Hi,
let me comment on some of this:
As Troy mentioned, I think it is contra-productive to start a we vs them mentality in an open software project.
I think there is only a “we” (the media and entertainment industry) that’s it.
And we should do what is the best for us.
I think it would help the industry to have an easy interoperability system to communicate the pipeline for production. Also, some studios are demanding an ACES pipeline, even if the parties in the loop are not comfortable with it. Having a flexible output pipeline would make all parties happy.
I think you cannot find one output transforms which satisfies the needs for all productions in the presence and (more important) in the future. How could you forsee the future?
A live-action movie needs something else than an anime hand-animated movie.
This is a fundamental concept of any natural system.
Without mutation and without diversification you have no evolution, no innovation no progress. I think a joined effort like this one should empower innovation instead of discarding it.
It is not about fixing…
The same is true for a unified working space. Why should we do all operations in ACEScct. Maybe I want to do a CAT in LMS, a photoshop blend mode in another space and then a saturation operation in a CAM-ish space.
In the mid-term future, the concept of a working space will be obsolete.
I really feel sorry for what I am writing now but the ST2065-1 file format is far from unambiguous. If I give you a ST2065-1 file you don’t know if it was made with the ut33, 0.1.1, 0.2.1, 0.71, 1.03 or 1.1 version of ACES. Which all will producer quite a different version of the movie.
So the argument at the most forefront of defending the single output transform actually proves itself as unachievable and just sets the wrong incentives for the argumentation sake.
Is it a bad thing that we have an ambiguous archive file format? I don’t think so. It is good to have ST 2065 and nail down a few parameters for the encoding. It is a better DSM, that’s it and it is great.
There will be different display renderings as time passes. You need to archive those display renderings along with the image material this is the only way. Having a unified industry-agreed way of specific and archiving those would be a real winner.
What I am really afraid of for our future generation is that they will restore severely limited ST2065-1 files, because we rendered hacky LMTs into our masters which go to 709 and then back again, just because the actual system was not flexible enough. This is ethically and morally the wrong approach in my opinion. And we are steering right at it with a single output system.
It is a challenge to design a meta-framework and needs a lot of thinking. But I think it is the right task to fry our brains.
If we come to the conclusion that a flexible output transform system is the best thing to do I think it is a valid outcome for a vwg. We still need a very robust vanilla-aces-transform.
I hope some of this makes sense.
Daniele