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Academy Software Foundation

Jul 29
0

OpenTimelineIO Becomes Fifth Project Hosted at Academy Software Foundation

By | Announcements

Created at Pixar Animation Studios, OpenTimelineIO is an open source interchange format for editorial timeline information

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 29, 2019 – The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a neutral forum for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, today announced that OpenTimelineIO has been accepted by the Academy Software Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC) as the fifth Foundation-hosted project.

“Picture-less data produced by editorial departments is very useful across the pipeline. We developed OpenTimelineIO to provide an open source alternative to proprietary formats and enable our community to easily and efficiently interchange editorial timelines,” said Guido Quaroni, Vice President of Research and Development at Pixar. “As an Academy Software Foundation project, we hope OpenTimelineIO can help facilitate content creation within the motion picture and other similar industries.”

OTIO makes it easier to build tools that use editorial timeline information, filling a gap in film production pipelines that was previously underserved by similar, proprietary technologies. It supports clips, timing, tracks, transitions, markers, and metadata in an API that is easy for studios to integrate with their tools and for vendors to integrate with their software. Use cases include tracking shot length changes, providing context shots in dailies, communicating shots added or removed, conforming new renders into a cut, and dealing with picture-in-picture shots.

OpenTimelineIO used on “Coco” for transitions and linking media to the latest renders.

“OpenTimelineIO is quickly becoming a part of an industry standard editorial pipeline, both within and between animation studios, visual effects studios, and third-party vendors,” said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “With the support of the broader Academy Software Foundation community, we hope the ecosystem of third-party tools that support OpenTimelineIO will grow, making it easier for users to integrate it into their pipelines.”

Erik Strauss, Netflix Director of Post-Production Engineering, added “collaborating with a diverse community of creative partners and service providers demands a precise and uniform way to store and exchange the relationships between media assets in a timeline. We are excited to be able to contribute to OTIO as an opportunity to improve the interchange of this essential production data, and standardize its authoring for our community of filmmakers. As an active OpenTimelineIO contributor, we are very excited to see it become an Academy Software Foundation project, and as a new Foundation member, we look forward to working with the rest of the community to grow the project.”

The Academy Software Foundation will maintain and further develop the project with oversight provided by a technical steering committee. OpenTimelineIO joins OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB as projects in the incubation stage at the Academy Software Foundation. All newly accepted projects start in incubation while they work to meet the high standards of the Academy Software Foundation and later graduate to full adoption. This allows the Academy Software Foundation to consider and support projects at different levels of maturity and industry adoption, as long as they align with the Foundation’s mission to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base.

Developers interested in learning more or contributing to OpenTimelineIO can sign up to join the OTIO mailing list or attend the OpenTimelineIO Meet-Up at SIGGRAPH 2019 on Tuesday, July 30, from 1-2pm in the JW Marriott, Diamond Ballroom 7-10. The OpenTimelineIO Meet-Up is part of the Academy Software Foundation’s “Open Source Day” on July 30, a full day of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions focused on open source projects used for visual effects, animation, and image creation. Additional details are available here.

Jul 29
0

Amazon Web Services, Rodeo FX, and MovieLabs Join Academy Software Foundation

By | Announcements

Academy Software Foundation Announces Amazon Web Services as a New Premier Member

Rodeo FX and MovieLabs join as General and Associate members

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 29, 2019 – The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a neutral forum for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, today announced that Amazon Web Services has joined the Foundation as a Premier member, Rodeo FX as a General member, and MovieLabs as an Associate member.

“We are pleased to welcome Amazon Web Services as a new Premier member. Many open source projects and developers rely on cloud services from AWS for content creation and production. We look forward to their contributions as our projects continue to evolve and grow,” said David Morin, Executive Director of Academy Software Foundation. “We are also excited to have Rodeo FX and MovieLabs join our community. Rodeo FX has a deep expertise in visual effects and developing artist-driven tools that will be beneficial as our Foundation continues to grow. MovieLabs has a history of bringing together studios and tech companies to develop common technology goals, which aligns with our goal of driving collaboration and shared development of open source technologies across the motion picture and media industries.”

Launched last August at SIGGRAPH 2018 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation provides a neutral forum for open source software developers to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound.

“Our membership has almost doubled since we launched the Academy Software Foundation a year ago, and we’re grateful that both studios and software vendors are seeing the value in having a neutral home for collaboration and shared development of open source software,” said Rob Bredow, SVP, Executive Creative Director and Head of Industrial Light & Magic, and Governing Board Chair of Academy Software Foundation. “Amazon Web Services, Rodeo FX, and MovieLabs are welcome additions to our community, and we look forward to their contributions as we continue to grow.”

SIGGRAPH 2019 Open Source Day
All SIGGRAPH 2019 attendees are invited to “Open Source Day,” hosted by Academy Software Foundation on July 30 at the JW Marriott in Los Angeles. The event is a full day of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions focused on open source projects used for visual effects, animation, and image creation – Academy Software Foundation, OpenVDB, OpenCue, OpenEXR, Rez, OpenTimelineIO, ACES, OpenColorIO, Open Shading Language, and MaterialX. Additional details are available here.

Member Quotes:

“AWS is excited to be joining the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) to help support open standards in the visual effects and animation industry. With a variety of workloads from Media & Entertainment customers already running on AWS, we look forward to contributing to ASWF projects and initiatives to help studios continue their success using open source technology and open standards effectively on the cloud.”

  • Will McDonald, Principal Product Manager, AWS Thinkbox, Amazon.com Services, Inc.

“Rodeo FX is excited to be joining the Academy Software Foundation and further supporting its commitment towards the advancement of open-source software in the visual effects industry. Our work relies heavily on the ability to share between different studios, multiple vendors, and across a variety of software and platforms. Open standards makes this type of collaboration possible and allows our artists to focus less on technical hurdles and more on the creative challenges of bringing the best image to the screen. We look forward to working with the Academy Software Foundation and its members to help shape the future of open-source software in our industry.”

  • Jordan Soles, VP Technology and Development, Rodeo FX

“MovieLabs believes that the future of content creation lies in software-defined workflows for image and sound creation and rendering. Open source software, like the VFX Reference Platform, has proven immensely valuable to our industry in establishing common tools and formats. We’re excited by the opportunity to work with the Academy Software Foundation to enable new forms of content production and distribution.”

  • Jim Helman, Chief Technology Officer, MovieLabs
Jul 29
0

Netflix Joins the Academy Software Foundation

By | Announcements

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 29, 2019 – The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a neutral forum for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, today announced that Netflix has joined the Foundation as a member.

The Academy Software Foundation also announced today that OpenTimelineIO has been accepted as a Foundation-hosted project and is one of the first projects Netflix will contribute to as a member of the Foundation. Initially created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenTimelineIO (OTIO) is an Open Source API and interchange format that facilitates collaboration and communication of editorial data and timeline information between a studio’s Story, Editorial, and Production departments all the way through Post-Production. You can read more about the announcement here.

“Netflix’s deep expertise in streaming media needs no introduction, but it is lesser known that Netflix also has a strong commitment to open source software, having open sourced many projects already, and contributing to many more” said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “We are pleased to welcome Netflix into our community, and we look forward to their involvement and contributions to ASWF projects, including OpenTimelineIO, which we are pleased to announce is now a Foundation project.”

Erik Strauss, Netflix Director of Post-Production Engineering, said: “We’re thrilled to join the Academy Software Foundation and look forward to extending our collaboration with peers and partners on innovative software projects, such as OTIO, which are the cornerstone of digital production.”

“We are pleased to see Netflix join the Academy Software Foundation. As a founding member, we have watched the Foundation’s projects flourish with the support of the community, which is why we submitted OpenTimelineIO to the Foundation,” said Guido Quaroni, Vice President of Research and Development at Pixar. “Netflix has been an active contributor of OpenTimelineIO, and we look forward to their continued support and collaboration as a Foundation member.”

Launched in August 2018 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, Academy Software Foundation provides a neutral forum for open source software developers to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound.

SIGGRAPH 2019 Open Source Day
All SIGGRAPH 2019 attendees are invited to “Open Source Day,” hosted by Academy Software Foundation on July 30 at the JW Marriott in Los Angeles. The event is a full day of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions focused on open source projects used for visual effects, animation, and image creation – Academy Software Foundation, OpenVDB, OpenCue, OpenEXR, Rez, OpenTimelineIO, ACES, OpenColorIO, Open Shading Language, and MaterialX. Additional details are available here.

Aug 14
0

CIODive: Hollywood rolls out red carpet for open source developers

By | In The News

The launch of the ASWF is almost like creating a GitHub for the developers behind motion pictures, but open source is nothing new to the film industry. It dates back about 20 years, Andy Maltz, managing director of the Science and Technology Council at the Academy, told CIO Dive. Film “is the only art form that has a fundamental reliance on technology,” he said. The film industry’s use of tech dates back to photochemical technologies and proceeds to today’s digital image capture.

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Aug 14
0

ITWeb: Open Source cleaning up at the Oscars Open Source cleaning up at the Oscars

By | In The News

Over the last 25 years, software, and particularly open source software (OSS), has played an increasingly important role in the most successful movies of our time. Now this contribution is set to grow, boosted by the introduction on Friday, of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a joint venture of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the organisation behind the annual Oscar awards and the Linux Foundation. This follows a recently concluded two-year investigation by the Academy which found that more than 80% of the motion picture industry uses OSS, particularly for animation and visual effects.

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Aug 13
0

L’Usine Digitale: L’industrie américaine du cinéma structure ses efforts dans l’open source avec la fondation Linux

By | In The News

L’académie américaine des arts et sciences du cinéma (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ou AMPAS) et la Fondation Linux ont annoncé le 10 août la création d’une entité commune, baptisée “Academy Software Foundation” (ASWF). Celle-ci aura pour objectif de fournir un espace de discussion, de partage et de collaboration pour les développeurs de logiciels libres travaillant dans l’industrie du cinéma (et les industries attenantes de la télévision et du jeu vidéo). Les technologies concernées touchent typiquement à la création graphique, aux effets spéciaux, à l’animation et au son.

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Aug 13
0

ZDNet FR: L’académie des oscars déroule le tapis rouge à l’open source

By | In The News

Oscars et Open source sont deux notions que l’on croise rarement dans la même phrase. Mais l’académie américaine des arts et sciences du cinéma a pourtant annoncé la création d’un partenariat avec la Linux Foundation, baptisé « Academy Software Foundation. » L’académie américaine est principalement connue à l’international pour ses « Academy Awards », la cérémonie des oscars qui récompense chaque année les réussites de l’industrie du cinéma américain et international. Mais l’académie joue également un rôle important auprès de l’industrie du cinéma américain. A l’origine, celle-ci avait notamment été crée afin de faciliter le développement de codes déontologiques ou de règles techniques à l’échelle de l’industrie toute entière. C’est dans cette optique que « l’Academy Software Foundation » a été mise en place.

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Aug 13
0

3D Ring: Academy Software Foundation – Forum für Open Sorce Software in der Medienbranche

By | In The News

Die Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences und die Linux Foundation haben die Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) gegründet. Die ASWF ist eine neue Organisation mit dem Ziel, ein neutrales Forum für Open-Source-Softwareentwickler in der Bewegtbild- und Medienbranche zu schaffen. Es ist dazu gedacht um Ressourcen zu teilen, und an allen Techniken zu kollaborieren die mit Bilderstellung, visuelle Effekte, Animation und Sound zu tun haben.

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