Film Gimp Project Renamed to CinePaint

ubiquitin writes "To avoid confusion with the GIMP, the Film Gimp project has renamed itself to CinePaint. The project is essentially a legitimate fork of GIMP, and is focused on image manipulations for moving pictures." We've mentioned Film Gimp several times lately; it'll be even handier as programs like Cinelerra and Kino grow more polished.

Comments

This is uber cool!

[$$$exy Gwen Stefani]

Film Gimp (now SinePaint) has been used in tons of major motions pictures, such as the following:

Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Cats & Dogs, Dr. Dolittle 2, Little Nicky, Grinch, Sixth Day, Stuart Little, Planet of the Apes, Showtime, Blue Crush, and The Fast and the Furious II.

This is really cool. I used to think it was just another Open Source project where someone creates a SourceForge website and then abandons it two months later after no code is written.

Re:Legitimate fork?

[Junta]

Legitimate as in not violating the licensing terms of the original project. For example, if CinePaint was a closed-source product, it would be an illegitimate fork. Bastard GIMP.....

Re:Why fork?

[ocelotbob]

Essentially, the fork came from a different design philosophy and set of priorities. One of the big reasons was that the Film GIMP (now CinePaint) crew wanted support for 16 bit per channel color, something that the GIMP crew wasn't going to be getting around to until GIMP 2.0. While GIMP 1.3.x now has that support, CinePaint now has support for other color models, such as floating point colors. Also, GIMP is migrating to GTK 2.x, and CinePaint is still using 1.2.

Re:No thanks

[TheRaven64]

I was sure you posted something higher up implying that you actually had a clue as to what this program was. Obviously not. Film GIMP (sorry CinePaint) is 'a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to be more suitable for film work than GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.' (from the web site). It is a paint program, designed for editing and retouching individual frames in a movie, not a video editing tool. It is aimed at film studios, not at people like you. If you think iMovie would cut it in these situations then you are mistaken.

Re:Why fork?

[Raphael]

Why fork?

Good question. The initial fork occured a few years ago, when a team of developers started to work on Gimp16 for adding 16-bit color channels into the GIMP. This was needed for editing films, but it was not appropriate at that time to integrate the new code into the core so this became a fork. However, the GIMP developers expected that the main GIMP code and Gimp16 (which was later called Hollywood Gimp, Gimp's Film Version and then FilmGimp) would converge later and that the core of GIMP 2.0 would support most of the features that were required for film editing (mainly 16-bit and floating point color channels). The user interface may have kept some differences due to the specific needs of film editors.

Unfortunately, for various reasons (political as well as technical), the gap between GIMP and FilmGimp widened a few months ago, soon after Robin Rowe took over the maintenance of FilmGimp and resurected the project that had not been very active in the last two years. There was some discussion about the fork on the GIMP developers mailing list in November and December last year (you can check the list archives here). The conclusion was that the FilmGimp developers were not interested in bringing their code closer to the current GIMP, and there are too few people working on GEGL (the library that should bring 16-bit and float channels into the GIMP) so it will still take a while before the main GIMP code is suitable for film editing. I am still sad about the way this whole thing happened. I tried to bring the two projects closer to each other, but obviously I failed.

I don't know how the future will look like. I wish the CinePaint developers good luck (honestly) and I hope that they will be successful. This fork of the GIMP suits the specific needs of the film industry and I hope that many studios will be able to use it and do great stuff with it. However, I expect that most people interested in photo editing, web design and general graphic editing will find that the GIMP is more suitable for them than CinePaint.

By the way, if you want to know some of the plans for the future of the GIMP, I suggest that you have a look at developer.gimp.org. In particular, read the plans for the future of the GIMP, posted in December 2000 but still valid. Besides this, the developers mailing list and the list of enhancements submitted to Bugzilla are good sources of information.