Date: 01-Sep-2012

Summary

AMSTERDAM—September 4, 2012—The Open Effects Association (OFX), a non-profit organization that promotes open standards across the visual effects community, today announced the immediate availability of version 1.3 specifications and source code.

Founded in 2004, The Open Effects Association was created to encourage open communication between hosts and plug-in developers, while establishing a uniform specification built to benefit artists and users.

New in V1.3: OFX OpenGL/GPU rendering extension

The new suite has been tested for future product deployment on the plug-in side by GenArts Sapphire v6, and on the host side by Assimilate Scratch and Sony Vegas Pro. An industry first, it increases performance by allowing direct transfer of images between host and plug-ins without moving the data to the CPU and back to the GPU.

“We’re very excited about the new OpenFX 1.3 GPU rendering extension because it will allow plug-ins using the GPU to integrate right into our GPU-accelerated video processing engine in a very efficient manner, providing smoother playback and faster rendering.” (Dennis Adams, Director of Technology, Sony Creative Software)

“Sapphire is getting unprecedentedly fast render performance using the OpenFX 1.3 GPU rendering extension with CUDA in Scratch. We are very excited to be part of this groundbreaking project.” (Gary Oberbrunner, Chief Scientist, GenArts Inc.)

Also of note: the source code has moved to github – https://github.com/ofxa and if you are a developer, feel free to join our mailing list: ofx_discussion@googlegroups.com. Join the Association to get early access to new features and help define future versions of the standard. Ongoing operation continues to be maintained transparently at: http://openeffects.org/

About OFX

The Open Effects Association (OFX) is a non-profit company that aims to develop and promote open standards across the visual effects community. The Association’s focus is to improve the OpenFX image processing plug-in standard to reduce the level of development and support required for plug-ins across different compositing and editing host platforms.

Current voting members include: Assimilate, FilmLight, The Foundry, GenArts Inc., RE:Vision Effects, and Sony Creative Software. By joining OFX, members can network with fellow plug-in developers and collaborate to extend the OFX API.

For further information, and if you are interested in joining the organization contact one of the association board members: Peter Huisma peter.huisma@assimilateinc.com, Gary Oberbrunner garyo@genarts.com, or Pierre Jasmin pierre@revisionfx.com).