2022-03-14

RAW to ACES Working Group Meeting Notes

March 14, 2022

Host: Alexander Forsythe

Attendees

Alexander Forsythe (TSC) - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
John Mertic (ASWF) - The Linux Foundation
Kimball Thurston (TSC) - Weta Digital
Mark Boorer - ILM
Michael Lafuente (TSC) - MSG Sphere Studios
Thomas Mansencal (TSC) - WētāFX
Remi Achard - DNEG
Matthias Scharfenberg - ILM
Kevin Wheatley - Framestore

Agenda

  • Review of action items

  • Discuss potential code pushes

  • Should we document high level architecture?

  • MPC / Mikros / Technicolor Questions:

    • What is your positioning regarding libraw (OSS, reading raw files and demosaicing) and rawspeed (OSS, reading raw files)? 

    • At the end, it would be good to load RAW files in oiio and libraw is already integrated in it. How do you see the link between rawtoaces and oiio? 

    • What is your position about DNG Converter? Public SDK driven by Adobe, with restricted features, lack of documentation about what is done in it. DNGConverter however provides cameras profiles in DCP (devices) and LCP (lenses). Do you plan to use them? If not, what is your process to calibrate the cameras·

    • How can we scale to support all cameras? Do you plan to setup a platform where everyone can share calibration files? What kind of information would be stored regarding the device and the optics? 

    • Good RAW conversion tools like CameraRAW in Photoshop also provide some image enhancement with an ISP pipeline (Image Signal Processing), including denoising, sharpening, vignetting, defringing... Are you interested in integrating that into rawtoaces? One of the challenges is that it requires a floating-point implementation of these algorithms. 

Notes

  • Status of code availability:

    • Thomas: Kimball might need clearance from Unity Technologies, should not be any issue but needs to go through the legal chain.

  • MPC / Mikros / Technicolor Questions:

    • Kevin: Keen to to follow-up on some of those. RawTherapee has for example a dedicated demosaicing library (https://github.com/CarVac/librtprocess)

    • Thomas: Talked about Lensfun with Kimball, interest to take over because the Lensfun developers lack of time.

    • Alex: Need a plan on how this would be done.

  • Mark: Code might serve Weta purposes but might need work to define what lives in library vs application space. 

  • Alex: TODO: Will get offline conversation with Kimball to get better clarity on Kimball's overall plan.