Slashdot Mirror
Film Gimp
gosand writes "DesktopLinux.com is running this story about Film Gimp. It is a movie editor based on The Gimp that movie studios have been developing for their own use for a while now. The article is an interview with Robin Rowe about Film Gimp's use, and includes some interesting info about the film industry's use of GNU/Linux desktops. One quote worth noting: 'Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing! While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.'"
I initially read the tite as "Film Gump" and thought that Jon Katz was back writing his inane drivel once again.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Editing films is like a box of chocolates....
- Forrest Gimp.
... movies make the Gimp!
...because it helped to generate that atrocious looking dog in the scooby-doo movie. ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source
It seems to be implying that the studios are doing it out of love, but methinks that they are finding that it's cheaper, and more flexable (their programmers can get their hands on all the code)...
Not that this is a bad thing, just that it's not because they hate MSFT...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
But other than having Linux on the "inside" where does this get us?
I remember, about eighteen months ago, really trying very hard to enjoy my hobby - music. I can't believe that sequencing really is that much of a minority activity and yet it was damn near impossible to do anything. Will there be a day when music/film studios release their programs?
Alas, I doubt it.
Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues
Not likely. They're in the movie business to make money, anything their customers use for free is a threat, anything they use for free is more money.
Sig is on vacation
FilmGimp? Can they not change the name to something more politically correct? ie:
- FilmChallenged
- FilmSpecial
- FilmJerrysKids
- FilmTheres"Abilitity"In"Disability"
- FilmDroolingTard
Hmm.. no, on second thought "FilmDroolingTard" is out.
Trolling is a art,
Of course, Scooby Doo would have been overpriced at "free", but that's completely beside the point.
John
Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing!
I know that typical Slashdot math (49 + 2 - 1 = 49) is a bit "creative", but I hardly see how a dozen (or even two, three, or four dozen) movie studios with a couple hundred Linux boxes measures up to the predicted number of Linux desktop users (18,000,000) from the folks who run the Linux Counter Web site.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Is it strictly correct to call this a movie editor, or should it be called a frame editor or something, since it's not for true editing or compositing (like Avid), but for frame-by-frame clean-up?
I'm really glad to see that Film Gimp work (which seemed dead or at least very sleepy for a while) is actually continuing. Thanks, Robin Rowe!
... I just hope that any new menu approaches are offered as options rather than The New Way.
:)
As I understand it (can anyone improve my understanding?) a lot of the work done for Film Gimp will likely end up rolled back into Gimp. This sounds great. I hope though that the "right click" menus are not completely replaced; I rather like the way they work. I understand that a lot of people don't like them, though
CMYK is the constant complaint I hear wrt to Gimp vs Photoshop, even from people who aren't sure what CMYK is or why they should want one for the kitchen. So I do hope that film gimp work results in CMYK support.
So after "that awful interface" (not my opinion, but hey) and CMYK support, what's the *next*-biggest complaint people have about the GIMP?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Film gimp adds lots of support for superior playback. However, the biggest and most importanted different is that it uses 16 bits per channel instead of only 8 like the regular gimp. That means that instead of roughly 16 million colors, you get 16 million squared colors. This adds much less chance of rounding errors on compositing, and gives you more room to play with when adjusting brightness and color balance over 8 bit images.
The downside is that film gimp is based on an old version of the gimp, and it doesn't really look like that is going to change soon. But at least they are talking about syncing up a bit before 2.0 whereas before they seemed to be planning on waiting for the Gimp 2.0.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Content Restrictions Issue != Linux/Open Source Issues.
This article has nothing to do with the MPAA campaigning for content restrictions. It's all well and good that the movie studios have discovered Linux and have built FilmGimp, but again, what does this have to do with Open Source? Not a damn thing.
Why? Because the various Open Source licenses don't cover content created with their software, unlike the stuff the Evil Empire could pull if it wanted to.
blog |
> While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.
Whoever wrote that has obviously never had a job. Executives don't give a fig what their employees want or need to get their jobs done.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Dreamworks wants to make a profit. The larger the profit they can make, the happier everyone is. One way to increase your profits is to reduce your costs. Simple math right? So how do you reduce the cost of your software? You switch to open source of course.
Just because it's a large company and they chose to use open source software isn't anything special in my book. It's the logical choice for those in the know. But then again I guess it's nice to hear about Linux's ever-increasing acceptance.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
from working two years trying to sell a piece of technology to the members of the entertainment industry, I have come to realize that there is no group more interested in getting something for nothing than the entertainment industry.
as a result, I'm not at all surprised to find OSS in the major studios, being used to create stuff.
places like ILM exist successfully largely because people give them hardware for the joy of being known as the hardware that ILM chooses. then people ignore the fact that the reason they choose that hardware is largely based on it being free.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
"Digital Domain is transitioning all of its 2D and 3D production workstations to include NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL professional graphics solutions, NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture (UDA), and the Linux operating system. The company is also deploying NVIDIA Quadro4 graphics hardware and Linux software drivers in its software development, digital content creation studio and systems administration departments."
There's a difference between movie production studios and other companies/corporations. Studios are extremely "tool-driven" in that the timeliness and quality of their production is extremely dependent upon the quality and flexibility of their tools.
The average corporation, on the other hand, is not as dependent on an extremely flexible desktop computer. All you need is a compter that runs an office suite, and they've already got that in Microsoft.
So the thought that studios might be setting an example for other corporations is a longshot indeed.
Does anybody know if this uses anything from GNU's Free Film Project?
I haven't really heard much about the project myself and so I haven't looked, but from what I read on GNU's info page about it it seems pretty interesting. Also the GNU Octal stuff seems interesting, what about that, every decent film editor has at least rudimentary sound manipulation utilities.
If they're not, can anybody give reasons why? Projects like those and GYVE (GNU Yellow Vector Editor) are things that confirm my faith in GNU and RMS in my times of doubt.
I wonder what the studio workers position is on MPAA/Palladium/TCPA et al.
They hate the TCPA Initiative just as much as you and I.
I have a friend who works for a major studio in Burbank, CA. Once I asked him about TCPA and Palladium in general, and he said the company execs sent out few bulletins in the past regarding secure computing, which was ironically a study done by Microsoft. What's notable here is that the wording described in the bulletin hinted how TCPA would stop the major studio motion picture leaks that hit the scene, hence preventing piracy.
So employees are being lied to also, just to answer your question.
Not to say that it's all bad for the studios or open source. The place I work for shelled out money for an open source developer to finish some of his development work on a program they wanted to use. Cheaper than buying a commercial package, and everyone benefitted.
But the biggest reasons the studios go for Linux is the cheaper/faster hardware (despite all sorts of compatibility headaches -- getting reliable 24 frame per second playback for 1k images is a little touchy) plus reduced porting costs for their legacy IRIX software and avoiding the whole Microsoft headache. The sysadmins really don't want to go there, and the studio doesn't really want to start springing for license packs for a few hundred users and a few hundred renderfarm machines.
According to the page, the rumor is that the committee saw the Film Gimp effort as the prototype, "the one you throw away" and decided to put their efforts into gegl.
Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source. It seems it was something related to those irritating "lemedoitfoyou" wizards that populated Windows since then. Moreover, Windows has some features that were directly taken from X interface.
That's one example taken out of the *NIX world. On *NIX world we have tons of examples on how certain "purities" dissolve in the mass of needs and wishes of its users.
The fact that Warner Bros uses GPL is nothing extraordinary. And, frankly, it has nothing to do with their stances for protecting ownership. The problem of content, information sharing going beyond software is something to be dealt with extreme care. A film, book or other media content is not a product of software exclusively. And the means to share it should be completely different. In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.
Anyway, the restrictive politics that MPAA and its cousins play, surely hurt everyone. They are creating a feud out of certain media and they are seriously hindering the chances for people to have a right for information (entertainment is also a form of information) in these environments. Considering this highly restrictive stance and their use of free software tools is surely a paradox. But it does not mean they should free something. Anyway, their money helps a little our world, right? But they should be more democratic and flexible in what relates to the media they work with. Because if they will keep this stance, the consequences will backfire at them. For example, they may produce new fresh laws that will hinder developers from making cheap software they highly depend on...
While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source.
This is highly suggestive. AFAIK Open Source does not equate to being against anti-piracy measures. I am not trying to defend the MPAA here. I am only saying that these are two different things, and mixing them up is bad polics.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Having Linux on the desktop of three hundred users at a film studio is a nice little step in the right direction. But, it is still a long shot from having Linux on the desktop of large corportions. Large corporations make industries move. If GE says to Micorsoft "we need a feature" then Microsoft delivers. When Boeing says to Dell give this or give me that, Dell delivers. When GE's tens of thousands of desktops, -or CocaCola's, or Procter & Gamble's or any other Dow thirty bell weather company - uses Linux, then there will be parades in the street proclaiming Linux has arrived on the desktop.
Well, if the GNU license is as viral as microsoft claims, all movies are now public domain.
Fight Spammers!
The thing about Hollywood is that they aren't very cost sensitive. Palladium could be succesful on mainstream machines and not effect the digital editing folks because they use different platforms like Apple, SGI, etc... It would be better if this were an industry like HR which uses extremely mainstream hardware. Other than that I agree with everything you wrote especially about the 5th column.
All that hard work that you've spent coding for FREE on the Gimp project is finally paying off! Now, the same companies that bring us great technologies like CSS and great laws like the DMCA are now PROFITING OFF OF YOUR BACKS!
Okay, maybe my attitude is wrong about the whole thing, but could someone please help me figure out why?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Drop all CSS related lawsuits.
"Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues."
If my grocery store has a super friendly cashier then maybe the marketing executives will rethink their privacy-invading club-card discount crap?
If I have a Mac at home then maybe I will become a good artist?
If 18,000 peace activists sit in a stadium thinking about world peace then maybe we'll have it?
It seems to me that lots of people are saying that movie studios are inherently against open source because they are big and corporate and, most importantly, against P2P. Everyone needs to stop for a second and realize that P2P and Open Source are two completely different issues that are linked, in this case, by the fact that /.ers have strong opinions on both, which are anti-msft and anti-movie studios respectively. So please think before you equate the two. Are movie studios really publicly against Open Source or are they just fighting P2P, show me....
Disclaimer: No I don't like msft, studios, corporations, government or anything else you'd like to take a shot at, just broadening perspective here
And, no, I should not have used the goddamn Preview mode first.
It's about the tool. Whatever tool will get them the biggest bang for the buck. If a $5k/seat tool would do it better than a free one (and return a better product/movie at the end), then they'd use that instead.
How many studios are using Blender instead of Maya/3DSMax/Lightwave for real production work? Very, very few, if any. Even though Blender has the potential to save serious $$, it's just not good enough.
It appears FreeGimp is good enough, so that's why they use it.
The MPAA and Linux...
Does this make Kaiser Soze the "Gimp"?
Chris
isn't it a bit odd that movie studios are aparently embracing linux to MAKE movies, but seem to desire it being illegal to VIEW the same movie on linux (via DVD) ?
Silicon Grail and Rhythm & Hues were the only sponsors, and Grail is gone.
"We use Film Gimp on all talking animal jobs"...
Reason enough to pull the plug on this baby right here and now.
**>>BELCH
Question: What are the implications of Film Gimp?
Film Gimp is the most successful open source tool in feature motion picture work today. Programmers at many studios are helping development, including Rhythm & Hues, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and ILM. This is great cooperation in an industry that historically has been rather secretive.
Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing! While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.
Movie studios migt be giving back to the community by helping develop the tools but this is completely different from the studios giving away the IP created with these tools. Because the studios benefit from OSS is not enough reason for the studio execs to allow their IP to be freely distributed. Don't expect this to happen anytime soon, if ever.
Perhaps RMS should add a line to the GPL which requires any work created with GPL based tools must be given to the community under the same terms as source code.
Their thinking will be "We get the special production tools, and all you theiving scum, er, consumers get are playback systems. We'll just have our lapdogs in congess get that into law." Why would you think that they wouldn't want to keep 'special' tools for themselves, particularly when they see how powerful they can be?
First let's go over what DRM is going to be:
- X86 CPU manufacturers are (in the most likely senario) going to add instruction opcodes, or more likely, additional BIOS interupts, which are used for isolating a segment of memory from all but a "trusted" source, a process of some sort, be it a driver, application, whatever. It will be authenticated by a key, yadda yadda. The point is, the HARDWARE will lock-out access to this memory block by all other processes on the machine. Therefore, program A cannot read, write, touch, smell, send a love letter too, or call program B's protected memory block on the phone to say hello. To the rest of the machine, sans program A, this block does not and never did exist.
- Microsoft is implementing "Palladium" as the software end to this scheme. It will be a system in Windows which does the work of authenticating the use of these features as an abstraction layer in the Windows API. Windows Media Player, for example, might download encyrpted content from the 'net into a protected memory zone, so other programs would be unable to rip it for saving & possible later re-distrobution. It could also be used to completely isolate processes from each other in hardware, which would also prevent many types of viral activity (but not all, imagine a process is taken over by some network exploit and code is saved to the disk, it woudl work in any isolated segement it is loaded into...), and improve general security of sensitive e-mail, documents, data in general.
The way I see it, this scheme offers ADVANTAGES for Linux. For one, Linux won't impose the pay-for-use services I can envision Microsoft and MPAA/RIAA types pushing for (i.e. imagine the MPAA strikes a deal with MS, and each time you watch a DVD in your computer, you are charged a $0.05 fee, with no way around it, in addition to not being able to rip the DVD [well, using the standard driver, anywaysThen there is always the "YEAH RIGHT" crowd, those who insist this is root of all evil and I should remove my head from my ass and smell the reality. Most would also claim the smell before I took my head out of my ass would match this particular reality, but I'm not quite so sure (heh). Think about it, if DRM is going to cripple hardware to the point where it will destroy the open source community, a community which has proven time and again its methods work and its craftsmanship is that of quality - a community which the government (of both the US and foreign nations) has begun to take notice of and actually embrace - a community which competes directly with Microsoft; do you really think they'd get away with it? The NSA has their own Linux distro. Suddenly Microsoft and Intel create a system which only allows Windows to run on previously open hardware?
The DOJ would flush them both down the toilet for extreme monopolistic practices before it would even be reported on Slashdot. The recent court desision also left a somewhat open end for amendments to the settlement, I'm sure that would "get in on the action too".
I really wasn't a big fan of the whole DRM idea when I first heard it, but the Slashdot crowd tends to get a little over-excited at times. Between seeing what this whole DRM project has evolved into, and given the current state of the technology world (and for that matter, the world as a whole), I dont' see how it wouldn't be complete suicide for DRM-supporting companies to lock out potential 3rd-party developers of any kind. The system is meant to protect content, not monopolies.
Unless it's a monopoly on content. But that is a different discussion...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing!
I wonder if they use KDE or Gnome? Emacs or vi? Mozilla or Konqueror? I'm in need of a role-model!
Is it too late to change the GPL to prohibit the use of GPL'd code at any company which is a member of RIAA?
I probably won't ever have a need to hand paint hundreds of thousands of frames in Film Gimp, but by the way he's been promoting this thing it's a good bet that someone is jockying for an award of some kind next April. Evangelism of a free software product as having a major impact on the film industry is just the kind of thing that gets an award.
The exact degree to which "ILM" and "Dreamworks" really use it and the exact number of screenshots of Film Gimp we see outside the Robin Rowe columns in Linux Journal are beside the point. The movie industry is a game and we're seeing someone who knows how to play it.
How many tarballs you make, how many websites you upload to sourceforge, and how much evangelism you preach is what drives the industry.
I hate to run a cold shower on your collective open source hard-ons, but the reason most studios that are Linux based use GIMP as their paint tool is because there is NO OTHER CHOICE. I work at one of the studios listed in the article. The artists on my team doing texture painting will actually go look for a 5 year old SGI octane with Photoshop 3.0 to use because it is faster and easier to use than GIMP. Let that settle in for a moment. These kids love fast machines, they crave them like crack cocaine. However, they will go sit in front of a 250MHz boat anchor and use a product released 8 years ago because it is a better tool. GIMP has a UI that that the Surgeon General should place warnings on for RSI risks (repetitive stress injury for the non acronym types.)
The availability of Deep Paint or Photoshop on Linux would signal the end of GIMPs use in studios. It is not a matter of free as in beer tools, it is a matter of Total Cost of Ownership. If it takes my artists 3 times as long to produce paintings/textures in GIMP as it does in Photoshop/Commercial Tool X, I am walking straight into my Producer's office with a P.O. for Photoshop licenses. Because at the end of the day, our highest costs are labor, not software. And we are not zealots. We, as the rest of capitalistic America, want to make money. And we can't do that with inefficient process.