Last week end from 21th to 23th October mentors meet in San Francisco / US to share our experiences in organising and mentoring students during Google Summer of Code 2011, talk about open source projects and of course get in contact with other teams and meet in person. The Mentors Summit was well organised and it was fun to be there. It was my first time in the south of North America. So chances where good to meet new people.

The VLC and FFMPEG people where interested in colour management. I tried to give them some idea, what colour managed applications need to know about media streams. It seems, that awareness rises about colour management in the open source video community, which is wonderful.

Two members of the Scribus team where present, Peter Linell and Malex. We could discuss quite some topics around distributions. It was great to meet them both.

The Open Source in Visual Effects was missed be me due to a swapping of rooms. Luckily Peter knew the OpenColorIO author and we could get in contact in a small four people meeting. We discussed Linux colour management, distribution and the relation of movie picture to ICC style colour management. Jeremy Selan pointed out the very difference of HDR scene referred imagery compared to the style of HDR which is typical in ICC workflows. I could convince Jeremy to look at the ICC floating point extension and it’s two open source implementations. He was interested and might work on implementing that in OCIO too. If that happens, it would be a great step toward joining movie with still graphics workflows. In the past the issues around round tripping and HDR handling had lead to the decision of movie studios to develop own colour management systems. OCIO supports already the export of colour correction tables to ICC profiles for use in photo and paint applications, which traditionally feature ICC workflows. Once the input side through ICC profiles is implemented in OCIO the same library could be used as a CMM inside ICC and movie workflows.

Thanks to Google and its OPSO team for sponsoring and organising a great event.