Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - October 15, 2025

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/aswf?view=list&projects=aswf

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
Daniel Greenstein - OpenImageIO 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
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Montana Addington, Netflix Animation Studios
Lee Kerley, Apple
Olga Avramenko, Sony Imageworks / D&I
Alyssa Alexis, SIGGRAPH
Doug Walker, Autodesk / OCIO
Cory Ormand, Walt Disney Studios
Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
Jim Helman, MovieLabs
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
Mriganka Arya, Sony Imageworks

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Agenda

General Updates
- ORI follow up on Incubation #1167
- Dev Days Recap #1174
Annual Review: OpenAPV #803

Notes

General Updates
- ORI follow up on Incubation #1167
  - Carol: Erik S started a thread in #tac channel, please comment on that thread if you have thoughts. Even if you just “agree!”. Would be good to have more opinions from TAC members.
Annual Review: OpenAPV #803
- Youngkown Lim
- 6 Months review 6 months ago
- OpenAPV (Sandbox Project)
  - Got a new logo
  - Brief description: develop a royalty free, open-source, open-spec codec
  - 4 TSC members
- GitHub activities
  - 15 forks (testing?). Interested in hearing from any ASWF members who might have done it
  - 251 commits, growth of commit activity
  - 73 PRs
- TSC Activities
  - Extensive testing to understand the various characteristics of APV
  - Introduction of APV at 2025 ASWF Virtual Town Halls as part of ORI Video Encoding Guidelines
  - Available on YouTube
  - results posted for PSNR and encoding time, OpenAPV can be confirm to perform similarly to ProRes 4444 12 bit/XQ. Encoding time is close to hardware accelerated ProRes. Testing is promising.
  - ffmpeg integration:
    - native decoder from 8.0
    - oapv encoder supported
    - oapv decoder supported, developed from spec, separate from our implementation
- Future Plan
  - OpenAPV improvement
    - Implementing RGB support
    - Supporting conformance of ffmpeg native APV decoder
      - OpenAPV encoder is used for encoding by ffmpeg
    - Implementing preset bitrates for specific resolutions, frame rate and chroma
  - Contribution to ORI encoding guideline
  - Collaboration / integration with other ASWF projects
    - e.g. OTIO / Toucan
    - More recommendations / suggestions will be welcomed!
- Caveat
  - DaVinci Resolve 20.2 has added support of APV
  - OpenAPV project will be presented at ACM Multimedia 2025 Open Source Software session
    - ACM MultiMedia 2025 - Open Source Papers
- Open Discussion
  - JF: Resolve implementation is exciting? Youngkwon: I think they are using the OpenAPV implementation.
  - Carol: a ton of progress in 6 months, very exciting, with presentation at Open Source Days. Excited to read the paper! From my perspective, we had put the 6 month deadline to show progress, and you’ve done that. Youngkwon: Sam Richards was instrumental in guiding the testing.
  - Matthew Low: It might be interesting to see an OpenAPV variant of DPEL’s ASC StEM v2 asset: ASC StEM2 - Standard Evaluation Material 2 Youngkwon: yes that would be interesting
  - Eric Reineke: I’d be curious about how it’s supported in resolve - worth noting: libavcodec is included in the resolve binary package, so they may have gotten it for free with an ffmpeg update
  - John: how about moving towards incubation stage? Youngkwon: thinking about it. Carol: main aspects are the badges and adoption across the industry: products, ASWF members. Youngkwon: integration with other projects is a main goal.
  - John: look forward to seeing you back here next year!
Dev Days Recap #1174
- Olga Avramenko / Montana Addington
- Slide Deck
- Goals for 2025 Dev Days
  - Have two Dev Days events
  - All ASWF projects participate
  - Increase participation amongst contributors
  - Create a replicable framework for coordination, administration and communication…
- Dev Days by numbers
  - 104 registrations
  - Majority from NA
  - 58% were newcommers
  - 21 Individual Contributor, 17 Students, 8 Sony Imageworks, 5 Dreamworks, 5 Weta, 4 ILM, 4 WDI, 3 Autodesk…
  - All 16 ASWF projects were open to contributors
    - 28 participants, tracked on PR submission, plus a group project so 31
    - 10 projects
    - 41 PRs
    - 32 merged as of 10/14/25
    - PRs opened and closed by project
      - MaterialX: 2 / 7
      - OpenCue: 0 / 16
  - Feedback
    - How did you participate: 75% contributor (1st time)
    - Did you find it easy to source info? 100% yes
    - If you registered and didn’t contribute, why? SCheduling issues / other commitments
    - How satisfied were you with Dev Days logistics? all 5s
    - Project specific feedback (from 6 projects)
    - Feedback from Participant Questionnaire
  - Dev Days Social
    - Good first turnout in Vancouver and LA
    - People liked the in-person connection
    - Suggestion to move the venue around in LA next time to capture more attendees
    - Both LA and Vancouver venues a bit loud. Need to find quieter vetted venues
    - Toronto and Salt Lake City would like to see Dev Day socials in their cities next time.
  - September Key Takeaways
    - Successes
      - Improved issue labels
      - Group project for MaterialX
      - Promotion, marketing, and publicity of Dev Days was timed well with Open Source Days
      - Communication with project leads channel was smooth
    - Room for improvements
      - Organization framework and documentation
      - Returning contributor documentation / communication / “good second issue”
      - Virtual and in-person celebrations to be more widely considered
      - Not many responses to end of event survey in either May or September
  - Dev Days 2023-2025
    - Registrants: 90 / 118 / 78 / 110
    - Projects worked on: 5 / 7 / 10 / 10
    - Individuals participating: 51 / 47 / 29 / 31
    - PRs opened: 31 / 58 / 34 / 41
    - PRs Closed: 20 / 35 / 27 / 32
  - But numbers are higher if you add up both 2025 events
    - Got to 13 out of 16 projects worked on
    - A few more people participating
    - Number of PRs up significantly
  - May vs September 2025
    - OpenCue went from 0 to 16 PRs! They worked on promotion, making the issues well worded
    - MaterialX also a popular choice
    - More opened and closed PRs in September than in May
  - Looking ahead to 2026
    - Questions for the TAC
      - Are we focussing on the right things?
        
        Do you have ideas or recommendations?
      - How many Dev Day events should there be per year?
        
        1, 2 or 3?
      - Are these the right time of the year?
        
        1 Event: undecided
        
        2 events: May / September
        
        3 events: January, May, September
      - Should we try focussing on different contributors or specific themes?
        
        January Dev Days is focussed on Students?
        
        May Dev Days focussed on a specific type of issue (documentation, oldest tickets)
      - How big do we want to make this? Do we want to focus on only ASWF projects or other open source projects.
- Q&A
  - Christopher Moore: did we canvas on familiarity? Carol: projects have to have “good first issues” and build process documented. We recommend that people build the project before the event so they are ready to complete the task on the day instead of spending the day building. We still have people who spend all day building the project, maybe first time using CMake, contributing to an OS project. We still count this is as a win, even if we don’t get a PR. We count PRs over the following week, so even if they were blocked on the day of, we can count follow on PRs.
  - Larry: we try hard to explain that there’s a strong correlation between people who were able to build ahead of time and finish the task on the day. Most people have been getting the message. Also unreasonable to expect that the work gets merged on the day. Even a skilled developer may require a couple of review cycles. Even if it takes a couple more days, it’s part of the process. Adding something else to consider. we’ve grappled with the tension between trying to recruit people entirely new to our projects / ASWF, vs people in our companies but haven’t touched our project. These are different audiences. We shouldn’t consider solely on one or the other, we would need feedback on that.
  - Cary: I was out for most of September so wasn’t able to have OpenEXR join. We have framed this event as an introductory event for junior programmers. For OpenEXR I struggle to find issues accessible to people like that. Is there an alternate effort focussing on the larger things a project needs, targeting more senior people who haven’t contributed before, instead of smaller things that benefit the individuals.
  - Larry: at Imageworks we had a team do a somewhat larger task, hand’t tried it before, it was quite successful. The team effort made it more interesting / fun. Working together they could take a bigger bite out of the task. It was successful, a way for companies to turn it into a collaborative event.
  - Cary: someone at ILM is working on a feature extension to EXR, it’s not his primary job, so he’s “noodling away at it”. So a Dev Days event where someone like that could concentrate on that? Carol: last time you gave this feedback, we took it into consideration, adjusted our wording, presentations. Not sure we took a large uptake, but we are taking it into consideration. It really does take concrete ideas. Should we bring it back to 48h for more “meaty” tasks? Would love to see more senior devs in companies have exposure to multiple projects, and be exposed to something that’s not part of their day jobs.
  - Olga: we are also encouraging senior devs to join.
  - Matthew Low: we had two contributors at Dreamworks who had done internal dev for Rez caching, now is the right time to contribute back work that had been mostly done before. Also an OpenRV contribution. So it’s a good way to encourage contribution to Dev Days, but also more regular contribution. Part of challenge is on the rep of the company to be the evangelist, last time Montana had made a post mortem at Animal Logic. From companies who were successful, what are you doing internally to recruit participants?
  - Larry: cookies was the secret! Olga: I took charge at Imageworks, we had Dev Days cookies printed across the 3 locations. David: but they were so nice you didn’t want to eat them! Olga: we did internal promition at SPI, but also someone senior said it was important to join, and it’s OK not to work on your normal responsibilities. Otherwise Dev Days can feel like an “extra task” you can’t concentrate on. Backing from senior management really helped. Had 4 people working on MaterialX project.
  - JC: Has it been considered to maybe collect success stories and publish them somewhere? This could maybe entice companies to participate more. Olga: we have blogs posts, but we need company leadership to distribute the info. Carol: We have published a few blogs, but I agree, more focused case studies would be good.
  - Kimball: in previous years I had to “beg” people, this year a bunch of people self motivated, so a good outcome, people didn’t see it as an onerous task, they wanted to do it. Olga: we hope it becomes a self sustaining event so we don’t need to promote it as much. Carol: it may feel slow, but this is just our 4th Dev Days in the 3rd year. Progress in the chart and combining 2025 events is showing growth.
  - Carol: can’t talk about Dev Days without talking about how much effort Olga and Montana have put in, both at ASWF level and within their companies. But they are volunteers, we would like new volunteers, at least 1 or 2 people in the TAC (separate from Carol / Larry). Just commit for 2026! It can be hard to sign up for open ended commitment, if you have time to help us on the committee, please reach out! We need to respect Olga and Montana’s time so it’s not all on them. We get support from Linux Foundation, but they are also stretched thin. Olga: if there’s someone at your company, it doesn’t have to be a TAC member, we’ll appreciate help from anyone who volunteers. Carol: of course, but would like 1-2 other volunteers from the AC.
Carol: already October, so looking for TAC vice chair who will work with me, as I will be replacing Larry as TAC chair. 2 year commitement, vice chair the first year, then chair the second year. Lots of “talking” on the meetings, but also working behind the scenes with David, John, the Board, making sure we keep priorities in order, the TAC meetings are running well, following up on issues. We’re getting better at doing this, have made progress on how to run the TAC. If you are interested, please reach out, otherwise we’ll nominate people! Larry: whoever volunteers will have a great time, Carol is a great organizer and she will “show you the ropes”. It’s not a forever commitment! Carol: reach out to me directly.
David: thank you Olga and Montana, Dev Days is on a growth curve, we’re there for the long term. A lot of the discussions here make a lot of sense, for instance Cary’s feedback. We are looking forward to the next Dev Days. Also “thank you Larry!” even though still TAC chair. Working with Larry and Carol is great, TAC is at the core of ASWF, which is there to support the TAC. Discussions with Carol and Larry about projects and the ASWF have been great, we have a lot of potential to achieve, in an industry in challenging times. How can we take incremental steps to achieve results. Looking forward to working with Carol and the new Vice Chair. Larry, you have to remain involved! Larry: we borrowed approach from DigiPro, they also have previous chairs as an “advisory board”, happy to be available for something like that.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
Annual Review: Zero Trust Working Group #621
Annual Review: Open Shading Language #437