Linux Movies Picture Gallery

An anonymous reader writes "Shots of Linux being used in movie production including Star Wars, Scooby-Doo, Collateral Damage, and other films. The Linux Movies Group is an open group advancing Linux motion picture technology, founded by Robin Rowe who leads the Film Gimp project."

Incredible!

[nathanh]

I don't know what amazes me more; the fact that Linux is being used by professional artists to create blockbuster films... or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!

Re:Incredible!

[CTD]

Don't get me wrong... but "incredible!"?

I think that the "rah rah" club for Linux needs to get over their "underdog" status.

Linux might not be Windows (concerning market saturation), but it's not a joke, or a temporary thing. Yeah, I'm jaded and cynical for not being excited when I hear that the Girl Scouts used Linux to host their cookie sales website, but let's get real... Linux is more than good enough for use in business production and nobody should be surprised when anyone in the mainstream figures this out.

You want me to get excited about someone using Linux? Get Asia Carrera to host her website with Linux...

Otherwise let's get over the "Gee willikers Mr. Peabody, someone else is a nerd too!" response and get to the "It's about damn time these idiots saw a good thing for what it is!" response.

(Sorry if I sound offensive nathana, it's cool and all, but sheesh)

Re:Incredible!

[Permission Denied]

You want me to get excited about someone using Linux? Get Asia Carrera to host her website with Linux...

ingram% telnet www.asiacarrera.com 80
Trying 209.163.238.131...
Connected to asiacarrera.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 02:32:47 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.21 FrontPage/4.0.4.3
Last-Modified: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 01:59:58 GMT
ETag: "50013-1cc7-3e139d1e"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 7367
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Connection closed by foreign host.

You may be missing the humor inherent in the original poster's comment:

I don't know what amazes me more; the fact that Linux is being used by professional artists to create blockbuster films... or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!

Tk is a graphics toolkit. It's also a suck-ass graphics toolkit, and it's also impossible to separate from a suck-ass language called TCL (pronounced "tickle"); you can get Tk bindings for perl, python, etc., etc. but it still requires TCL. TCL/Tk is so suck-ass that I find it hard to believe that someone would actually consider using it for a new project - thus, it's incredible.

In all fairness, TCL/Tk was the only GUI scripting environment for Unix many years ago. Back in the day, your choices for X11 GUI toolkits were TCL/Tk (suck-ass), Motif (costs $$), Athena (looks nasty, confusing semantics), or DIY with Xlib (which isn't as hard as it sounds, but takes time). Nowadays we have really nice toolkits like Qt and wxWindows (and GTK for those who refuse to program in C++), but the pyhon and perl people still consider Tk the "canonical" toolkit for their languages. Really a pity, since wxPython is much nicer RAD environment.

Re:Incredible!

[CTD]

You got me. Thanks for the clairification on Tk.

Thanks. :\)

Re:Incredible!

[Ed Avis]

I think it's no longer true that all Tk implementations require Tcl. The very first Tk libraries for other languages used to call the Tcl interpreter, but I think that Perl's Tk and Python's Tkinter now call the C code directly.

Re:Incredible!

[Sembiance]

What's incredible is that Linux is being used to CREATE all these movies, yet it's still not legally allowed to VIEW them.
Funny eh?

Re:Incredible!

[g4dget]

or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!

Tcl is a pretty simple scripting language and Tk is a pretty simple GUI toolkit. And that's exactly why people still use them.

What are the alternatives? There isn't much. The most popular is scripting language bindings to Gtk+ or wxWindows or Qt. But those just expose very complex toolkits to a scripting language, rather than creating a simpler, more high-level way of specifying a GUI (and, no, GLADE doesn't do the trick either).

Tcl/Tk clearly needs to be replaced--it is aging and limited. But until something better than scripting language bindings to C/C++ toolkits comes out, Tcl/Tk will continue to be used.

Too bad...

[RyoSaeba]

...they don't make their progs Open Source !
Now that's prolly asking too much, considering how much money they prolly invested in those apps....

Now what would be interesting would be to know why they chose Linux:
* price
* open sourceness
* existing tools on it
* stability
* no precise reason except it's cool
* other reason
(almost forgot that option:)
* CowboyNeal computes all effects on paper

Re:Too bad...

[Permission Denied]

Now what would be interesting would be to know why they chose Linux

The option you missed is that Linux is excellent for compute clusters. If the render farm runs Linux, putting the design tools on Linux might save time/money in integration issues and codebase maintenance. In the Windows world, "cluster" means database server farm, not compute cluster. I don't even know if Windows has tools like MPI or mosix.

Re:Too bad...

[CyrusSukhia]

Um...it seems open sourced to me...from the Film Gimp homepage

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.

That looks cool

[NaveWeiss]

They say that Film Gimp is more suitable for films. Now I wonder - what program is easier for colorizing greyscale images: Film Gimp or Plain Gimp?

Interesting

[leviramsey]

I wonder how KDE fans who like Star Wars will respond to the screenshots which indicate that ILM prefers GNOME!

;o)

Other shots?

[Hubert_Shrump]

Anyone have action photos of the servers that send me all this wonderful porn?

It's okay to *create* movies using linux but...

[rickthewizkid]

... the RIAA will get ya if you try to *play* their resulting DVD in Linux.... :)

Interesting double standard dontcha think?

Just my 4-DVDs-for-49-cents worth
RickTheWizKid

Re:It's okay to *create* movies using linux but...

[damiam]

The RIAA has nothing to do with movies or DVDs. That would be the MPAA. Get your evil organizations straight.

Linux involvement a big deal?

[Anonvmous Coward]

Is Linux the big deal here? Not at all. The big deal here is that they're using Open Source software to get their work done. As somebody planning to enter the VFX world soon, it's WONDERFUL that I can download this software and learn how to use it, therefore I can train myself before I get the job. The potential advantage here is that newbs to the industry aren't so newbish anymore.

Nobody should care that it's Linux. They should care that Film Gimp is available for Linux, and soon Windows (which most of us starting out are already using). Hopefully a 3D app like Maya will wander into the Open Source arena before too long. (Yes, I'm aware of Blender, it's not at Maya's quality yet.)

Note: I'm referring to the title of the page this article links to, not the Slashdot story itself.

Re:Linux involvement a big deal?

[Luyseyal]

Um, the Open Source movement, as contradistinguished from the Free Software movement, is all about economics. Greater efficiency and TCO through quality, shared software. By buying into the argument that Linux and Film Gimp make better sense for their products, they have bought into the Open Source movement.

Free Software movement is a whole 'nother animal.
-l