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Tech stars on the Academy’s open source red carpet

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 16 Sept 2019

Apple and Microsoft have become the latest big names in the IT arena to step onto the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) red carpet.

The ASWF was  launched by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the organisation behind the annual Oscar awards – and the Linux Foundation to advance open source software development in the motion picture and media industries.

This follows a similar move by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Netflix in July. All four organisations have signed up as ASWF Premier Members,  joining other IT players such as Cisco, Google Cloud, Intel, Nvidia and Autodesk in the top echelon of the Foundation.

“Studios and vendors across the motion picture industry have come together in support of the Academy Software Foundation, and their commitment has fuelled our growth,” said David Morin, ASWF’s executive director. 

He noted the Foundation’s growing membership was now resulting in annual funding of over $1million which will be used to support its open source projects, the software engineers that develop them and the open source community in general.

Tad Brockway, corporate VP of Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, said the company was looking forward to working with the entertainment industry to “bring the latest cloud technologies to the Foundation and its projects”.

In a statement announcing its membership of the ASWF, Microsoft committed itself to “supporting innovation across the media and entertainment industry by bringing cloud platforms to bear to help studies unlock creativity and collaboration, bring content to market faster and engage and monetise audiences.” 

It would also dedicate engineering resources to support Foundation-hosted projects and would assume roles on the ASWF Governing Board and on its Technical Advisory Council.

With filmmakers everywhere using Apple products, Rob Bredow, Governing Board chair of ASWF, said the plan was to work with Apple to improve support for Apple platforms. Through the use of the AWSF’s continuous integration (CI) build infrastructure, which streamlines development for build and runtime environments, this would help continue the democratisation of open source software development.

Turning to the decisions of AWS and Netflix to join the Foundation as Premier members, Morin noted that many open source projects and developers relied on cloud services from AWS for content creation and production while Netflix had long had a strong commitment to open source software.

According to Morin, Netflix had already open sourced many projects and contributed to many more. The first project to which it would be contributing as a Foundation member was OpenTimelineIO which had recently been accepted as the ASWF’s fifth Foundation-hosted project.

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.  

“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,” Guido Quaroni, VP of Research and Development at Pixar, explained.

Other recent sign-ups to the ASWF include visual effects company Rodeo FX, and MovieLabs, which is focused on bringing together studios and tech companies to develop common technology goals.


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