ILM, Imageworks release Alembic 1.0

The shift toward open standards and open-source software in visual effects and animation took another step forward Tuesday as Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks released version 1.0 of Alembic -- their open-source interchange format for animation graphics files. "It allows us to hand data between facilities in an easier way than ever before," said Imageworks chief technical officer Rob Bredow. In development more than a year, Alembic represents a rare collaboration between the rival visual effects giants. "We're providing all of this to the community as a single large open-source project," Bredow said. "And we'll see the community develop it from there." The announcement came at a press conference Tuesday morning at the Siggraph conference in Vancouver. Alembic allows animation graphics files to move between software applications easily and quickly, which was not possible with previous file formats. "Most of the things that people come to ILM to Imageworks to do is extremely complicated. You have to use every off-the-shelf tool and internal software to pull this work off. So this helps have the common language between all the different applications," Bredow said. Version 1.0 is the first official production-tested version of Alembic, already in use at Imageworks on "Men in Black III" and "The Amazing Spider-Man." ILM and Imageworks were working separately on the problem of an interchange format; when they learned of each other's work, they decided to pool their efforts. They announced Alembic at last year's Siggraph conference, and with a working version already in hand, they expected to release version 1.0 in just two to three months. But, as Bredow told a Monday session on open source software, once they tried to merge the two projects "we realized we had to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up to realize both our goals," something he said "was not an easy decision." Bredow noted that since the project is open source, neither Imageworks nor Lucasfilm will get any direct financial benefit from it. "This is not a small investment," he said. "Not only do you have to believe it yourself, you have to convince other people who are responsible for funding our organization. We're a for-profit entity." Contact David S. Cohen at david.cohen@variety.com