Slashdot Mirror
Linux Powers Digital Muppets
Darren Alcorn writes "Red Hat and Jim Henson have teamed up to bring you digital animatronics through the use of Red Hat Linux." I bet thats a fun system to see in operation.
The article is light on technical stuff, but discusses the computerized puppeteering system
a little.
kernel the frog
I can't believe it's not lard!
RedHat has restored Jim Henson to life? I KNEW linux was miraculous ! !
Z
enough is too much
So let's see the Hensen Creatureworks bring Tux to fully animated life!
www.eFax.com are spammers
"For its recent hit "Shrek," DreamWorks used Linux servers to create detailed images for the movie." - I thought that another report said that Linux boxes were just used for the rendering - not the actual creation.
Video Game cheats, hints a
The article is rather vague, so maybe I'm not getting this right (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). But it sounds to me like they're saying that they're actually doing the work on software running under Linux? I'm just sort of wondering.. where are they getting this software? Last I checked there's not a huge abundancy of high-end digital animation production software floating around for Linux. It took me awhile to find software that would suit my own purposes for audio recording. Even then, I can do everything and about 3 times more on a Mac with ProTool/Logic or on a PC with SoundForge/ProTools/Cakewalk...
I mean, not that I'm criticizing... it's major step forward for these companies to crank enough power out of RedHat servers to power a production studio. But the article is little more than a vague plug for Linux without some sort of specifics about what exactly is going on.
Sorry... can't resist... seeing as this fell right after the article on transformers... does this mean that the new transformers will run under RedHat? Will Kermit know how to use them? The world may soon know...
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight... maybe.
You may want to amend that to Jim Henson Studios. I'm not sure he'd approve of this deal anyway.
one segfault ha ha ha
two segfaults ha ha ha
three segfaults ha ha ha
-- The Count
I might be out of the loop, but isn't Jim Henson Studios owned by Disney, or at least the intellectual rights to the muppets?
Isn't that a case of strange bedfellows -- Linux and Disney. Wonder what Hollings thinks about this anti drm OS handling such precious, marketable creations.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
considering Jim Henson died a few years ago.. RedHat must have some crazy voodoo magick or something..
And Oscar the Grouch now lives in a core dump.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
AMD!
How's that for underdog geekiness. When I was at SIGGRAPH last year, the AMD booth had a display booth with a dude using the the Henson "Muppet-tronics" platform running on a AMD-Powered Linux workstation. I think the control software said something like version 0.8. It was pretty neat.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
The other day something awful had to remove a parody of Muppet movies, with funny things like "DAS BERT" instead of "DAS BOAT," etc. Kyanaka received a letter, which is shown here.
Needless to say I was shocked to see that someone who was making no money form parodying the Muppets, which are simply carpeting glued to wood, was asked to remove parody content.
I would be very careful if I was RedHat. Its funny how companies like the Church of Scientology (The cult I mean) have more lawyers after the leader dies, in the SOC case, Hubbar croaks, and people are marauding around using racketeering and extortion on "worshippers." Such is the case, to a smaller degree obviously, with Henson. Because the magician, the creator, the worthy one is dead they assemble a cabal of lawyers to viciously and rabidly attack anyone "using" the franchise because they now are charge with protecting against something that is non-Novel, replaceable, duplicateable, old. On another note, Tolkein's son, who tries to "continue" the LOTR franchise by printing his father's notes, was against the move LOTR. JRR's grandson was for it. Its time to let go, and let more creative people take a stab at things sometimes - we are all glad that JRR's son wasn't able to stop the movie. Excerpt - I think some stories are meant to be read, not to be seen. Before seeing this Oscar-nominated movie, Tolkien's son Christopher said, "My own position is that The Lord of the Rings is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form." Filmmakers disagree. Two sequels based on Tolkien's Rings characters, filmed at the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring, are scheduled for release in 2002 and 2003. Ah, yes. The franchise cometh.
I really hate when opportunists feed on the carcasses of things. This sort of activity as displayed by the Muppets franchise is so completely wrong. Its not as if Disney was slandering Henson, or parodying and making money off the parody. This company will go so far as to harass independent site owners on the web, they have lawyers trolling to make trouble. I cant say how upset I am at the Henson franchise.
My letter to Henson:
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
With all of these gaping holes that Red Hat's linux installs by default, will this allow me r00t Snuffleupagus? Should I make everyone's favorite wooly mammoth go on a muderous rampage down 123 Sesame St.?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Way back when, I worked for a company that made (almost as a sideline) Animatronics! One of our clients (In fact, it may have been the only one) was Sesame Park. We made a couple of "Oscars" and "Cookies", and the muppeteers came in to program them - Our breakthrough was the teaching machine. Very cool.
The system was all analog, with the signal FSK recorded onto 30 minute carts. I spent a week each spring recording new carts from the masters. 20 hours of listening to Cookie, 20 hours listening to Oscar
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Microsoft has been powering the puppets in D.C for ages.
--
they've been doing this for years - look at this
Good grief moderators. When will you figure out that posting the text of a story in a comment is NOT informative? It's redundant at best, and a copyright violation at worst. Please quit encouraging this!
Says they chose Redhat due to the RHN software update feature... obviously they haven't used it recently
The two grumpy guys up in the balcony are now Ballmer and Gates.
The real article wasn't misleading, but the
slashdot synopsis is. Jim Henson Studios did not
"team up" with redhat. Redhat is just giddy over
the fact that JH's Studios bought a bunch of
copies. I like seeing linux advance as the rest
of us, but comon. Lets go with REAL advances.
If Mercedes Benz bought 2k copies of XP for their
existing servers, we woudln't say MB teams up with
MS.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Back in 1988, Graham Walters and I, at PDI, built a system in collaboration with Jim Henson and his creature shop, and with Kirk Thatcher (who since went on to greater things at Henson), to build the 'Waldo' character for The Jim Henson Hour. The idea was that this character would be controlled by a waldo, which would sense the position, orientation, and mouth angles, and display the character, blue-screen keyed onto the image on the screen in real time.
The beauty of this system is that Henson puppeteers always work by watching their images on TV monitors, so this kind of digital character wasn't even second-nature to them -- it was exactly how they'd been performing characters all along. Among the nice things about Waldo is that he didn't have to hang out at the bottom of the screen with all of the rest of the other puppets. This system was implemented and run on an old Power Series SGI borrowed from Sheridan College.
I saw Davey Goelz (Gonzo, and others) at Siggraph this year, at the Henson booth on the show floor. They're selling a somewhat improved version of the same waldo mechanism that we used 14 years ago. Davey got us out of a jam on the first Henson Hour show, as somehow we lost the mouth-opening information from the tracks that Henson recorded on the set. Davey lived right near us at PDI, and came down and laid those back in, mimicing Jim's style. I don't think that he ever found our, and it's tragically too late now.
Anyway, The Jim Henson Hour was too good, and perhaps a little too different, for American TV, and only 12 episodes were ever made.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I said it before, and I'll say it again - we need some new moderation categories:
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Come on.... I've been using Kermit in Unix for close to a decade now.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
It's supposed to read:
He's dead Jim. I can't do anything for him.
Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a puppeteer (as he ducks his two heads under one foreleg, and kicks Jim with his rear leg).
It's all coded in perl with the Mod::Ressurection package.
As for Disney, if my history is correct, right before Jim Henson died, he was negotiating to sell the studio to Disney but, after his death, his sons nixed the deal.
This stuff is really neat to see in person. Using HDPS, a trained puppeteer can create computer graphics facial animations in realtime that might take a team of animators several weeks. There are some images of our system in use available.
You can email me (dhelfman at la.creatureshop.henson.com) if you've got any questions.
That's the best logo for a linux distribution I've ever seen.
Ever notice how if a /. story is about anything Linux related that the zealots come out en masse and mod down almost 50% of the comments? This thread is a good example.
The growing trend of censorship by the left (which Linux advocates certainly qualify for) is frightening. We rely on the Left to provide progressive and enlightened contributions to the betterment of society. Censorship, in any form, flies directly in the face of this.
What are the Linux zealots so afraid of? To read that someone thinks their OS sucks? This is ridiculous. Regardless of your choice of an OS, there are millions of geeks ready and chomping at the bit to inform you that your choice sucks, is miguided, ignorant, facsist, criminal, etc...
Linux is failing because the Linux community has been growing increasingly dysfunctional and childish. It was a compelling option for a desktop OS a few years ago but for some reason things have gotten seriously broken in the open source world.
I am advocate for open source and the philosophy behind it. We need to leverage our democratic right for the public to own its own property. But there needs to be a serious reality injection into the open source community. They need to understand the dynamics that make software appeal to the mass market. They have utterly and completely missed the ball on this one, imho.
mje0w!!!1!
I was lucky enough to see that particular feature before it was pulled. It wasn't the best Photoshop Phriday, but it was rather large and had a few gems. My favorite? A reworked Dirty Harry poster starring The Sweedish Chef. "Do yoo veel looki, POONK?!"
So anyone got a mirror? I hope I can't get sued for describing or asking for a "copyright-infringing image." I probably can.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I will now eat a rubber tire to the tune of "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio"
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
... when I worked at Loki, I gave a talk at a LUG (San Gabriel was it? I lived in OC at the time so I didn't know the area at all) in the LA area that was modestly attended. At the end a fellow from Jim Henson's shop came up and chatted Scott and I up, and even invited us to come out to their studio and check things out. We never got around to it, but I wish I had, and of course this article doesn't surprise me as a result of meeting him.
m.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B