| Film Gimp - Lights, Camera, Linux! |
(November 12, 2002)
Film Gimp is a popular open source tool in feature motion pictures. It has been used in Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter Stuart Little, and other films. Robin Rowe answers some questions about the progress of Film Gimp and other projects . . .
Question: What's Film Gimp?
Film Gimp is a tool for retouching motion pictures frame by frame. A typical application is removing dust marks after film is digitized. Scanning the negative is the first step in post-production, and the scans must be cleaned up to remove dust and scratches. Film Gimp also is used to eliminate wires when actors are being flown in wire rigs.
A movie fundamentally is just a bunch of frames, and that's what Film Gimp operates on. It's different from a video editor that works on one large file. Each frame of a film negative is scanned to become a single image file named with a sequential number. A frame manager in Film Gimp helps the user walk through the images one-by-one. The image retouching itself is about the same as using Gimp, which Film Gimp is based upon. Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a popular open source alternative to Photoshop.
Movies are normally scanned at 2k wide resolution and 16-bits per pixel component. A significant difference between Gimp and Film Gimp is color depth. Gimp uses 8-bit component (24-bit rgb), and Film Gimp uses 16-bit component (48-bit rgb). Even though you can't display uncompressed 16-bit on a conventional monitor, it becomes apparent if you work in 8-bit and later print back to film. Film has more dynamic range.
Question: What are the implications of Film Gimp?
Film Gimp is the most successful open source tool in feature motion picture work today. Programmers at many studios are helping development, including Rhythm & Hues, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and ILM. This is great cooperation in an industry that historically has been rather secretive.
Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing! While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.
Question: Are there any interesting or notable technologies or approaches used in Film Gimp?
There's Gimp, of course, on which it is based. We have a lot of flexibility thanks to the plug-in architecture. You can create filters or enhancements in just about any language you can name: C/C++, Python, Perl, Java, and so forth. We can support new file types through plug-ins. For example, Rhythm & Hues does that to support their own internal RLL image format used in their production pipeline.
Lately we've been leading some discussion about supporting CMYK. That's a feature that's been requested of Gimp for years. CMYK is of interest to printers and still photographers. Although CMYK is not of interest for motion picture retouching, the 16-bit design of Film Gimp makes it suitable for high quality still work, too. Film Gimp supports both 16-bit integer and 16-bit floating point formats.
The GUI is different. Unlike its predecessor, Film Gimp has some pull-down menus. It isn't all right-clicking like Gimp. Photoshop users are turned off by the Gimp interface. It seems very uninviting. Working on the GUI is what excites me most about the project.
Question: What's the future of Film Gimp?
The future looks very bright. It's a remarkable story. Film Gimp was never supposed to be a product. It launched as a joint effort in 1998 between Rhythm & Hues and Hollywood technology company Silicon Grail to add enhancements to Gimp. The Gimp HOLLYWOOD CVS branch was eventually vetoed by the Gimp committee as being too immature. They felt that the features would be more appropriate for Gimp 2.0 (which today may still be years away). Silicon Grail dropped out, but Rhythm & Hues persisted. Over the years there's been interest by other studios in Film Gimp, but the lack of support discouraged them. Film Gimp had no official release, just CVS.
After I joined the project as release manager in July others came forward to help. Sony Pictures Imageworks de-cloaked to reveal that they had their own secret internal version of Film Gimp with many bug-fixes that they had been working on for a year. Sony used Film Gimp on Stuart Little 2. Sam Richards at Sony is responsible for the latest releases of Film Gimp. Programmers at Sony have been integrating the features Rhythm & Hues added in the past year with Sony's version, which has brought us to version 0.5. A programmer at ILM just contributed a patch for 0.6.
Linux Fund recently awarded me a small grant to revamp the GUI and add a macro recorder. I think we will get more sponsors as success warrants, and that will help take Film Gimp to the next level.
I keep a list of technical goals on the Film Gimp home page. That currently includes maintaining frequent releases, package support, more file formats (PSD, Cineon, DPS, DV, MPEG), rendezvous with Gimp 1.2.3, Windows and native Macintosh support, GUI enhancements, better documentation, Python as the default scripting language, and perhaps compositing.
Question: How did you get involved in Film Gimp?
I wrote a story about Film Gimp last year for my column at Linux Journal. I write the graphics column there. My article described the steps to take it from CVS, how to build and install it. In the article I suggested that a Film Gimp source tarball would be available soon, but when the article came out nobody at Rhythm & Hues had found time to put a tarball together. Eventually I offered to do it myself, as well as updating the Film Gimp Web site that hadn't been touched in years.
Film Gimp was hosted at gimp.org, but I needed more than anonymous rights if I was to update the site. Rhythm & Hues vetted me, and gimp.org said they would give me an account, but months passed and still nothing. Nobody at gimp.org had time. I suggested hosting the project on SourceForge, which is what we did. Around that time the Film Gimp email list hosted at UC Berkeley went down for a month without explanation, so I started a new list on SourceForge. Rhythm & Hues continued to use gimp.org CVS for a while, but now we have everybody on SourceForge.
Question: How's the adoption of Linux in the film industry going?
Amazingly well. Studios choose the best tool for the job. Cost is secondary. Most studios have a mix of operating systems, including Linux, Irix, Windows, and Macintosh. Linux has become the primary OS for studios because it is the best tool for the job.
Disney is the last of the big dogs to announce coming over to Linux. Digital Domain, Dreamworks, ILM, Pixar -- everybody is onboard. Linux is now the preferred OS for animation and special effects. I anticipate that in 2003 most of the movies in theaters will have been touched by Linux. The new motion picture standard is Linux. It's everywhere.
Question: What's missing? What needs to be created, added, updated, to make Linux more appealing in the graphics/film industries?
The film industry has tremendous technical power. The question is not so much what we can do for them, but what they may do for everyone else. The studios have the largest Linux desktop deployments and are learning a lot from doing that. They are also pressing IBM, HP/Compaq, Dell, and NVIDIA to do more with Linux. They are driving the third-party market, resulting in Linux versions of leading commercial software including Maya, Houdini, SoftImage, Shake, and Renderman. Most of the industry standard motion picture tools are there. Adobe and Avid are the big holdouts.
What the studios tell me they want is good kernels that handle low latency, graphics, and audio with rock-solid stability. Studios are particularly sensitive to NFS file system and graphics drivers issues.
It is still early days for Linux as a mainstream studio OS. In fact, the conversion has happened much faster than anyone anticipated. SGI exiting the workstation market created a vacuum that sucked in x86 Linux. Although the paint may still seem wet on Linux, the studios are happy with it. They are seeing a 5x performance boost over systems being replaced.
Question: How did the Linux Movies Group get started?
When we relocated our company to the Bay area I was looking forward to joining in what I had imagined was a vibrant users group community here. Perhaps due to the economic downturn, the reality wasn't as I had expected. The right technical forum for my interests didn't exist so I decided to start something a new group.
Because my interests didn't fit into just one group I started two: Open Source Programmers and Linux Movies. Years ago I had founded a C++ users group in Washington. That grew to more than a thousand members. After I left though that group fizzled out. It was just too much work to maintain. For the new groups the goal is not just to be successful, but also sustainable and informal. Rather than have speakers we have roundtables, perhaps with a special guest. Everyone gets to talk. Both groups meet monthly in the Berkeley area. We've been at it about a year now, growing slowly by word-of-mouth.
Question: What else are you working on?
My day job is motion picture technology company MovieEditor.com. We make encoders, players, and editors. Been working on animation tools most of this year.
Object Design Group is home to my commercial projects beyond motion picture technology. My newest project is a SPAM firewall. Some years ago I built an automatic television news monitoring system for DARPA that used a PC to record CNN-TV off the air. My PVR was before TiVo, but for the military. It did natural language parsing on the closed-captioning and would notify military analysts as soon as any story on a relevant topic aired. It also deleted off-topic stories to conserve storage. I'm developing a similar approach to prioritize and cull email.
I do a bit of writing. Besides my column at Linux Journal I'm writing a book about Linux motion picture technology. Robin can be reached via email.
Additional resources:
Film Gimp - SourceForge Project
Linux Movies Group - Linuxmovies.org
Open Source Programmers Group
www.movieeditor.com
(Click here for further information)
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