Weekly recap — 29 January 2023

Sun Jan 29, 2023 by Alexandre Prokoudine

Massive open-source releases from Autodesk and DNEG

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Week highlights: Pixar makes a new USD release, Autodesk releases Open RV and DNEG releases xSTUDIO, FreeCAD contributor starts an open-core company.

GIMP

Jehan and CmykStudent recently started porting plugins from GtkAction to GAction, which is the last major milestone blocking the release of v3.0. Turns out, this is not as straightforward as they might hope it would be, over to Jehan:

This […] gave me a good overview of the various missing features in GAction (compared to GtkAction) and how we’ll have to implement this in GIMP core. I now have a very clear path of what remains to be done.

On top of that, Luca Bacci contributed a large patchset to improve the support for non-ASCII characters in paths on Windows.

And because teasing users is what the team is extremely good at, here are the beginnings of CMYK image mode, to be worked on and merged after 3.0 release:

The dream...
Proof of concept for full CMYK mode after GIMP 3.0, inspired by a conversation with @zemarmot. **Very** buggy at the moment, but at least I have a better understanding of how to implement it when the time comes. pic.twitter.com/wQDX5l9IVs
— CMYK Student (@CmykStudent) January 25, 2023

Krita

There’s a lot of plumbing work lately. One notable change in the last week was undo/redo and lock functionality in the color palette docker, all added by Halla Rempt. Undo/redo have been temporarily hidden in the docker, however, because the team intends to redesign it.

Open RV and xSTUDIO released

Autodesk and DNEG made a joint open-source release of their tools for media review and playback, both under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

Open RV, an image and sequence viewer, is hosted by Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) as part of its Open Review Initiative. The ASWF also published an interview with Diana Colella, SVP of Media and Entertainment at Autodesk. This is what she said about the differences between Open RV and RV from ShotGrid (their proprietary project management solution):

While there are some differences between Open RV and the version included ShotGrid, our goal is to keep the two versions as closely aligned as possible. We will also invest in the Open RV project ecosystem and keeping the commercial version in sync so users can easily use both. There are however a few differences such as the support for licensed codecs and ShotGrid integration which we had to remove to expedite the release of OpenRV and minimize delay. Our goal is to add back some of that functionality as open-source – to the extent that it is possible

DNEG’s xSTUDIO, a media playback and review application (Linux-first, no less!), is now also hosted by the ASWF. While this is beta software, you can already view media files in various file formats, all color-managed (OCIO v2), and make review notes on top of the shots. DNEG also has a feature roadmap that mentions things like multi-track sequences (via OTIO) and ASC-CDL color grading being a a work in the progress.

Of course, askNK covered the news:

USD 23.02

Pixar released Universal Scene Description 23.02 with performance improvements, initial schema versioning support, Python 3.10 port, native Metal support via OCIO 2.1.1, and numerous other changes.

Ondsel announced

Brad Colette, a long-time contributor to FreeCAD, creator of the Path workbench (CAM), and author of two FreeCAD books, announced the launch of Ondsel. This is a USA-based public benefit company with initial funding from Open Core Ventures.

The intention is to create paid online services around FreeCAD and contribute back to the upstream project where possible. There’s also a discussion thread that I highly recommend reading if you are worried and/or interested to find out more. By the way, they are hiring.

Brad is also on the board of the FreeCAD Project Association, a Belgium-based non-profit organization launched a year ago by the FreeCAD team. The FPA is something I should have posted about much earlier, and now I have an interview with Yorik van Havre about it in the pipeline (although I’m not yet sure if it will be published here or elsewhere).

Movie workbench for FreeCAD

One thing I missed entirely is a recently created Movie workbench for FreeCAD, by Francisco Rosa. The intention is to help you make this kind of product videos:

The discussion thread is here.

NLE news

The entire NLE department is mostly quiet right now. In Kdenlive, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle recently made a lot of progress with nested sequences. Janne Liljeblad started working on a GTK4 port of Flowblade. And Cinelerra-GG had a bugfix release earlier this month. But that seems to be it right now.

Ardour

Thanks to Paul Davis, both the Preferences and the Session Properties dialogs now have a search function to quickly locate a setting (especially the Preferences dialog has so many of them!). The feature is currently incomplete and needs a lot more metadata to make various settings searchable, but this will be done in time for version 7.3.

Two more features are a work in the progress. Robin Gareus made the first steps towards arranging sections, so that entire parts of a project could be moved elsewhere on the timeline along with tempo map changes and markers. This is early work right now, but it’s happening in the main development branch, so expect more soon.

And then Paul Davis started working on the very basics of clip recording in the Cue view. This is happening in a branch, so I’d say there’s no guarantee it will be part of 7.3. But let’s see!

GxPlugins.lv2

After 6 years of development, Hermann Meyer finally made the v1.0 release of GxPlugins.lv2, a set of LV2 plugins designed to complement Guitarix (a free/libre guitar multi-FX software processor). The pack includes simulators of various overdrive and fuzz/distortion pedals, a dozen of amps, and a cabsim.

GxPlugins 1.0 in Ardour

LSP PLugins 1.2.5

This release comes mostly with various quality-of-life improvements. There is a major change too: all plugins are now available as CLAP plugins (see my coverage from last year for more info), which makes it possible to use them in the Linux version of Bitwig Studio (proprietary).