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Film Gimp Chalks Up Another Studio
Robin Rowe of the Film Gimp project has a piece running on NewsForge (also part of OSDN) that says "Film Gimp has recently been adopted by ComputerCafe, the fourth motion picture studio to use it in making feature films." Check out this recent post about Film Gimp to see some great screenshots of behind-the-scenes use. (And Rowe is also hoping you can get to the Linux Movies Track at Creative Cow West 2003, starting Tuesday in Los Angeles.) Update: 02/17 04:04 GMT by T : Brain rebooted, so I added the missing link.
Okay, originally I thought Film Gimp might have been a video-editor or something built on top of The Gimp, but here's what it really is (straight from the horse's mouth):
Film Gimp is a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to be more suitable for film work than GIMP or Adobe Photoshop. Film Gimp is the most popular open source tool in the motion picture industry -- used in Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films. Go Film Gimp! Go!
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
babelfish describes it as follows:
In order to decorate the decoration string of the film and from the string or adobe brick Photoshop to be suited for working the film it is the picture of the free was opened source which is designed and the correction program of the image. The decoration string of the film is the potter of the Scooby-Doo and the Harry, the photographic strip industry which a little is used with the film of the and other feature most spread the source equipment which was opened....
In many respects, IRIX is the better choice. IRIX is loaded with features that make it great for film work. But in the end, the high price of hardware and software loses out to linuxes strengths.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Historically, custom-written solutions on propietary hardware has been the norm in the VFX industry.
However, Hollywood has always been focused on the bottom line. VFX studios are always looking for cheaper solutions for creation of visual effects.
Companies that have locked themselves into SGI, for example, have found themselves having to cut prices to compete with other botiques using cheaper solutions on commodity hardware.
Embracing the linux/open-source movement has gained remarkable popularity in recent years. A few small studios each contributing a small amount to a project such as film-gimp have produced a product superior to Adobe Photoshop for film work.
(PS does not properly support 16-bit color, a neccessity in modern pipelines.)
This trend has advanced to the point where the VFX community is afraid of even Apple asorbing shake and cutting its price in half. Would you spend 250k on shake licenses for linux x86 if you cannot get a firm answer on whether or not the program will be supported in 2005? Or, would you dump 100k into supporting the development of Cinelerra?
It's important to remember that the VFX companies are a totally different aspect of Hollywood than Jack Valenti and his minions.
At the end of the day, a computer is a tool. If a 10k program can help a 150k/year VFX artist work even 10% faster, it is worth its cost.
If a free program cannot produce such a speed-up, it will not penetrate the upper echelon of VFX work.
However, if a free program can help a 2-3 man studio compete with the big boys, it's easy to understand why Film-GIMP has taken off in a big way. PS is now the second place runner, a position it has not had to be in in a long time.
Competition will continue with only better results (hopefully on the silver screen) as the result.
-Brett
FilmGimp started as a hacked up version of Gimp to solve a particular problem that had no solution. Instead of making that a propriatary product R&H went open source. FilmGimp is more specialized buy very handy for some extgreme image processing. very cool
It may just be the only OSS tool in the motion picture industry.
I know sweep, an opensource sound editor is used widely, and in fact was partly funded by Pixar.
Your comparing people who make movies with those who's business is to invest, finance, and eventually profit from them. The people using this software only care about quality and creating spectacular effects, and use the best tool for the job be it OSS or not.
(PS does not properly support 16-bit color, a neccessity in modern pipelines.)
I'm going to stamp out the idiots right now and say that Film Gimp does not support 16-bit per pixel color (aka high-color). Rather, it supports 16-bit per channel color, or 48-bits (64 with an alpha channel) per pixel.
It also supports 32-bit floating point per channel, for things like HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging.
www.macslash.com had an article on it... search the old articles for it an the story will point you to the website with details on film gimp on os x
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Up until 2-3 years ago the visual effects industry was firmly (though reluctantly) set on NT as the succesor to IRIX. This had nothing to do with the relative merits of NT; it was mostly because SGI had started falling seriously behind PCs in terms of raw CPU power and even OpenGL speed. The high-end studios that rely on lots of custom software definitely dragged their heels around this, since it is so difficult to port everything from a UNIX environment to Win32. Nonetheless the shift appeared to be inevitable; SGI's desktop machines could hardly even hold up to cheap Celerons (much less DEC Alphas) with 3DLabs or NVIDIA cards*.
Then Linux appeared like some grand accident or surprise mutation. The studios suddently had an alternative to the death-march towards NT. All the power of the PC, in a familiar UNIX environment, was too good of a deal to pass up. And now you see the entire industry adopting Linux as strongly as it adopted IRIX. There are of course still gaps to fill in day-to-day software for graphics work (like a fast 2D flipbook player or a media codec library or - dare I say it - Photoshop), but it's clear that Linux is here to stay.
* I acknowledge the inter-CPU bandwidth and scalability advantages of SGI hardware, but keep in mind that visual effects work leans much more heavily on individual CPU speed and to a lesser extent OpenGL.