Nvidia and Red Hat are the latest high-profile companies to join the Academy Software Foundation, a consortium that aims to help Hollywood with the adoption and development of open source tools. The foundation has also taken two additional open source projects, OpenEXR and OpenCue, under its wings.
In addition to Nvidia and Red Hat, the Academy Software Foundation also accepted ftrack, a company that has developed software for collaborative media review, as a new member.
“Open source technologies have been a source of innovation for the motion picture and broader media industry for many years, and Red Hat has been proud to collaborate with many of the leaders in this space to both enable their adoption of open source and to progress technologies in a way that has enabled this innovation,” said Red Hat chief technology officer Chris Wright in a statement. “We’re happy to join the Academy Software Foundation to expand this work and drive open standards that deliver sustainable interoperability.”
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“We’re looking forward to working with the Academy Software Foundation to help shape the future of this creative industry,” added Nvidia director of media & entertainment partnerships John Ison.
The Academy Software Foundation was founded last summer by the Linux Foundation and the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Existing members of the group include Dreamworks Animation, Epic, Sony Pictures, the Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. and others.
Some of the open source projects overseen by the foundation include OpenVDB and OpenColorIO, with the latter being a color management tool used for the production of movies like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “Hotel Transylvania 3,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”
OpenEXR, one of the two new projects announced Wednesday, was originally developed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as a high-dynamic range file format. It was first used for movies like “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Men in Black II,” and more recently was deployed to create “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Black Panther,” among other films.
OpenCue, the other new project, is an open source render manager developed by Google Cloud in partnership with Sony Pictures Imageworks.