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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?
The newsforge article is here. Or perhaps they are saving the URL to tomorrows dupe about it.
Was it windows ?
:-D
That's a good one
No, really, most film studios used to be SGI/IRIX houses. Very expensive, but back in the day, it was pretty much the only thing studly enough to do what they needed. This is part of the reason why they now prefer Linux over Win32---easier to port stuff over.
No doubt a few places run Film Gimp on IRIX, but these days, it doesn't really get you much over doing the same on Linux. (And a Linux workstation is loads cheaper.)
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
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
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
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.
I really thought that we would be mostly AIX on larger p Series IBM machines. But as we're going, it looks like we'll be clustering and/or looking to divide processing among a large number of the new blade servers (Dell or Sun).
Linux is certianly not as capable as an AIX, but it's cheaper (even with purchased support), easier to admin, and will handle almost all tasks we need it to do admirably. The solution doesn't need to be perfect and Linux means we're not painting ourselves into a corner with a commercial product that will be hard to migrate from.
AIX is probably "better" from a purely technical standpoint, but overall, flexability wins out
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
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.
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!
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.
You won't care, probably, but ten years ago when I didn't yet decide on what to study, I just called R&H while I was in LA as a German tourist, because I tried to find out about the folks behind the Star Trek special effects.
They gave me, a foreign High School kid, the grand tour of their facilities, showed and explained almost everything I asked for and were really really nice people - considering the fact that I just called them hours in advance and had no prior appointment with them.
Same with the model shop, btw, who allowed me to see the actual DS9 model. I still can't quite believe that they just took the time for that weird German fanboy that I was...
While I didn't end up in computer graphics software development, it's nice to know that since I made minor contributions to Linux, some of my code now runs on R&H's computers...
So anyway, good luck to them. I hope they are still as cool as they used to be.
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You may like my a cappella music
The answer to the dilemma is to set clear limits on the copyright monopoly, particularly *time limits*.
Some have suggested that it's reasonable for the copyright owner to make 90% of the profit. So if the typical book generates 90% of its total profits within the first twenty years of publication, copyright on books should last for twenty years. The 10% reduction in profit for the publisher (compared to perpetual copyright) is more than outweighed by the increased gain to the public from having the book in the public domain after 20 years.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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.
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.