Autodesk open sources RV to democratize access and drive open standards

Autodesk is committed to helping creators envision a better world, and having access to great tools allows them do just that. So we are making RV, our Sci-Tech award-winning media review and playback software, open source. Code contributions from RV along with DNEG’s xStudio and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ itview will shape the Open Review Initiative, theAcademy Software Foundation’s (ASWF) newest sandbox project to build a unified, open source toolset for playback, review, and approval.  

Autodesk is a founding member of ASWF, which the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) launched in 2018 under The Linux Foundation umbrella. And the organization’s goal is to encourage the use of open-source software across the motion picture industry to streamline global collaboration.   

“Sharing RV desktop media player with the open source community is a natural next step in our journey to embrace cloud workflows andopen standards – like MaterialX, OpenTimelineIO, and USD,” said Diana Colella, SVP, Media & Entertainment, Autodesk. “At a time when demand for content is at an all-time high, we’re very excited to create new opportunities and resiliency for the industry.”   

RV contains professional-grade media player technology that allows VFX and animation artists, and production teams to seamlessly view high-resolution images and sequences in real time and compare different versions while collaborating on projects.  

“RV is critical to our animation pipeline, and this allows us to share our integrations with the industry. It’s similar to what we’ve done with Autodesk and Pixar to integrate ourALUSDMaya toolsets into the Autodesk supportedmaya-usd plugin,” said Darin Grant, Animal Logic CTO and AWSF board member. “As they did with their contributions to OpenColorIO, Autodesk is once again demonstrating its commitment to open source by sharing foundational libraries and toolsets that will help push the industry forward.”   

Autodesk acquired the RV technology from Tweak Software 2015 and integrated it into theShotGrid production management platform, which has eliminated workflow bottlenecks, enabled live collaborative review sessions, and supported teams in accelerating time to pixel during reviews.  Autodesk will continue supporting RV commercially as part of the ShotGrid ecosystem.  

For details about RV, visit theShotGrid website. To learn more about Autodesk’s commitment to the open source community, check out:https://opensource.autodesk.com.