TSC Meeting Minutes 2022-12-06

Owned by Gary Oberbrunner
Last updated: Dec 06, 2022
3 min read

Attendees

  • TSC Members: Gary Oberbrunner (Dark Star Systems), , John-Paul Smith (Boris FX), Pierre Jasmin (RE:Vision FX), Dennis Adams (Sony), Phil Barrett (Filmlight), Peter Huisma (Assimilate)

  • Visitors: Paul Miller (Boris FX), Philippe Jean (Autodesk), Jasmin Roy (Autodesk), Roman Dudek (SGO Mistika), Mikki Wells (Boris FX), Scott Wilson

Minutes

Meeting called to order at 11:05am EST

Organizational Matters

  • The Association as filed a motion to be dissolved; we are in a 2 month waiting period before it is closed but nothing more needs to be done.

  • All Association funds have been donated to ASWF.

  • Website: no action since last time. Gary will ping John Mertic to see what we need to do next – fill out website form?

  • Pierre asked if we have a shared document repository like dropbox or github available from ASWF or the Linux Foundation. Gary will ask John M.

  • Gary will ask John about github migration – we are ready for that.

  • Mailing lists have all been migrated over to ASWF.

Technical Matters



  • Overlay Draw Suite:

    • This is in https://github.com/ofxa/openfx/pull/97

    • Paul will review, add doc, & implement (in progress)

    • Question was raised: what about custom param drawing? (As opposed to image overlays)

      • Red Giant does this, says Pierre

      • Group decided not to try to support custom params with this new suite yet - too many unknowns

    • Action items: Pierre will talk w/ Red Giant, Phil will write some text describing current limitations to be included in the header(s)

  • GPU:

    • Progress update on adding the new GPU image-transfer extensions: OpenCL, CUDA, Metal, etc.

    • Initial version with new properties (mistakenly) added directly to main in https://github.com/ofxa/openfx/commit/aad9e0c43

    • Who's using which GPU transfer modes today?

      • Sony: OpenCL & OpenGL

      • Baselight: OpenGL, about to release CUDA & Metal

      • Mistika: OpenGL (would use OpenCL but not today)

      • RE:Vision: OpenCL, or OpenGL sometimes (in-house Vulkan & Metal, unreleased)

      • Paul: OpenGL and OpenCL native (plugin side; host coming)

      • Resolve: CUDA & Metal

      • Sapphire: BMD CUDA extension

      • Assimilate: OpenCL (& OpenGL)

    • Pierre asks: should these new image extensions support the same features as the OpenGL extension – specifically, what about GPU/CPU opt-out and fallback, and error handling?

      • Phil: both host & plugin declare support, then host decides which it'll send, so there's no support for CPU opt-out

      • Who will work on adding support for these features?

        • Dennis will implement plugin & host (Paul too); he'll work on plugins being able to opt out

      • Sounds like a mini-project or subcommittee

        • CPU fallback and/or opt-out

        • Error handling

        • Documentation

      • Need official examples (can get from BMD examples, but may need copyright clearance)

    • Jasmin Roy, Autodesk:

      • Interested in direct Vulkan support in OpenFX

      • Substance Vulkan lib is now in Flame

      • They have a prototype API working; not perfect yet but functional

      • Shares device, queues, etc.

      • Plugin has to own its own shaders & manage mem

      • Would like to move to host-side buffer/texture management, but current version works OK

      • There are something like 5 objects to be sent to the plugin, but not too complex

      • Synchronization: each render request has to be synchronized (flush device) -- even with sync it's still pretty fast

      • Alternate possibility: provide command queues to plugin from host (but not how it works now)

        • Phil: other GPUs pass queue and don't synchronize; would be best to stick to that (Jasmin agrees)

      • Working on Mac in MoltenVK as well as Linux

      • "More complicated than Metal but totally doable"

      • Pierre says RE:Vision might be willing to help test this from plugins, but would need an example to work from

    • Dennis: we should ship more examples in general, especially for new features -- what about host support?

      • Maybe start w/ BMD example and try porting that to Vulkan?

      • Would need copyright clearance to ship them but could use internally

    • Dennis suggests host could have functions to allocate & cache buffers & textures

      • This could be useful for CPU as well (compute cache style)

    • Peter: if we add more than what's in Resolve, will Resolve take up the additional features? If not, are we wasting our time?

      • There are other OFX hosts, so perhaps not 

      • Pierre will ask Resolve folks if they would implement a standard version of their suite (with new features/methods)

  • Color handling progress report:

    • Will be based on OpenColorIO (OCIO)

    • JP submitted OCIO extension PR, WIP, Phil has provided feedback

    • They will continue on that a few more iterations before it'll be ready

    • Currently it's used between hosts & plugins that both use OCIO; may need more work if one side isn't using OCIO

      • What about an ACES host or plugin (without OCIO support)?

      • Maybe a minimal OCIO config just to support plugins that need it?

    • API sends a reference to a disk file and some strings rather than a complete OCIO config – those are large

    • Need OCIO props on output clip (not there yet)

    • What about transitions – what if each clip had a different color space? That's a bit pathological, but we should define behavior

  • Rust bindings: discussion proposed by Scott Wilson, but he had audio problems and had to drop off

    • Discussion deferred til next meeting

  • Gary will check out C++ wrapper: does it still build?

Meeting adjourned 12:15pm EST

Meeting Recording is on Zoom, with transcript