Date: 2014-04-09

Location: The Las Vegas Convention Center, 3150 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV, USA

• GenArts, Inc., represented by Gary Oberbrunner
• RE:Vision Effects, represented by Pierre Jasmin
• Sony Creative Software, Inc. (SCS), represented by Dennis Adams

• Miguel Angel Doncel and Roman Dudek, SGO
• Kostyantyn Onyshchenko, Quantel
• Boris Yamnitsky, Boris FX
• Rohit Gupta and Vivek Vedagiri, Blackmagic Design
• Marc-Antoine Arnaud, Mikros Image (maintainer of TuttleOFX)
• John-Paul Smith, Imagineer Systems

Minutes

• Quorum present, meeting brought to order
• Reappointment of Directors
• Directors reappointed by show of hands:
• Peter Huisma (not present), Secretary
• Pierre Jasmin and Gary Oberbrunner, Directors
• Company Accounts presented: Approved
• Reviewed status of organization:
• Membership now aligned with calendar year (was previously May to May)
• Association address has changed but still in UK
• New website is live
• Current members list:
• The Foundry, FilmLight, Assimilate, GenArts, RE:Vision Effects, Sony Creative Software, and Vidmaker
• General Business
• Introductions
• New members
• Gratis membership offered to TuttleOFX open source project: Accepted by Mikros Image
• Boris FX would like to join
• Imagineer System would like to join
• Quantel would like to join
• Blackmagic Design will probably join
• Retiring members
• Vidmaker will no longer be a member as of 2014
• Discussion of whether the Association could prevent private implementations (to make OpenFX more “open”)
• No current action (many members felt part of being “open” is the ability to implement as you want)
• SGO will propose changes to association charter for review and discussion
• Discussion of whether the membership cost should be reviewed
• Proposal to keep costs the same for now: Passed
• The Association would like to hire someone to improve the documentation and samples
• Discussion of how to further evangelize OpenFX
• Perhaps find an evangelist to talk to potential hosts and plug-in vendors at NAB or other tradeshows
• Discussion of how developers can get support
• Suggestion that they should use the ofx-discussion Google Group
• Suggestion to use samples on github (note that they are not always complete)
• Suggestion that the Association could sponsor an OpenFX tag on StackOverflow
• Pierre indicated that he will push new items tagged as 1.4 that had already been approved
• It was noted that Gary is the head librarian of the github repository
• Proposals of new extensions
• SCS proposed an extension for OpenCL rendering, based on what is already being used in Vegas Pro and Movie Studio
• Action: SCS and RE:Vision Effects to work together to submit proposal (including details on how it would work with multiple GPUs)
• Action: GenArts and BMD to work together to submit proposal for a similar extension for CUDA
• RE:Vision Effects requested an extension to or a documentation clarification of the existing GPU render extension so that a plug-in may revoke their ability to do GPU processing (this would allow them to have a user option or heuristic to turn off GPU processing other than just returning an error from the render call which likely isn’t efficient on some hosts).
• Action: RE:Vision Effects and SCS to further discuss and propose
• SCS proposed an extension for GPU resource management similar to the existing CPU memory suite but for OpenGL buffers and textures & per-context OpenCL buffers and images, enabling host-managed pooling (for performance) and knowledge of GPU memory used (for better memory management)
• Action: SCS and RE:Vision Effects to further discuss and propose
• Action: BMD & GenArts to further discuss and propose same thing for CUDA buffers
• Related to that proposal, SCS proposed a host-managed MRU caching extension for CPU memory and GPU resources
• Assign a unique per-plug-in 64-bit ulong and then release resource; later you can ask for it, and the host might still have it
• Useful for things you can rebuild but would prefer not to for performance; enables better overall memory management
• Action: SCS and RE:Vision Effects to further discuss and propose
• Action: BMD & GenArts to further discuss and propose same thing for CUDA buffers
• SCS proposed an extension for host-managed presets (user and factory), including an XML format they’ve created for single presets, keyframed parameters, and plug-in chains
• There was some discussion of how to handle differing parameters between different hosts, and versioning
• Action: None (not enough interest; many plug-in vendors do their own preset management)
• SCS proposed “FXDL”, a method to communicate plug-in chains and parameters between tools in a workflow (based on similar ideas that made ASC-CDL successful)
• Enabling on-set pre-visualization using commercial plug-ins, communicated non-destructively downstream to other tools, accurately communicating the DP’s or Colorist’s intentions
• Action: SCS and Imagineer to further discuss and propose.
• BMD expressed interest in supporting.
• Imagineer raised the need for plug-ins to create host splines and there was discussion of tracking and animated splines as well as the difference in how splines are represented and used in various hosts
• Action: Imagineer, BMD, GenArts to further discuss and propose
• GenArts raised the topic of making changes to certain properties after they have been initially defined (e.g., parameter label). It was felt that the existing API could handle this with additional documentation specifying how it would be done. SCS added that in addition to label, the specification should say which parameters could be changed (e.g., min/max ranges probably, type probably not).
• Pierre mentioned that the new website has a place for making proposals so as each group comes up with initial proposals, that’s where they go
• Meeting closed.