Hearing about a film production company making use of open source applications within a production is rare. and even using a Linux distribution alongside open source tools is rarer.
There are even few films that are known to have been made with the help of free software (this compared to the titles that are released per year). But now it seems that things are about to change since the use of free tools for the use of films was only one step, now the approach is another.
Sony Pictures Imageworks has contributed a software tool used to create movies like "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", "Hotel Transylvania 3", "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" and many others for the open source community.
About OpenColorIO
OpenColorIO (LEISURE) is a complete color management solution geared towards imaging in motion with an emphasis on visual effects and computer animation.
LEISURE offers a straightforward and consistent user experience across all supported apps, while allowing sophisticated back-end configuration options suitable for high-end production use. OCIO is compliant with the Academy Color Coding Specification (ACES) and is independent of the LUT format, and supports many popular formats.
OpenColorIO was released as version 1.0 and has been in development since 2003. LEISURE represents the culmination of years of production experience gained on films such as Spider-Man 2 (2004), Surf's Up (2007), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and many more. OpenColorIO is natively supported in commercial applications such as Katana, Mari, Nuke, Silhouette FX, and others.
OpenColorIO is a tool used for managing color during the production process, it has become the second software project of the Academy Software Foundation, an industry-wide open source association led by the Linux Foundation.
Linux helping on the big screens
In August 2018, the Linux Foundation reported that it joined with Hollywood to create a conglomerate of companies to promote the use of technologies and open sources of software by the «Academy of Arts and Sciences» in the productions, thus being born »Academia Software Foundation» (ASWF).
Before the birth of the Software Foundation Academy, the first project to join was OpenVDB, which is an open source C ++ library, developed by DreamWorks Animation, which is the organization of volumetric applications as well as data manipulation for productions.
Academia Software Foundation welcomes its second member
The second company to enter a project at ASWF is Sony Pictures Imageworks, with OpenColorIO (OCIO). Sony Pictures Imageworks has granted 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 ownership of the future of the tool. The announcement was made by Emily Rosen Olin, Third PR Manager of the Linux Foundation, in a post on the project's official blog.
That still had a statement from Sony Vice President Michael Ford, responsible for software development within the company, with the following statement:
"We want to contribute OpenColorIO to the community that depends on it, and the Academy Software Foundation is the natural choice"
"Developers and companies that use it every day will guide the project roadmap, starting with the features and release cadence for the new version 2.0."
How to use OpenColorIO on Linux?
OpenColorIO it can be used with some software already present in Linux, such as Krita, Nuke, Natron and Blender. At the moment OpenColorIO has the installer for RedHat and CentOS, but on its site we can find instructions on how to compile the program on its distro.
To learn how to do this, just go to this link here.