Sony Pictures Open Sources Software Used to Make 'Into the Spider-Verse' (variety.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Variety: Sony Pictures Imageworks has contributed a software tool used to create movies like "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," "Hotel Transylvania 3," "Alice in Wonderland" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" to the open source community. OpenColorIO, a tool used for color management during the production process, has become the second software project of the Academy Software Foundation, an industry-wide open source association spearheaded by the Linux Foundation.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has for some time given the industry free and open access to OpenColorIO under a modified BSD license. By contributing the tool to the Academy Software Foundation, the studio hopes to encourage the community to take charge of the future of the tool, said Sony Pictures Imageworks vice president and head of software development Michael Ford. "We want to contribute OpenColorIO back to the community that relies on it, and the Academy Software Foundation is the natural fit," he said.

Comments

The Great Colour Leveller

[DThorne]

It's been integrated in many software products for some time now. The essential gist of it is that light capture, manipulation and display is littered with all sorts of incredibly complicated, and sometimes proprietary encodings that can make combining them a colossal mess. OCIO was an attempt to sit down and formalize the stew into a process that would convert all those colour spaces and light capture methods into a workable primary for manipulation(linear).
I'll be honest, I've been using it for so many years I assumed it was already OS, I guess I was wrong, and now Sony wants to pass control to the community. Cool.

Sony, ILM and others have done things like this for some time, and despite the jokes about embedded hacker code or unreliability, in fact not only is it not true(these are tried and true production tools that tend to be fairly atomic and rigorously tested), but the reasoning behind it are quite pragmatic. The notion of a single FX facility doing an entire movie/show has basically disappeared now - the economic reality is many studios of wildly different sizes will work on a single show, frequently in a panic at the last minute to boot when the workload increases but the delivery won't budge. In the past, every studio had it's own swiss army knife approach to all the countless technical issues in the pipe, so every little thing such as file format(like ILM's venerable EXR - still the major player) or light manipulation that studios can use and not worry about incompatibility is a win/win for everyone. It might seem like a gift, but it's more a hope for striking another obstacle to sharing off the list.

When I saw the article title, I thought it was referencing OpenCue, which Sony and Google have jointly just released to OS. It's a render farm manager, which is limited to the software tools at Sony, but again by OS'ing it, in theory other plugins could be added and released and make it a more general use tool.