… We should all be able to have at any time a few “good first issues” tag. Even if this means the contributor does need some previous experience.
  - Olga: need to get a bit creative on the project side, like “updating the logo / documentation” and providing the steps in the issue.
  - Matthew: wanted to call out how useful the “How to host a dev days” session was. We’re not were we want to be yet, but it helped to bootstrap at Dreamworks. Did we inventory company affiliation for contributors? Olga: we have the data, but don’t have a graph / visual. Can share at next TAC meeting or offline. Also want to nail how many people participated in all 3 events, or only 2.
  - JF: perhaps having some common infrastructure on how to use AI assisted coding systems to understand the structure of a project.
  - Larry: there was some discussion on Slack about an LLM that can summarize the major features of an open source project. Looked kind of interesting. For TAC company representatives: this is how we attract new people, but also how do we provide professional development opportunities for your more junior engineers (Carol: senior as well!). There can be “selfish” motivation to help recruit internally. DeepWiki
  - Cary: two different objects. An avenue to bring in junior people who haven’t contributed before, get over the hurdle, and here’s how you create a PR. A great experience. Last year we had Lucas Miller looking at PyBind11 for Alembic, and Dev Days kicked that process. Can we use this semi annual process to encourage very senior engineers to step up. They are not good first issues, but a bite sized chunk of work so we can encourage senior people. Olga: that’s what the DevDays25 label was for as well. Company “pressure” can also help with more senior engineers. Cary: I took the approach “I just tagged a bunch of issues”, but will be more pro-active next year to track down people. Carol: also we can think about this on the marketing side. The way we present it is “this is how you contribute for the first time”, maybe we need to adjust this and show different levels of contribution. The “bite sized” nature of the contribution is the key.
  - David: maybe we pigeonholed ourselves with first time contributions. That’s really good feedback.