New Program by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic Streamlines CG File Sharing

July 29, 2010 by Yonah
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services

Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks, two major companies in the visual effects business, have teamed up to launch an open-source software as a solution for sharing large, complex CG files.

The need for such a viable solution was dictated by the increasing difficulty in sharing digital files between various software, sites and vfx studios due to the growing in size and complexity of the files being shared. To this adds the fact complex visual effects projects make often the job of multiple f/x studios which makes the file sharing ability really imperative.

The fruit of the collaboration between the two giants is “Alembic” an ILM/SPI project, a file format developed to give sharing of complex images more speed and efficiency. The project was announced on Tuesday at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles by the chief technology officers of both companies, Richard Kerris of ILM and Rob Bredow of SPI.

The chief technology officers of the two companies, Richard Kerris of ILM and Rob Bredow of SPI, announced Alembic on Tuesday at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.

“The goal is to have as many people involved as possible to do what’s best for the industry,” said Kerris, while according to Bredow, Imageworks is pretty happy with Alembic having tested it already on few productions.

Alembic will become available next month at alembic.io and via SPI’s open-source software site.

Tags: file sharing service, file-sharing