Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - October 14, 2026

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 - 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
Karen Ruggles - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description 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 - Individual - No Account
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Lee Kerley - Apple
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
Ted Waine
Randy Packer - Dreamworks / Moonray
Pierre Jasmin - OpenFX / RevisionFX
Peter Holubowicz
Andrew Pearce - Alienrobot
Anthony Yin
Gordon Farrell - Sony Imageworks
Jonathan Swartz - NVIDIA
Philip Grobler

Meeting Assets

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 - Sept 17th #1446
Annual Review: OpenFX #514
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336

Notes

Annual Review: OpenFX #514
- Gary Oberbrunner
- Slide Deck
- OpenFX Update
  - OpenFX is an open standard…
  - A busy year: PRs nearly doubled. We released 1.5.1, and merged most of 1.6: new C++ bindings, a machine-readable property metadata system, and several new properties. 1.6 is close, but not released yet.
- OpenFX Organization Status
  - Contributors
    - 5-7 people attend TSC meetings: a solid core group
    - 7 Committers, but only 3 active: I merged 43 of 46 PRs, need more!
  - Git stats (LFX Insights), past 365 days vs the year before:
    - Commits: 152 vs 13; active days 56 vs 55
    - PRs: 50 opened, 46 merged, vs 26 opened, 13 merged
    - Merge lead time: avg 5 days, down from 3 months; media 20h to close
    - Contributors: 18, up from 16. 76% contributions are mine - too concentrated
    - New GitHub stars: 103 vs 70, new forks: 21 vs 14
  - slack: 237 members, up from 193 (our primary channel)
  - Discord: 114 members, up from 50; mailing list 60 up from 50
- Updates
  - 1.5.1 released 11/20/25. 1.6 is nearly done: most features are merged, and we’re finishing the last PRs and testing
  - 1.6 features already run in products: obsolete plugins in Boris FX, Silhouette, param interpolation types in RE:Vision Effects
- Organization Status: Discussion
  - Moving much faster than pre-ASWF. Monthly meetings help a lot, ASWF’s resources help offload the admin work, as well as helping set direction and give us goals to reach for
  - PR activity nearly doubled this year, but too much depends on one person: 76% of contributions are mine.
  - The new property metadata system is paying off: it generates the C++ bindings and docs, and has already found errors in the API headers
  - We will always be slower than some open source projects because we have major commercial users, and because OpenFX is a mature plugin standard. Release engineering is much better now: signed releases, ASWF CI images, and a standard Conan package.
  - We’re continuing to work with other ASWF groups where possible: colour-managed params build on our OCIO-based colour support, and the proposed Conform extension will help hosts bring effects in from OTIO and other interchange formats.
- Project Status
  - Done this year
    - 1.5.1 released: CPU-render and thumbnail-render properties, Window build fixes
    - New C++ bindings (openfx-cpp), with type-safe property accessors (ships in 1.6)
    - Property metadata in the headers, generating C++ accessors and docs (ships in 1.6)
    - Signed source releases (sigstore); CI on the ASWF ci-openfx images
    - Conan packages restructured to the standard Conan Center Index layout
    - SECURITY.md and a draft policy on AI coding assistants
  - In process for 1.6
    - Merged: Windows ARM64 plugin locations, param interpolation types, colour-managed params, OpenGL texture handles, obsolete and unlicensed plugins
    - Open: host and param layout properties, a colour-conversion library, fixes found by fuzzing
- Outlook
  - Focus Areas
    - Release 1.6 - top priority
    - Get hosts and plugins using the C++ bindings and property metadata (the new ones most likely)
    - Camera and clip metadata (EXIF, timecode, etc) - still slower than we’d like
    - Adding plugin and host example and test code for all new features
    - Conform extension, for effects interchange via OTIO, AAF and FCPXML
  - Needs
    - Blackmagic/Resolve engagement: no response yet on COnform or colour management. Can the ASWF help?
    - More contributors / committers: most code still comes from one person
    - More engagement and input from TSC members, users and new people
    - More git and github expertise among the TSC, getting there now, was a bigger problem last year.
    - Help to support our example plugins, and plugin and host support libs. How to get started with the API document.
    - Better documentation of host feature support, a perennial thorn on our side (which feature is supported in which OFX host?).
  - Ideas
    - I’d like more engagement and leadership from others in the TSC
    - We need bug users like The Foundry, Blackmagic and Autodesk to weigh in
      - Timezones can be challenging
- Q&A
  - JF: can you query what is supported? Gary: yes, you can query which attributes are supported, but not at a high level. But could have something that the host app would need to fill.
  - Eric: can make for a challenging test framework? Gary: yes, today we just test.
  - Christopher: any strategies to get more contributions from the vendors? Gary: we didn’t do anything for dev days this year due to being busy, like tagging Good First Issues. But we have to do Dev Days. Pierre: RevisionFX supports 17 host applications with OpenFX, the best time to meet these vendors is NAB / IBC, most developer companies don’t go to SIGGRAPH, so that’s always an issue for us. Before ASWF we organized our own events, we haven’t followed up. Gary: we meet BMD at NAB / IBC, but that’s once a year. I will make a concerted effort next year for Dev Days. Once we have the C++ layer, we’ll have easier issues to dig into. Carol: we would love for Dev Days to be more than something you have to do twice a year, projects should be ready “year round”. Maintainers should always maintain Good First Issues, a process to onboard new developers.
  - Emily: we could do a virtual town hall to “re-introduce” OpenFX, can be shared internally at member companies. Even if the turnout isn’t huge, we can share the recording. Gary: I’d be up for that, let’s connect. Pierre: we have developers in Europe and Asia, so setting up a time is hard. Emily: yes, pick “best bang for buck”, others watch recording. Carol: One year we pick Asia-friendly time, one year Europe friendly time. We’re trying to be more involved at NAB / IBC, we’d like to hear what’s the best way to work with NAB. What should we be doing, what should we target. Gary: we have thoughts, so let’s connect offline.
  - Carol: slow but steady progress is great for a mature standard / project. For vendors, we’ll try to help get you connected.
  - Pierre: BMD offers space in their booth if we want to do an event, has to be before or after the show. But most of their devs are in Australia / Singapore.
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
- PowerPoint template on TAC Website
- Want to make it nicer for projects to use, what needs to happen before we can publish this revision.
- Anything in red is to be filled out
- Roadmap: a “bare minimum”. Depending on where you project is in its lifecycle, we have FYI slides.
- Contributions: we provide templates, but you can adjust to taste.
- Contributing orgs: always useful to the TAC
- VFX Industry Build Matrix and Project Engineering Contributions spreadsheets
  - Updating those for your project should be part of the annual review process.
  - Discussion in annual review what changed for your project
  - Should be easier to update for projects
- CI / Security / Marketing Upgrades
  - Improve your infrastructure, working with CI WG
- AI / ML Code Generation Use / Reporting
  - How are projects experiencing this
  - Usage of AI assisted tools
- Areas the project could use help from
- Feedback on working with ASWF
  - Should not be a surprise
  - JF: maybe a “slider” as to how much integration a project desires? Carol: could be a separate slide? But could be an interesting idea.
- Carol: a few projects have already used it, thank you.
- The VFX Industry Build Matrix was built with Larry, it’s a lot of data, a lot to get through. A lot of it doesn’t change every year. Spent some time with an AI assistant, how could we make the process easier. From least to most invasive. Google Sheets can make a form populate a sheet. So could populate spreadsheet from a form to make it easier. Could be same for DCCs. Is this more syntactic sugaring, or make something more code based, and build HTML from that? How do we get folks to update their spreadsheets in a way that’s intuitive?
- JF: a JSON format for DCCs and ASWF projects
- Carol: I like the human in the loop aspect, scraping data is good, but we need someone responsible for it, and here’s what changed year over year
- Larry: I don’t have strong opinions as to how info goes in, was more thinking of the reader. For instance the maintainer of multiple packages, what’s the hidden data I wish I always knew, but isn’t easily answerable, and could be exposed in a dashboard. Which projects are consuming my project, and at what version. Which major distributions use my project, what versions used in studios, mostly for support reasons. The dynamics of how projects are used. Is it safe to update the minimum CMake version? If there’s a line in the spreadsheet of which versions are used by studios, as long as I’m not too out of step from that, I should be OK. Very useful as long as it’s kept up to date. Also have thought of having projects have a manifest, hardest “nut” to crack are the things that aren’t repos / products. How does the studio supply that? And that’s the most important info. There’s a gap between VFX Platform and what studios are actually using.
- Carol: if there aren’t major objections against making this a mandatory aspect of annual review (even though info from DCC vendors and studios is more crucial), I would want this to be part of annual review.
- Matthew: DPEL review used the template, it’s in good shape. The red highlights encourage people to fill things out (like the spreadsheet).

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: agent skills repo #1467
- AGENDA TOPIC: GitHub Security Manager role #1434
Add Guide #1105
Annual Review: Zero Trust Working Group #621
Annual Review: Open Shading Language #437
AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377