Open Effects Association Wiki
Welcome to the website of The Open Effects Association (OFX). This non-profit company aims to develop and promote open standards across the visual effects community. Founding members come from Assimilate, Autodesk, Digieffects, FilmLight, The Foundry, Genarts and RE:Vision FX, who between them, have helped artists create ground-breaking VFX shots on just about everything that hits our cinema screens. The Association’s initial focus is to improve the OpenFX image processing plug-in standard. This standard's goal is to reduce the level of development and support required for plug-ins across different compositing and editing host platforms.
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For many years, compositing and editing application vendors have created interfaces for plug-in developers to connect to their host products.
Each host vendor had to develop their own proprietary interface. This
meant that each plug-in vendor had to port their plug-ins to all the
different hosts, hosts couldn't use each other's plug-ins, limiting the
selection of effects available to artists. The need for a standard
interface was becoming clear by the time of the initial OFX
conversations in 2002 and 2003. Bruno Nicoletti of The Foundry took
charge of the initial spec and implementation, with comments from many
interested parties. The first implementations were available in 2004
and 2005, and by now many host and plug-in vendors support OFX with more
added continously.
The Association's role is to standardize and develop OFX's intellectual property for the good of the community; it finalizes the transition of the OFX code base and specification to a true open source model (under a liberal BSD license), and serves as a governing body for further refinements and additions to OFX.
The benefit of OFX for artists is that more plug-ins will be available to them. In the past, if you were a user of a certain host application, you had to wait for plug-in vendors to port their cool effects to your application. Now with OFX, once the host implements its side of the protocol, *all* the OFX plug-ins on the market instantly become available to that host's users. And similarly, plug-in vendors can concentrate on what they're best at – making cool effects, rather than porting to new hosts all the time.