Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is another prime example of OSS can work to make software that is competitive if not better the other closed source applications.. Of course adobe will come along and say that they own the patent on anything that edits a layer of an image and try to sue because they cannot seem to compete and let their work answer the challange. Looks as though the gauntlet has been cast down again.
Since the previous OS of choice was IRIX, a Unix variant, the transition to Linux was both logical and fairly easy. In the past this was done on SGI workstations because Intel CPUs simple didn't have the horsepower.
Times change.
Windows wasn't used for a few reasons. First of all, it didn't exist for starters. It might be hard for some to bear in mind how recent a development Windows really is. Then, once it did exist, it simply didn't have the stability. It also didn't have the networking and multitasking capabilities of Unix, which was much, much, MUCH more expensive than any MS product, but worth it.
Now Linux is much, much, MUCH cheaper than MS products, but still a Unix variant.
Sure it's possible to write open source software for Windows, and there's lots of it available, but Unix has been, like it or not, the OS of choice for "serious" computing ( much to the disgust of the LISP machine fans) for over 20 years, and Windows is actually the "toy" OS newcomer. Not a troll. Just an observation from someone old enough to remember.
KFG
For movie work, yeah, mostly SGI and IRIX. For lower end stuff (ie, made-for-TV and commercials), NT was (and still is) also pretty widely used. A lot of production software was ported to (or written for) NT when it looked to some like NT would replace Unix, and SGI flirted with NT for a while too.
That trend is starting to swing in the Linux direction -- the same commodity hardware advantage that NT offered, but with the software advantages of Unix. And a price better than either.
-- Alastair
Apart from all the standard Unixy stuff like Linux, bash, Perl, Tcl/Tk, g++ etc, you mean.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The main reasons why studios are switching to Linux is that a) it's sufficiently similar to IRIX that programs port fairly easily (Unix + X11 + OpenGL is pretty portable), and b) you can now get decent hardware (e.g. OpenGL-enabled graphics hardware for previewing) for much less money.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
My general opinion of Hollywood is that it's populated by people like Jack Valenti, clueless rich assholes that will stop at nearly nothing to suck every last dime from the pockets of the public. I'll feel some sympathy for poor Jack when the film industry is living in cardboard boxes beneath highway overpasses. They whine and bitch about pirates stealing billions from their pockets when I read stories like this.
The MPAA is the evil part. Companies like ILM, Sony Imageworks, and Computercafe don't have a lot of say in the MPAA's policies. Besides, why does an entity have to be entirely evil? The "motion picture industry" is made up of hundreds of companies and millions of people. Not all of them support DRM and the war against CSS.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
For copyright holders as paranoid as corporate copyright holders, it's all about control. It has to be, they can't legally decide that "this is enough money" once they make a good profit because even though that might keep their customers happy, it won't satisfy their stockholders. Individual copyright holders can analyze a situation and realize that they have more to gain by letting 75% of their users/readers/views/listeners bootleg their works. Corporations don't have that luxury.
So that presents a problem. I'm a classical liberal, I believe that freedom from tyranny is more important than wealth, the former begets the latter and that the latter does not reinforce the former. If anything one can look at today's corporate society to see a society where freedom is sacrificed to make a buck. The democratic process control by two parties is in large part responsible for this situation. The only solutions could never be put into effect because monied interests of all stripes control the system. It doesn't matter whether they're labor, capital, environmentalists, "consumer rights" (whatever the hell that is), anti-abortionists, you name it. They're almost all invariably against the public good which is the protection of natural rights.
There are two solutions I can foresee. One painful, one not so painful. The first is to bar corporations from owning intellectual property. The movie studios for example would "loan money" to steven spielberg to produce a copyrighted work that he would own that the parent corporation would have an exclusive right to distribute, but not own. The other solution is to simultaneously remove anti-freedom nuts like Valenti and give legal protection to copyright owning corporations that allow bootlegging on some meaningful scale to keep their customers happy.
Strong copyright advocates need to learn that America doesn't have the culture to stomach the laws they want. It never has, those laws fly in the face of hundreds, if not almost a thousand years of Anglo-American customs and traditions. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, did not believe that the law should allow for private ownership of ideas. I'm sure almost none of them would approve of our current system. As a very liberal Christian I find it repulsive to allow for patents on anything other than very specific physical product designs. To me, allowing patents on anything else is an affront to God's creation as all knowledge is ultimately the creation of God, not man. Knowledge exists independently from human understanding, it awaits discovery, not creation, by man.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The main reason of linux over IRIX is simply the price and (lack of) performance of sgi workstation hardware. Call sgi and ask for the price of 20 dual-proc Octane2's with a couple of gigs of RAM and then call someone like HP and ask for the price of 20 similar machines. Notice the order of magnitude difference. Add to this the fact that the Intel workstations will performe a lot better in 90% of the tasks you will be throwing at it, it starts to become obvious. There are VERY few tasks left where sgi hardware outperforms Intel hardware.
The reason for linux over Windows is primarily that porting from one unix to another is easier than porting to windows.