The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), the premier organization for advancing open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, today officially announced the formation of its new Review & Approval Working Group.
The Review & Approval Working Group has two parallel goals. The first is to achieve industry-wide standardization around encoding reviewable media and its accompanying markups and annotations. These efforts will ensure the accuracy of media across different platforms and enable annotations to be interchangeable across multiple studios and vendors, thereby streamlining collaboration.
The second goal is to ultimately create a robust open source collaborative review platform, which any facility can then tailor as needed. An open source platform as the foundation will enable efficient industry-wide standards while still allowing each studio or vendor to build a review tool on top that meets its internal needs. Academy Software Foundation member companies DNEG and Sony Pictures Imageworks are currently leading this work within the working group.
“Efficient review and approval workflow has always been the cornerstone of animation and VFX. As the dynamics of review have changed over time, from film to digital, to multi-site companies and multi-vendor films, and now with work from home, this process has had to adapt to meet the demanding needs of our iterative process. With hundreds or even thousands of shots in play at any point in production, it’s critical that studios and vendors are able to efficiently review media and give accurate notes and graphic feedback in a way that reaches each relevant party without miscommunication or loss of critical context. The Academy Software Foundation is in a perfect position to push for industry-wide standardization of these critical exchanges in the short term, and in the long term, to develop an open source platform for building these collaborative experiences that will benefit everyone,” said Erik Strauss, Director of Engineering at Netflix and the chair of the Review & Approval Working Group.
Developers interested in learning more and contributing to the Review & Approval Working Group can sign up for the mailing list here.
