MovieLabs is pleased to announce the release of version 2.5 of the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) with major extensions into CG Assets to support their use in VFX pipelines and preproduction and audio from capture through to mastering.
There are also various minor updates in this version of the ontology that are based on feedback from implementors – and we love the practical feedback on how the ontology is working for you, so keep it coming! If you’re implementing the Ontology for Media Creation let us know how it’s working for you at office@movielabs.com.
We built the OMC with extensibility in mind, so we’re able to make these major changes in both breadth (new areas of production workflows) and depth (adding new definitions and concepts) to add strength and extra functionality without breaking existing implementations. Much of this new work takes advantage of activities and standards from other industry groups, which we can easily integrate by adding connections to the OMC, and only inventing new things where there isn’t anything preexisting that is suitable. We expect this to be more and more the case as we add new breadth extensions.
All of these new extensions work automatically with existing OMC features and concepts including Contexts, Versions, and Relationships (see our recent blog post on Versions for more on how we approach them within OMC).
New Breadth Extensions in Ontology v2.5
- CG Assets: Computer Generated Assets are a huge part of modern productions in both Visual FX and animated content.
• This release covers what is necessary to describe and exchange simple and complex CG Assets, including simple geometry assets and Compositions – made up of multiple different geometry assets; Maps and Material (again both simple and composite) and placeholders for rigging.
• Since all of these are OMC Assets, they can use the standard OMC mechanisms (Portrayal and Depiction) to tie back to narrative elements such as characters and props, and can be managed with OMC Versions. The extension also covers Purpose and Scale, both of which are known to be trouble spots when exchanging CG Assets within workflows.
• This extension makes heavy use of standards such as USD (USD Home — Universal Scene Description 24.08 documentation (openusd.org)) and MaterialX (MaterialX – Home).
- Audio: This audio extension covers sound and audio from their entry into the production – whether that is from on-set capture, ADR, or a sound library – though sound editorial and into mastering. We also added a more formal connection between sound editorial and picture editorial. Much of the model and controlled vocabulary comes from SMPTE, to which OMC adds some structural formalizations and relationships.
- Images: Images in OMC have moved from being a placeholder to a more formal structure, covering both physical and digital images, along with a simple way of communicating about (though not defining) color spaces. The Images extensions use industry standards such as OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, and ACES.
- Utilities: We added some new utility classes to support the new areas including Compositions, which are sets of Assets that are used to generate other Assets, e.g. a set of audio files and an audio session to generate final audio, or some geometry, maps, and materials to generate rendered frames or turntables.
- Procedural Asset: We added a placeholder class for Procedural Assets – OMC does not delve into their insides, but allows them to be labelled and used by other parts of the ontology.
Changes based on feedback
As implementors start to use OMC Contexts in more situations, it became clear that we should add some specialized types of Context, which are now implemented in v2.5. The main ones are:
Narrative Context – intended to be used with narrative elements, especially when doing script breakdowns.
- Narrative Context – intended to be used with narrative elements, especially when doing script breakdowns.
- Production Context – for things that are particularly relevant to the details of the real world production process, such as managing production sets, production locations, and depictions and portrayals
- Shoot Day Context – In OMC 2.0 and earlier, Shoot Day was just a number. During implementations, we realized the shoot day is much more than that: it is more useful as type of Context that covers everything that is needed to understand, manage, and reason about the complexity of what happens on set on a particular day and the relationships between all of those elements.
- Clarifications – There is a fuller explanation of how to use file-based assets in OMC, and more consistent systematization of narrative elements.
v2.5 Timeline
There are several components to a release of the MovieLabs ontology including updates to the MovieLabs documentation site (at mc.movielabs.com), the RDF versions of the ontology (which is stored on the MovieLabs GitHub repo at github.com/MovieLabs/OMC) and a JSON version of the ontology (also stored on GitHub).
Some of the updates noted in this blog are available now and some will be following later, here is our schedule for release:
We hope you enjoy these new tools and we look forward to seeing all the great new use cases and workflows powered by the interoperability enabled by Ontology for Media Creation!
