OpenTimelineIO Becomes Fifth Project Hosted at Academy Software Foundation

Created at Pixar Animation Studios, OpenTimelineIO is an open source interchange format for editorial timeline information

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 29, 2019 – The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a neutral forum for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, today announced that OpenTimelineIO has been accepted by the Academy Software Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC) as the fifth Foundation-hosted project. Initially created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenTimelineIO (OTIO) is an Open Source API and interchange format that facilitates collaboration and communication of editorial data and timeline information between a studio’s Story, Editorial, and Production departments all the way through Post-Production. Since 2016, there have been eleven OTIO releases with contributions from many studios and vendors including Pixar, Lucasfilm and Netflix. It has been used in production for films including Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4.

“Picture-less data produced by editorial departments is very useful across the pipeline. We developed OpenTimelineIO to provide an open source alternative to proprietary formats and enable our community to easily and efficiently interchange editorial timelines,” said Guido Quaroni, Vice President of Research and Development at Pixar. “As an Academy Software Foundation project, we hope OpenTimelineIO can help facilitate content creation within the motion picture and other similar industries.”

OTIO makes it easier to build tools that use editorial timeline information, filling a gap in film production pipelines that was previously underserved by similar, proprietary technologies. It supports clips, timing, tracks, transitions, markers, and metadata in an API that is easy for studios to integrate with their tools and for vendors to integrate with their software. Use cases include tracking shot length changes, providing context shots in dailies, communicating shots added or removed, conforming new renders into a cut, and dealing with picture-in-picture shots.

“OpenTimelineIO is quickly becoming a part of an industry standard editorial pipeline, both within and between animation studios, visual effects studios, and third-party vendors,” said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “With the support of the broader Academy Software Foundation community, we hope the ecosystem of third-party tools that support OpenTimelineIO will grow, making it easier for users to integrate it into their pipelines.”

Erik Strauss, Netflix Director of Post-Production Engineering, added “collaborating with a diverse community of creative partners and service providers demands a precise and uniform way to store and exchange the relationships between media assets in a timeline. We are excited to be able to contribute to OTIO as an opportunity to improve the interchange of this essential production data, and standardize its authoring for our community of filmmakers. As an active OpenTimelineIO contributor, we are very excited to see it become an Academy Software Foundation project, and as a new Foundation member, we look forward to working with the rest of the community to grow the project.”

The Academy Software Foundation will maintain and further develop the project with oversight provided by a technical steering committee. OpenTimelineIO joins OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB as projects in the incubation stage at the Academy Software Foundation. All newly accepted projects start in incubation while they work to meet the high standards of the Academy Software Foundation and later graduate to full adoption. This allows the Academy Software Foundation to consider and support projects at different levels of maturity and industry adoption, as long as they align with the Foundation’s mission to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base.

Developers interested in learning more or contributing to OpenTimelineIO can sign up to join the OTIO mailing list or attend the OpenTimelineIO Meet-Up at SIGGRAPH 2019 on Tuesday, July 30, from 1-2pm in the JW Marriott, Diamond Ballroom 7-10. The OpenTimelineIO Meet-Up is part of the Academy Software Foundation’s “Open Source Day” on July 30, a full day of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions focused on open source projects used for visual effects, animation, and image creation. Additional details are available here.

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About the Academy Software Foundation
Developed in partnership by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation provides a neutral forum for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound. The Foundation is home to OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenTimelineIO, and OpenVDB.  For more information or to get involved in the Academy Software Foundation, visit ASWF.io.

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Media Inquiries
Emily Olin
Academy Software Foundation
eolin@linuxfoundation.org