Sorry for the length:
* It seems ironic that Linux dominates at studios known for building secret proprietary technology to gain competitive advantage. What's happened is Hollywood has recognized that having a standard open platform to develop upon enables them to dedicate more of their resources to creating their secret sauce, the technology that sets them apart as a studio.
- Star Wars: Episode II, Linux made Yoda a light saber-wielding action figure.
- Lord of the Rings 2, waves of Orcs attacking the colossal fortress at Helm's Deep are not thousands of human extras, but digital actors created using Linux.
To consumers, Linux may rank third after Windows and Macintosh, but Linux dominates motion pictures more than anyone but studio insiders may realize.
It has been used to produce more than 30 blockbuster films, including Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: Episode II, Harry Potter, Shrek, and Titanic.
Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top studios.
It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have adopted Linux, too.
At the software level, studios are using Linux versions of some of the leading commercial applications for 3D animation, compositing, special effects, and rendering -- Alias Maya, Apple Shake, and Pixar RenderMan.
Internally, the major studios have ported millions of lines of proprietary code to Linux and are creating their new programs in Linux:
- Ken Beyer (ILM production engineering manager): "Six hundred Linux desktops will be used for Star Wars: Episode III to be released summer 2005."
Sequence supervisor Robert Weaver noticed a tremendous performance boost upgrading from RISC (Sun/SGI) workstations to Linux PCs during Star Wars, Episode II:
"The old system was so slow that the clones firing lasers appear to be throwing javelins," says Weaver. "We've seen about a 5x speed improvement in Linux. I'd say Linux is one of the most successful efforts we've had. I can't say enough good things about it. It is intuitive, incredibly stable, and we can get stuff fixed at a moment's notice."
- Weta Digital used software called Massive to create the hordes of digital Orcs in Lord of the Rings 2. "Autonomous characters could only be done in a limited way before," says Massive developer Stephen Regelous. "There's no way you can animate a hundred thousand characters in any other software in a reasonable amount of time," says Regelous. "Massive runs twice as fast on Linux as it does on Windows."
* Now, three of the most popular 3D animation drawing packages are available in Linux versions: SideFx Houdini (Linux in 1999), Alias Maya (Linux in 2001), and SoftImage (Linux in 2001).
An irony of the migration of software to Linux is that Apple and Pixar became leading suppliers of Linux software. The most popular motion picture compositing software -- Apple Shake (Linux in 2000) -- and the most popular renderer -- Pixar RenderMan (Linux in 1999) -- are both sold by companies headed by Steve Jobs.
CinePaint was based on a software project called Film Gimp, launched in 1998. Film Gimp was still in use there and had been used on Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, Dr. Dolittle 2, and Planet of the Apes & Stuart Little 2. It was even available for download for free by anyone who wanted it. Studios seemed to want it.
Last year, DreamWorks and Disney funded Linux developer CodeWeavers to make the CrossOver emulator run Windows Adobe Photoshop 7 on Linux -- without Windows. Can Photoshop with CrossOver meet the motion picture industry's need for Linux deep paint?
Not without the source code, and it remains to be seen whether Adobe would make its source code available to studios just to sell a few more copies of Photoshop. Will open-source CinePaint turn out to be the long-term solution? If nothing else, it will show whether the movie industry can get behind building open-source software.
* It seems ironic that Linux dominates at studios known for building secret proprietary technology to gain competitive advantage. What's happened is Hollywood has recognized that having a standard open platform to develop upon enables them to dedicate more of their resources to creating their secret sauce, the technology that sets them apart as a studio.
- Star Wars: Episode II, Linux made Yoda a light saber-wielding action figure.
- Lord of the Rings 2, waves of Orcs attacking the colossal fortress at Helm's Deep are not thousands of human extras, but digital actors created using Linux.
To consumers, Linux may rank third after Windows and Macintosh, but Linux dominates motion pictures more than anyone but studio insiders may realize.
It has been used to produce more than 30 blockbuster films, including Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: Episode II, Harry Potter, Shrek, and Titanic.
Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top studios.
It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have adopted Linux, too.
At the software level, studios are using Linux versions of some of the leading commercial applications for 3D animation, compositing, special effects, and rendering -- Alias Maya, Apple Shake, and Pixar RenderMan.
Internally, the major studios have ported millions of lines of proprietary code to Linux and are creating their new programs in Linux:
- Ken Beyer (ILM production engineering manager): "Six hundred Linux desktops will be used for Star Wars: Episode III to be released summer 2005."
Sequence supervisor Robert Weaver noticed a tremendous performance boost upgrading from RISC (Sun/SGI) workstations to Linux PCs during Star Wars, Episode II:
"The old system was so slow that the clones firing lasers appear to be throwing javelins," says Weaver. "We've seen about a 5x speed improvement in Linux. I'd say Linux is one of the most successful efforts we've had. I can't say enough good things about it. It is intuitive, incredibly stable, and we can get stuff fixed at a moment's notice."
- Weta Digital used software called Massive to create the hordes of digital Orcs in Lord of the Rings 2. "Autonomous characters could only be done in a limited way before," says Massive developer Stephen Regelous. "There's no way you can animate a hundred thousand characters in any other software in a reasonable amount of time," says Regelous. "Massive runs twice as fast on Linux as it does on Windows."
* Now, three of the most popular 3D animation drawing packages are available in Linux versions: SideFx Houdini (Linux in 1999), Alias Maya (Linux in 2001), and SoftImage (Linux in 2001).
An irony of the migration of software to Linux is that Apple and Pixar became leading suppliers of Linux software. The most popular motion picture compositing software -- Apple Shake (Linux in 2000) -- and the most popular renderer -- Pixar RenderMan (Linux in 1999) -- are both sold by companies headed by Steve Jobs.
CinePaint was based on a software project called Film Gimp, launched in 1998. Film Gimp was still in use there and had been used on Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, Dr. Dolittle 2, and Planet of the Apes & Stuart Little 2. It was even available for download for free by anyone who wanted it. Studios seemed to want it.
Last year, DreamWorks and Disney funded Linux developer CodeWeavers to make the CrossOver emulator run Windows Adobe Photoshop 7 on Linux -- without Windows. Can Photoshop with CrossOver meet the motion picture industry's need for Linux deep paint?
Not without the source code, and it remains to be seen whether Adobe would make its source code available to studios just to sell a few more copies of Photoshop. Will open-source CinePaint turn out to be the long-term solution? If nothing else, it will show whether the movie industry can get behind building open-source software.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31707.html