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Discreet (now Autodesk Media & Entertainment yadda yadda) ships Flint and Flame on Linux (yes, x86 only). They have a proprietary high performance realtime file system that lives on attached SCSI drives ("Stone"). Are they likely to give away their "crown jewels", the source to that driver? Not bloody likely. Would their customers like to be able to pop that driver into any version of Linux other than the exact kernel and options that Discreet ships? Certainly! Would Discreet even like to allow their customers to do this? Definitely! They wouldn't have to ship an update for every RedHat kernel update for instance.

Currently that driver has all the mangled kernel symbols in it, as well as the well-known struct-size/offset etc. issues. If there were a binary layer like nvidia uses for their drivers, this would be easy.

Note that this is not a hardware device that is portable to PPC, Alpha, whatever other devices you might want to run Linux on so the portability concerns are moot. And the chances of getting the driver "into the tree" are zero. It's a Flame ferchrissakes. Discreet has a right to control access to its hardware and its custom software. But it would sure make everyone's life easier if their driver could install on more than just one exact kernel build!

Anyway enough ranting for now.

And editing:
Nucoda Film cutter, ifx Piranha and Discreet Smoke.

Taking a look at the System Requirments for the more well known 3D Animation apps we see Alias's Maya and Softimage's XSI run natively under Linux. Which when you are dealing with animations that can take literally days to render for production it's no wonder they'd want to use a Linux machine instead of a Windows machine, I'm sure it cuts the time by at least 30% (totally grabbed that number out of my ass)

So is it news that the big animation companies also use OS X instead of XP too? I think the only big name 3d animation company that is Windows only is Discreet with their 3ds Max software, which I think is really only used for games, can't think of a movie that it was used for.

Sys Requirements:
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/requirements.php
http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/sy stem_requirements.shtml
http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/3dsmax.php?id=966
http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/v42/SysReqs/

Blender was a good pick. The developers are doing a good job of maturing it to a professional level app for any type of content (including film). It's the only other modelling app I have installed or ever use since I found the grail... When it comes down to it, I'm a Maya guy (big bullet to bite $$$). I can't really see myself going back to anything else after I started using it. It is a complete package with versatility that is unmatched. Whatever you do, try Maya last or you'll end up begging your wife until she lets you blow that $2500 :D.

Please ignore the guy who posted the crack and torrent to Maya - especially if you ever plan to do serious work. When you show/submit/release what you create, Alias may very well come asking how you ended up with Maya and have no license for it on record (I've seen it happen now and it's ugly). It's a good feeling to say that "this was created with Maya and Photoshop" without looking over your shoulder. People are usually genuinely impressed that you have a Maya license. It makes you look a bit more professional. Conversly, saying that "I can't tell you" or some other vague excuse for how you created your work makes you look more foolish than mysterious.

Good luck. Nice to have you back.

Ok, so as a windows user you're saying that the Gimp is close enough to photoshop that no one will bother buying it just because The Gimp came free with their OS?

If you weren't such an asshat you'd realize that at the cost of Adobe's products the people who want to use them and would/could afford to pay the price will.

Photoshop currently sells for 600$, no one who does the kind of graphics work that would justify that amount of money is going to be swayed by whether or not something comes bundled. Gimp happens to be free to distros to include and honestly lacks serious competition on Linux, so they put it in. Most distros (I know Slackware does, and it still hasn't topped 2 discs for binaries) also tend to include a pretty wide range of paint packages, though none are really comparable.

Your example of adobe is also particularly poor , and shows ignorance, given that photoshop hasn't been and, according to adobe execs (at least as of a couple of years ago), never will be due to their disappointment with the sales of the Irix port they did way back. If I remember right they lost a bundle on it.

This also has the implication that 3rd party developers (e.g. Adobe/MacroMedia, discreet, etc) have less reasons to support free OSs and more and more reasons to support MS only and eventually Apple.

Another poor example is discreet seeing as how they already support Linux. Though you're probably just showing ignorance again and thinking of their lower end software, like 3ds max which isn't up to the quality standards of the people who use Linux for those purposes (aka major film studios), which is why there is no demand for a port.

Sure all the wannabe kids who grew up hearing you "needed" it to make games or some nonsense would love it, but the 0$ contributions their warezed copies make can't be very motivating.

If you doubt bundling is a problem, answer this question..

How many people buy Opera on Linux when they have Firefox, Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and another 5 o 6 browsers all preinstalled ? At least, on Windows, IE is so fu**ed up that someone will buy it anyway..

How many people buy it on windows? Last I heard Opera's primary revenue streams were mobile devices such as cell phones and advertising revenue from the ad-supported version.

And last time I checked the people who were tired of ie being fucked up on windows were using Firefox rather than Opera, primarily because it does basically the same things without the 39$usd pricetag.

There was one question where it had the same answer twice, and unless I'm mistaken studio max is used for more 3d stuff than flash. Those are just a couple things I noticed.

I''ve been trying to find out if it is possible to get the Sharp Actius AL3DU laptop to run 3DS Max in autostereo mode together with a plugin for a 3D haptic input device called the SensAble PHANTOM Omni. It also might be cool to add the 3Dconnexion SpacePilot input device for navigation.

I think this would be the ultimate interface for 3D design. Has anyone had any experience with this? I've been emailing all the companies involved and have gotten responses saying that there are problems with this setup. I'd like to try it out on my own, but putting it together would cost a fortune and I don't want to blow all that cash just to find out it doesn't work.

Read about it here (about halfway down). They did fix the max6 issues with sp2, which were less severe, but max6 was the shipping version at the time, too.

Um ... available for standard definition (television) only.

I think it's admirable that AutoDesk is supporting Linux at all but I would hesitate to edit a film on standard definition if I could not up-rez to high definition on the same tool. AutoDesk would have you do a standard definition (perhaps letterboxed) "rough-cut" and then buy an SGI for full resolution. SGIs run Irix, which is a great operating system but hardly a derivation of Linux.

I do not usually reply to "anonymous" people here on Slashdot but I don't want anyone who might be reading this in the industry I work in to be fooled.

I use Discreet's Cleaner (was Media Cleaner) here to compress videos taken of cells through a light microscope. While we save our videos in Quicktime format as we are an all-Mac lab (with one or two unavoidable exceptions) and as the QT Player is free and can be downloaded easily by Windows users, Cleaner can also process other formats as well -- it can create RealPlayer files (but not read them, which drives me crazy when I want to do personal conversion projects on the side... WTF?), MPEG streams, QT files (of course), and so on. It is very good at optimizing video for different kinds of uses (you'd be tuning for web use) and is quite good at compression. It will work with any QT codecs you drop into the appropriate folder, should you be using a Mac; I've never used the Windows version, so I can't give advice there.

It can also do batch conversion -- we set up an entire batch of files to convert overnight, set it going, and walk away. When we return in the morning, it's ready and waiting.

If you encode on a Windows box, use cleaner XL. If you use a Mac, like we do, use cleaner 6.

Be sure to provide download links for appropriate players on your page, if you don't already. Users are likely to not know about vlc and other appropriate players.

I use Discreet's Cleaner (was Media Cleaner) here to compress videos taken of cells through a light microscope. While we save our videos in Quicktime format as we are an all-Mac lab (with one or two unavoidable exceptions) and as the QT Player is free and can be downloaded easily by Windows users, Cleaner can also process other formats as well -- it can create RealPlayer files (but not read them, which drives me crazy when I want to do personal conversion projects on the side... WTF?), MPEG streams, QT files (of course), and so on. It is very good at optimizing video for different kinds of uses (you'd be tuning for web use) and is quite good at compression. It will work with any QT codecs you drop into the appropriate folder, should you be using a Mac; I've never used the Windows version, so I can't give advice there.

It can also do batch conversion -- we set up an entire batch of files to convert overnight, set it going, and walk away. When we return in the morning, it's ready and waiting.

If you encode on a Windows box, use cleaner XL. If you use a Mac, like we do, use cleaner 6.

Be sure to provide download links for appropriate players on your page, if you don't already. Users are likely to not know about vlc and other appropriate players.

On the other hand, the question is about windows. Here's the best freeware list I've found, taken off of the neowin.net forums. These are not guaranteed Clean, but most of them are. Also, you might want to check tinyapps.org, which specializes in SMALL apps (usually not enough space for ad/spyware).
Category 3D Graphics: ----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/CharacterCountF ilterForAValidList----
3Delight Free - http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
Houdini (Free Edition) - http://www.sidefx.com/apprentice/index.html
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...ple/i ndex.shtml
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.h tm
OpenFX - http://www.openfx.org
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Toxic - http://www.toxicengine.org/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Category Anti-Virus:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Char acterCountFilterForAValidList----
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://www.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/
Category Anti Spyware:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Bazooka - http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/index.html
Diet K - http://www.dietk.com/
SpyBot Search & Destroy - http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
SpywareBlaster - http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.htm l
SpywareGuard - http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
Category IRC Clients:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
BersIRC - http://www.bersirc.com/
BitchX - http://bitchx.org/download.php
HydraIRC - http://www.hydrairc.com/
TinyIRC - http://www.tinyirc.net/
XChat - http://www.silverex.org/news/
Category Audio Players:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
1by1 - http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch
Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
DeliPlayer. http://www.deliplayer.com/
Foobar 2

Why does anyone use WinMX, Kazaa or any other spy and mal-ware software when both eMule and Shareaza are available? with source?

I guess I spend so much money on my hobby, CGI and the software for that, I just can't handle the thought of buying something when a free application does as good or better.

Some free software that is better than alternative commercial software (or has no alternative):

FREENET

Steel Panthers: World at War

Irfanview

PAF 5 (genealogy software, go to download products, ignore Marie Osmond's attempts to seduce you to the dark side)

GMAX 3D Modelling software

You can also get tons of free software with the purchase of magazines (I know, not really free); you can get the previous version or a free version of just about any graphical app when you buy digit magazine, including software that cost kilobucks as recently as a year ago.

Even though that Belluzo idiot nearly killed the company they still kick some ass in the high end graphics arena. Almost every film made in Hollywood is edited with Inferno on high end SGI Onyx boxen. Movie quality image processing requires insane amounts of bandwidth and storage, and SGI still reigns supreme there. Some day the PC will catch up, but not just yet.

Dark Horse Entertainment is going to produce a comic book in 2005.

more info:
http://www4.discreet.com/showandtell/showandtell.p hp?id=988#

Combustion is the desktop offering from discreet, the folks who make the ultra-expensive Flame and Inferno compositing systems. Same mind-blowing color corrector. Node-based compositing without the price point of Fusion or Shake.

Cleaner is another discreet product (bought out from someone else), but the previous poster made an excellent case for some alternatives.

We did this because we primarily use Discreet's 3dsmax (with Brazil and V-Ray) and Eyeon's Digital Fusion. We have found that most existing render farm solutions do not support these two packages very well -- thus we decided to develop our own custom solution. We also support After Effects, Alias|Maya, AIR and other RenderMan compliant rendering packages.

Of interest to the general Slashdot crowd may be that this Deadline Render Management Solution is based on the open source (BSD License) Exocortex C# library originally released with this C# 3D Engine. Deadline is built with C# in the hopes that using Mono we will be able to start supporting Linux with minimal extra effort.

I'll be reading all the posts on this Slashdot thread but I would also appreciate any direct feedback on our current beta product. We also found solutions such as Rush and Smedge to be less than user friendly in many respects. Thus we have tried as best as we could to increase a 3D package that is not well supported by most render farm management solutions -- except for Discreet's Backburner (which we found not that that scalable.)

The Flash file format is open. I don't understand your point. Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it not open, or bad for that matter. There are tools out there which output Flash and are not made by Macromedia themselves. There are even open source Flash production mechanisms. Yes, Macromedia could at some point change the file format to obfuscate it, yes they could make it non-backwards-compatible, they could even decide to abandon Flash completely. That doesn't put the genie back in the bottle, and its still not making Flash a bad thing in and of itself.

That's completely different. Discreet is not talking about hell or devils. The words inferno and flame and fire there mean a place where important creativity is molded.

This naming scheme, or at least something very similar, is used by Discreet
for their effects, editing & compositing software.

Products include Inferno, Fire, Smoke, Flame, Combustion, etc.

I agree with the above. Now if someone could just convince Discreet/AutoCAD how much trauma this causes people like me trying to run Educational computer labs.

Either granting special permissions for only one or two software packages, or installing them on alternate partitions/drives just so that they can allow anyone's dog to write to the applications folder is extremely annoying and time consuming.

[RANT ON] My public school system has over 16,000 Discreet licenses, but getting support is like pulling teeth. You would think basic stuff like this wouldn't be so difficult when the organization you work for literally puts hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars into a companies pocket every upgrade cycle. [/RANT OFF]

Just as an aside, my Mac labs have only had one major configuration issue, Managed Users and Classic Access for Quark Express 5. It also requires full write access to the application folder, but since it is our only Classic application, and is installed in a separate app folder than the newer apps, a quick trip in the terminal can resolve that. Let the kids hose classic, especially now that Panther includes distributed system imaging and restoring. Plus with the limited amount of hardware available I can use a single Panther system image for every machine in my lab, from B&W G3's all the way to G5's. The only problem there is the size of the image when the G3's have only a 6 gig drive installed.

Let's see XP/Ghost solutions that are that easy! (Right now I have 4 different configs with their own Ghost images.)

My suggestion would be nix (no pun intended) the whole linux angle to this. The kids are going to be learning difficult apps, and having to deal with an operating system that functions differently (think stuff like cut/paste) will just be frustrating. You also don't know about the hardware the kids are using at home, so a LiveCD that may or may not detect their hardware correctly could end up being more of a hassle than a bonus.

Second, LiveCDs have very subpar performance compared to a hard-disk install, doing graphical work or trying to model in 3d is going to be a painful experience to say the least; and will leave a poor impression of linux in the campers minds.

You mentioned that the commercial versions of these apps are expensive; they are. In many cases, the company that makes the app offers a much discounted or even free version. For 3d studio max, there is the excellent gmax software that does what most of your campers would likely love to do, create models for computer games. If you aren't content with gmax (which is a truly great program), there is always the Maya Learning Edition which is a learning version of the program the pros are using.

I would contact the software companies that offer learning versions and see if you could distribute those. The companies will be very happy that you want to use their programs, and may throw some free stuff your way (I can't think of anything cooler to win at summer camp than a software t-shirt).

If you are dead set on FOSS, I would make a compilation of those apps(gimp, OO.o, thunderbird/firebird, etc.) for Windows and throw them on a CD. Without Linux, you'll have more space for some killer free apps, and you'll have way more kids that will use Gimp or Open Office or Blender if they can use them without having to install a new, unfamiliar operating system. Remember, gratis will mean more to them than libre . If you want to get them intested in FOSS, download a small game (even something like a solitaire/tetris clone) and show them little snippets and explain what they do ingame.

Lastly, if this is a summer (read fun) camp, there will be some time for gaming. I obviously wouldn't recommend a live CD for this, but if you are looking for free(beer) software that is multiplatform, I'd recommend America's Army and Enemy Territory

I searched around and I came up with a list I think you'd get some good mileage out of, and I promise you'll hook more kids with these than you will a Linux liveCD.

6.19 MB - Firefox 0.8
7.52 MB - Thunderbird 0.5
257 MB - Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
51.0 MB - gmax + help, tutorials, and textures
133 MB - Maya Personal Learning edition
2.20 MB - Blender
63.5 MB - OpenOffice 1.1 installer
--------------
520.41 MB total

Speaking as a player, I'd encourage you to seek out any competitive communities built around the game(s) you're interested in designing for. While Neverwinter Nights is a cool enough game, I'd also reccomend you check out getting some experience with the "Quake-related" FPS games.

One of the tools that's used to create maps for several game is Radiant (supported on both Linux and Windows) and supports a bunch of games. Mappers familiar with Quake3 were able to transfer that knowledge to RtCW when it came out, and in turn that was transferrable to ET. Plugins for other games (Half Life, Soldier of Fortune, and some others I'm blanking on) is also available.

Couple that with experience working with 3DSmax (or gmax if you're on a budget) creating models, and you should be good to go.

If you're also looking for ideas on what to make maps of, I'd suggest trolling around and seeing if you can find a competitive community for the games you're interested in designing for. Stuff like Half-Life and its mods (most notably Counter Strike), Quake3/RtCW/ET, and the MOHAA/CoD stuff are going to be hot ticket items right now. Organizations like The Team Warfare League or the Cyber Athlete League might be worth a look to get an idea of how people are using the games and what kind of maps and what features they'd benefit from.

Looking to the future, everyone's pointing at stuff like Doom3 and Half-Life2 (obviously). But it might be worth taking a look at games like Far Cry and Painkiller as possible sleeper hits coming up on the horizon.

Good luck in your efforts. :)

That's a load of crap. SSE is useful only in very limited cases where there is more math than memory access. Here's a real-world example from a well-known product.

discreet worked closely with Intel to optimize the scanline renderer for 3dsmax, and the result was a little checkbox in the rendering options to "Enable SSE." Rendering images or animations can take minutes, hours, or days, so every little bit of speed helps.

So, how did Intel do with their SSE optimizations?

In the end, turning on that checkbox actually slows down the renderer by nearly 5%, and thus it is turned off by default!

That's a load of crap. SSE is useful only in very limited cases where there is more math than memory access. Here's a real-world example from a well-known product.

discreet worked closely with Intel to optimize the scanline renderer for 3dsmax, and the result was a little checkbox in the rendering options to "Enable SSE." Rendering images or animations can take minutes, hours, or days, so every little bit of speed helps.

So, how did Intel do with their SSE optimizations?

In the end, turning on that checkbox actually slows down the renderer by nearly 5%, and thus it is turned off by default!

Sounds like you're doing some fun stuff there. I work for MNN cable access in NYC. We just finished rebuilding our studio where we just got done dealing with these same issues. I understand joo.

1> Lighting. This is probably the most important part of making a show look good. I think I'd be doing you a disservice to say "get two inkies, three 5K fresnels, blah blah blah." You should really consider bringing in a good lighting designer who can not only recommend some good fixtures, but who can also put together some stock light plots that will look good for 95% of all productions. Never sleep on good lighting for a studio. It really makes all the difference.

2> Cameras. We went with the Hitachi Z3000W as our studio camera. It's digital, it has great resolution, and a wicked nice lens. They provide a lot of bang for the buck (can't remember how much we paid, tho.) Take a look at Triax cabling for connecting the cameras back to Control. It's flexible, the signa's clean, and they're a lot easier and cheaper to replace. For a teleprompter, we're just using QTV with WinCue. Works fine.

3> Audio. We had some Behringers around but they didn't stand up to the abuse we put it through. Then we found the Sony ECM-55B. It's our workhorse lav. I've had nothing but headaches with wireless so I'm not going to comment on them.

4> Decks. There are a ton of Good Broadcast Reasons to go with BetaSP but it's just so damn expensive. I love DV. Because we're public access, we have to work with civilians who can't afford $20 per tape. Let them master to DV at $4 a pop and they can go home, finish in iMovie or Premiere on their home computer and bring it back in to us all clean and digital like. Sure, it's compressed and of course it might artifact, but working with analog in post is a system bandwidth hassle. Meanwhile DV works at full-res on my mom's iMac. Until Thompson decides to make the Filmstream for $3K, I'm sticking with DV. I say go with DV if you can (DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, whatever.) You can't beat the price.

5> I'm not a big fan of the Streaming In A Box solutions. What you get for your streaming really depends on what you want to deliver. Do you want to provide video on demand? Bring the video into a Mac or PC via FireWire, use Discreet Cleaner to convert the file to MPEG4, Real, whatever, and drop it on a streaming server with lots of storage, hordes of RAM, and some fat ass bandwidth. Just looking to simulcast your broadcast? Even easier: run the program output of your master control switcher to a video capture card on a superfast PC. Start up some live encoder software (QuickTime Broadcaster, Helix Producer, MPEG4IP) and have it send a unicast stream to a replication server attached to the net. With live streaming, you don't need any storage at all (unless you need to archive.)

6> Newsdesks. Check out uniset. They make good looking inexpensive sets and CYC panels (for doing green screen). We've been very happy with their stuff.

One last thing: check out DVLince - an all-DV server based production workflow for under $300K. Sony just bought them to rebrand it as their own gear. It might not be exactly what you need, but it's worth checking out.

3D Studio Max is 500 dollars or less, and has 15 years of artist and programmer acceptance

I think you must mean $3500 and about 6 years of history, since Max was a ground up re-write, and bears absolutely no resemblence to the original 3d Studio, in either interface, principles, or API. The basic Maya seat has been $2000 for a couple of years now.

I've used Max, back when it was the cheap option. We use Maya these days, because in general, it rocks.

Discreet, makers of 3dsmax, was also affected in a major way by this hot"fix" more info can be found here
Discreet Info
Its really a bummer for all those people who stay up to date to find that the .max files they have been making, crash older un-patched windows, I myself spent a day figuring this one out, and getting everyone in my company up to speed.

One of the reasons that this patch may not be installed everywhere, besides the obviously long QA side of testing patches before deployment (I was burned by SP3 and a Promise IDE controller) is that it is pretty far reaching. Any game house or animation company for games like Quake or UnrealTournament2003 will probably not have applied this patch. Reason: It made it so they could not open any of the files made in gmax

can be found here. Written by the former hardware guru for discreet, it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors. I'm no hardware guy, but it made decent sense to me. have at it!

I assume you're referring to Premiere?

In my ten years in television production, I've seen a lot of changes; high-dollar proprietary replaced by off-the-shelf PCs, linear, deck-to-deck editing replaced by non-linear on a computer.

The current golden child in the video editing industry is Final Cut Pro; it doesn't require any additional hardware cards, which means it can easily be run on a laptop as well as a PC. A faster computer means a faster editing suite, without having to fork out more cash for the software. In the Wintel world, you can get Speed Razor for the same flexibility.

The big boys may be running discreet and Avid systems, but they only represent a small percentage of the market (that part that has obscene amounts of money to burn.) There are a lot of botique shops out there that need a cheaper solution (something that doesn't cost more than a house to get into.)

Thankfully, video editing software and hardware are becoming just as much a commodity as many other high end applications have, and Apple is helping to drive the prices down with FCP. If you can manage to run a competitive business with off-the-shelf parts for as cheap as possible, then more power to you. Pocket the rest and call it good.

If you just want to learn how to make models and stuff, and get the mechanics of it down (such as the fun of lining up textures, reducing poly counts, optimizing curves and arches, and manually moving individual vertices for 3 hours and then a power outage happens...) and just practice, but not have to pay all that money for 3D Studio Max... Use Gmax!

Gmax linkie-poo

If you happen to 'own' one of the many games that it is compatible with, you can even see your creations in a real game engine! Wowie-zowie! ;)

It is very close to 3DStudio max, and it's free to everyone who wants to use it. So it's a good starting point for someone who wants to experiment on the cheap.

No, it is actually in the 12 minute Digital Grading section of the special edition DVD. Director Peter Jackson and DP Andrew Lesnie were actively involved in the color grading decisions of the movie. You may not like the result, but as you know, Lesnie did receive the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the Fellowship.

The color grading was done at The Posthouse in New Zealand, under the supervision of Peter Doyle, and using software developed by a Hungarian company Colorfront. The software was later introduced to the general market by London based 5D Solutions as 5D Colossus. 5D later went into liquidation in October 2002. Colorfront has since signed an agreement with Montreal based Discreet, who will introduce their digital film grading system in Las Vegas at NAB 2003 in April. Colorfront software has been used to digitally color grade more than a dozen features including We Were Soldiers, Frida, Blue Crush, Stuart Little 2, xXx, Daredevil and Finding Nemo.

The Posthouse has just started work on the digital color grading of The Return of the King.

"Movie-quality" rendering is done in software, often by render farm nodes that don't even have a 3D video card. High-end video cards are used during content creation.

You won't find a GeForce or Radeon on Maya's list of qualified hardware, 3ds max's list of tested graphics cards, or Softimage's list of certified graphics cards. That's not to say that a consumer card won't work, but after spending $2,000+ on the software, plus maintenance, you want supported hardware.

Making a movie is not the hardest part. Making it look good is what matters. Do not expect anything remotely close to AE on linux. There are no substitutes. AE is pretty much prosumer, fairly extended special effects tool which won't appear in the GNU/GPL anytime soon. Then again, you don't really need AE, unless you're trying to create Farscape clones and cheesy made for TV effects.

Sure, you might be able to do basic stuff in Cinelerra, FilmGimp, etc, but for your movie to look absolutely flawless you need some high-end filters and effects. Jahshaka is in it's early beta and extremely buggy. They are emulating the feel of Discreet Fire (Post Production). I'm not too familiar with it's featureset. Don't count on it to be the Editing solution.

The secret is not the software itself, but the camerawork. If you put a lot of effort into shooting it, you'll make up for the editing shortcomings. It's definately possible. Hope you made a bet with the naysayers, because they'll lose. Funny thing is, it'll be a piece of cake to make a movie like Pi in linux with open source applications.

Good luck on your project.

I'm posting this anonymously because I'm chicken: I'm about to say some stuff that could probably be construed as libel, and I don't need that kind of headache. But I don't feel right keeping this stuff to myself either.

I know the guy behind Jahshaka. He's a Jamaican fellow named Karsten Becker. At the time I knew him, he was involved with-- running, owning, or just working for, I forget-- a Miami-based company called Visions Media FX. I met him several times at NAB, in 1998 and 1999 I think.

Basically he set out to write his own version of Flame. The inspiration is obvious when you look at the UI. In fact, I think "inspiration" might be an understatement, if you know what I mean.

The basic deal with Karsten is that he's a gigantic pothead, and has been involved in some extremely shady dealings. One of his business partners was deported back to Jamaica, and it was common knowledge that his company was involved in some operations that were not remotely legal. They accepted payments from customers, for example, and then never paid vendors on those customers' accounts, basically taking the money and running. There were rumors of involvement with drugs and drug trafficking as well, and while I personally believe those rumors based on some events that I witnessed in Karsten's and Ian's presence at NAB, I leave it up to everybody else to make up their own minds.

There were some very good people involved in Visions; in particular, one young guy who worked for them was just brilliant. But Karsten himself and his immediate business partners were extremely scary guys. Kind of like the Sopranos with more weed and less personal charisma.

My point is simply this: don't do business with Karsten, or any of the guys behind Jahshaka. If you want to take their software and run with it, fine. But don't get involved with them in any way; don't give them any personal information of any kind, and definitely don't ever give them any money. It's just advice. Take it for what it's worth.

If you want to check my facts, or pick a fight with me or whatever, feel free to post a reply. I'll check back periodically and respond as best I can to convince you guys that I'm on the up-and-up. I just don't want to see anybody make a serious mistake.

There was a small app for MacOS 7.1 back in the day that would allow you to submit DOS style commands: mkdir, rename, copy, move. Basically an experiment in API calls. I haven't owned a mac since '94, so I don't really know if this little app still exists.

Quicktime will play about anything but if you want to replay MPEG-2 you need to upgrade.
click here for all QT supported formats next to Cleaner Quicktime Pro is the best format converter out there!

Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire. The Macintosh platform, and the software written for it, is a far better choice than ANY PC-based setup as far as dealing with video.

Even prosumer and amateur customers will find better support from the Apple end of things. Final Cut Pro and iMovie work far better than any PC equivalent. If you are a speed junkie, sure, get a PC, and then you can brag about how your benchmarks are higher than your mac-using friends. But don't be at all surprised when your actual output and workflow suffers because you aren't using the best tools for the job.

Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire. The Macintosh platform, and the software written for it, is a far better choice than ANY PC-based setup as far as dealing with video.

Even prosumer and amateur customers will find better support from the Apple end of things. Final Cut Pro and iMovie work far better than any PC equivalent. If you are a speed junkie, sure, get a PC, and then you can brag about how your benchmarks are higher than your mac-using friends. But don't be at all surprised when your actual output and workflow suffers because you aren't using the best tools for the job.

Check out this:
http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/gmax_index.h tml

- its a slightly stripped down version of 3DS Max - but it's free as long as you register on the web site. It has a few manuals and tutorials to start you off

AutoCAD has not been available for the Mac since Release 11. I doubt that a ten year old program will run in OS X! But if you are going to spend $3000 on AutoCAD you can probably pick up a good enough PC for $1000 or so.

3dsmax5 also will need a PC, Autodesk has been brown nosing Microsoft for about a decade now. You might want to spend a few extra bucks on the PC though, dual processors recomended, 3ds max5 tech spec

The guy did say he was using OS X, you did read that right?

Sure, Maya and Softimage are/were standards for film production, but 3D Studio has been used in a number of major motion pictures as well. There's no denying that it has found more of a home in the games industry, but that's not for want of capability. Here is a list of application fot 3dsmax which includes cinematic works.

Of course if you're talking about it from a career perspective, then yeah, for sure, Maya would be the way to go for the film industry.

I agree 3DStudio-MAX is probably the best choice for games, but unfortunately it's not a choice for MacOSX yet... however, when I was at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters; a video tradeshow) a year ago, the discreet rep said their Mac version of combustion was selling much better than the PC port. So this could potentially bode well for an eventual Mac port of MAX, but its not a solution today.. Anyway combustion is a great compositing application, and compositing is an essential skill to effectively doing 3d since rerendering every aspect of every scene for every change is often time consuming and unnecessary. It's now OSX compatible, too.

Be wary, though. If you're thinking of getting into professional modelling, it is not going to be cheap. Heh, if you thought Photoshop cost too much, wait until you get quotes for 3ds Max. ;p~

You're question, unfortunately, will spawn a bunch of personal opinions and elitist responses.

I've been using Discreet's 3dstudio max since it was a DOS app (then autodesk's 3ds studio made by the Yost group). I've been teaching it since Max r1 came around. I find it interesting that your question doesn't mention it.

Obviously I'm a big fan of it. I highly recommend it - it is very easy to use, has plently of free pluggins as well as commercial ones, open architecture for programming and scripting and its default scanline rendering engine is very fast. Some people will argue that its rendering quality is inferior to, say, Maya, but I beg to differ.

Look into it.

Seeing as its based on code that is 4 years old, maybe the doom users could use it for new levels,
Hell Quake 1 modders might find a use for it too !, but for more serious 3D use i think they have a long way to go.

Maya, 3DMax users, i think you can assume your job is still safe :)

Ps. If you want Open source then please donate your time to something more worthwhile, after all no point in re-inventing the wheel again.

Pretty much any FX movie you watch anywhere was at least partially made on a Discreet, and thus on IRIX.

Now as for watching your DVDs, well... Octanes are not really desktop machines. :-)

While game designers are using tools like Maya and 3DS MAX to develop more complex models for games, the engines and technologies that are used to power these games are written by entities that have closer connections to the hardware manufacturers. Also, Maya is owned by SGI, which in turn has a huge role in Open GL. "Designed for $os", should actually read, "Designed for DirectX $version"

That's true. Five years ago, everybody in the industry had SGI boxes, but now, it's mostly PCs. Animation software is much cheaper, too.

True in the CG side of the industry, people use Maya or 3DS MAX running on PCs. However post production companies are still using SGI boxes (Octane, Onyx) in conjunction with, for example, Discreet's Inferno/Flame/Fire/Smoke software for non-linear editing and compositing. These SGI systems are still very expensive as is the software and support contracts, etc.