2020-10-20

Attendees

[ ]  John Mertic (Linux Foundation)

[ ]  Cary Phillips (ILM, OpenEXR, Sci-tech council)

[x]  Darin Grant (Animal Logic, ASWF Treasurer)

[x]  David Morin (Epic / ASWF Exec Director)

[x]  Eric Enderton (NVIDIA, DigiPro)

[x]  Joshua Minor (OTIO / Pixar)

[ ]  Nick Porcino (OTIO, OpenEXR / Pixar)

[ ]  Sean McDuffee (Intel)

[x]  Will Telford (ADSK)

[x]  Eric Bourque (ADSK)

[x]  Orde Stevanoski (Imageworks)

[x]  Lee Kerley (Imageworks)

[x]  Daniel Heckenberg (Animal Logic)

[x]  Alex Wilkie (Animal Logic)

[ ]  Bruno Sargeant (Unity Technologies Inc - M&E PM)

[x]  JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)

[ ]  Roman Zulak (Imageworks)

[ ]  Michael B Johnson (Apple, WG chair)

[x]  Rob Bredow (ILM, ASWF Chair)

[x] Haley Kannall (AWS)

[x] Sebastian Herholz (Intel)

[x] Deke Kincaid (Digital Domain)

Agenda

• Welcome/Intros

•  

  • WG chair not present?

  • There was a schedule conflict, but the meeting didn’t get moved.

• Calendar issues form some folks.

•  

  • Future meetings should be advertised on the mailing list and/or Slack?

  • Other ASWF WG meeting earlier today had similar problems.

• Scope of Working Group

•  

  • Aiming to create a proposal to ASWF

  • Question: Is this WG aiming for just current ASWF project-related assets, or something larger than this? For example, challenging scenes to render.

• Homework followup:

•  

  • Does your company have assets that would be useful to share?

• Disney Animation findings (via Rob Bredow & Nick Cannon)

•  

  • Relaying message from Nick Cannon

  • Getting permission for the Moana Island project was actually easier than expected. Disney’s openness for this could set a positive precedent.

  • Took a long time to get approval, but actual legal work was quick.

  • Biggest cost was in labor involved in transforming the data into an open format. OBJ - For example, USD version of Moana Island is still in progress.

  • Hosting cost for large data sets was non-trivial, but not super expensive (just needs to be budgeted)

  • Licensing questions: will the content be misused in a way the creators/owners are uncomfortable with?

  • Cannot use Disney trademarks, cannot misrepresent derivatives as coming from Disney

  • Short paper about the challenges:  https://www.disneyanimation.com/publications/?drawer=/publications/the-challenges-of-releasing-the-moana-island-scene/

• OpenTimelineIO findings so far (JT + Josh)

•  

  • JT Nelson has collected open film content here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_kefZpDT98-TSWlEN9X3IdLJGNbq0F4w-kKilyw2jkg/edit

  • We have found the source assets, and final footage for several open films, but we have not yet found the actual editorial timeline for any of these yet.

• Licenses?

•  

  • Hard to get “real production” assets.

  • Moana Island license allows for “research and software development” - we would want more permissive allowances for presentations, demos, etc.

  • Do we know stories/use cases where terms were too restrictive?

  • Some content out there is published without a clearly identified license. For example, these video clips and source assets say “Creative Commons” but without specifying which CC license: https://www.beeple-crap.com/vjloops

  • Desired uses:

  •  

    • Research

    • Software Development

    •  

      • Performance Testing

      • Correctness Testing

    • Presentations & Demonstrations

• Example open assets:

•  

  • Moana Island scene: https://www.disneyanimation.com/data-sets/?drawer=/resources/moana-island-scene/

  • Hyperspace Madness: https://area.autodesk.com/hyperspacemadness/

  • USD sample assets: http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/downloads.html

  • Sony Zombie Rig: https://secure.sonypictures.com/animation/hotelt/zombierig/videosubmissions/

  • Netflix open media: https://netflixtechblog.com/engineers-making-movies-aka-open-source-test-content-f21363ea3781

  • Blender Foundation projects (Blender scene files + rendered clips):

  •  

    • http://www.bigbuckbunny.org

    • https://durian.blender.org/

  • More here:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_kefZpDT98-TSWlEN9X3IdLJGNbq0F4w-kKilyw2jkg/edit

• Possible assets that could be contributed

•  

  • From animation studios, VFX, etc.?

  • From Universities?

  • UCLA Film and Television Archive

  •  

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Film_and_Television_Archive

    • https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/

  • AWS has some assets that might be a good choice (Haley Kannall)

  • Imageworks (Emoji city “Textopolis”, and a realistic dog)

  • Light transport test scenes from Intel (Sebastian Herholz)

  • Cloud (weather kind of cloud) asset library for OpenVBD from Intel? (Sean McDuffee)

• Hosting costs

•  

  • Some potential contributors are concerned about cost of hosting

  • ASWF could possibly host these - this WG will attempt to estimate size and costs for proposal to ASWF TAC & Governing Board

  • Moana data set is 265 GB (46 GB compressed). Hosting cost was 70 TB in the first week of downloads (tapered off from there).

  • Note: we should pick assets that appeal to the desired audience and not accidentally induce high hosting costs (e.g. a high profile, famous character or location might be a poor choice?)

Action Items:

• Locate assets at your company/project that might be worth contributing.

• Ask your employer about contributing - what are their objections, how could ASWF lower the barriers to entry?

• Estimate size of assets.