Open RV will gain from ongoing vendor development as well as community-driven improvements.
The popular media review and playback software from Autodesk, which recently won a Sci-Tech award, is now available as Open RV on GitHub. As part of the Open Review Initiative, which aims to create a single open source toolset for viewing, review, and approval of motion picture and associated professional material, the code will be housed at the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). RV will continue to gain from both community-driven updates and development work from Autodesk engineers as a member of the open source community.
To promote a standardised toolset for native review, Autodesk will continue to manage and develop RV for its commercial clients and actively participate in Open RV and the Open Review Initiative. This action demonstrates Autodesk’s conviction that interoperability and open standards are crucial for the survival and expansion of the visual effects, computer graphics, and animation industries.
VFX, animation, and content development teams employ RV, an industry-leading native review and playback tool, on a worldwide scale. The new open source RV version, which was first announced in August, enables users and studios to review any media with many of the same features as the paid version while also being able to customise, modify, and add new core functionalities that are specific to a project’s requirements or workflow requirements.
A technical steering group (TSC) made up of engineers and community members will oversee Open RV. The TSC will be led by Autodesk. The project, together with DNEG’s xStudio and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ itview, will be managed by the Open Review Initiative. Software developers and engineers can join the Open Review Initiative mailing list and ASWF Open Review Initiative Slack channel to participate in the project and the community.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) and the Linux Foundation created the ASWF in 2018, and Autodesk is one of its founding members. The ASWF is the top organisation in the motion picture industry for furthering the development of open source software for image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies.
Developers and the open source community can now access the Autodesk RV source code, known as Open RV, via the ASWF GitHub. With the intention of incorporating new functionality into the commercial version of RV, which is still accessible to customers with ShotGrid subscriptions or perpetual RV licences with active maintenance plans, Autodesk will actively participate in and monitor community-driven developments in Open RV.
