This week, I watched an interesting video called Open Source in Film. Meanwhile, our team finally completed a feature request on Huggingface, on which we’ve been working for a long time. Click to see the details.

Open Source in Films

In this video, Carol Payne, Larry Gritz, and Dave Neary discussed how the Open-Source movement (mostly on the software for film making) influenced the film industry drastically. Prior to watching this video, I have underestimated the correlation between software development and film making. However, I learned from this video many software tools for color management, editing, documents, rendering were vital to movie production, which have been proprietary before and people could only purchase compiled software.
The Open Source of these software tools have made them much more accessible to indie film makers and students in film making, bridging the gap between them and the big film companies. I believe this contributed to the birth of many indie films that I love! Many film companies are too big to make bold choices, but the software they developed help indie film makers create artistic pictures. Meanwhile, the open-source of these tools makes it possible for one person to seamlessly switch their role between a film-making student, an indie director and a commercial director without technical barriers.

Progress in Huggingface

This week, we finally completed a feature request we’ve been working on and submitted a Pull Request. This is the first time, during the span of this final project, that our team worked together to navigate the codebase, discussed ideas, and write code. Our work focuses on adding time-based strategy for logging, evaluation, and saving during model training. Previously, only epoch-level or step-level strategies were available, yet each step or epoch can take different amount of time to complete. However, the user may be interested in receiving some information at a fixed time interval (just as people often have weekly meetings, instead of progress-based meetings). We believe this PR, if merged, will be of great significance, because it can be seamlessly applied to the training of all kinds of models.
From now to next Wednesday, we will focus on preparing for our presentation. We would like to give an intuitive introduction of Huggingface to our classmates, and provide the best practices of interacting with the community we discovered.