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The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a foundation centered around open source projects in the motion picture and media industries, announced at SIGGRAPH the launch of the Open Review Initiative, a project focused on media reviewing & playback. Major companies are involved: Autodesk as well as DNEG, Sony Pictures ImageWorks.
One Committee to unite them all
The goal of this new project is quite simple: “to build a unified open source toolset for playback, review and approval of motion picture and related professional media”. In other words, media such as videos, image sequences that are used throughout the production process.
Autodesk, DNEG and Sony Pictures Imageworks provide code contributions from their existing tools: Autodesk will make their RV available to the open source community, DNEG and Sony will do the same with their xSTUDIO and parts of the itView ecosystem respectively. In other words, the new project won’t have to reinvent the wheel, and will be able to rely on production-proven technology.
Let’s remind our readers that RV was acquired by Autodesk from from Tweak Software 2015 back in 2015. It was then integrated into ShotGrid, a production management platform provided by Autodesk. The software editor explains that they “will continue supporting RV commercially as part of the ShotGrid ecosystem”.
Upcoming steps
A Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will guide this new Initiative. They will first focus on playback, and one of their goal will be to achieve “gradual convergence” of the three code repositories “into a cohesive, state-of-the-art review and approval framework”. This TSC will be “led by a combination of members from the contributing companies and a diverse cross-section of the community of engineers and users invested in this problem space”, explains the ASWF.
Since the project has just been launched, no detailed roadmap is available at this point. We will of course keep you updated on future announcements: don’t forget to follow us on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook!
