[GUFSC] O que tem Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter e Stuart Little em comum? Resposta: Film Gimp!

[Ricardo Grützmacher]

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/10/29/1622213.shtml?tid=6

GPL movie editing project gets grant from LinuxFund.org
Tuesday October 29, 2002 - [ 04:16 PM GMT ]   Print this Article
Topic - Multimedia

- by Tina Gasperson -
Film Gimp, a specially enhanced version of The Gimp, has been used as an 
animation tool in Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, and Stuart Little. Recently 
Film Gimp announced it has been chosen as the recipient of a $1,000 
grant from LinuxFund.org.
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Robin Rowe, the release manager of the Film Gimp project says the money 
will be used in part to make improvements to the graphical user 
interface (GUI) and to create a macro recorder, which will allow users 
to record patterns of keystrokes and save them as named files.

In a recent press release, Linux Fund's Executive Director Jerritt 
Collord said Film Gimp was chosen to receive the grant because of its 
significance to the Open Source movement. In particular, Collord says 
Linux Fund is excited about the proposed GUI changes, "that will finally 
make it more accessible to users accustomed to popular proprietary 
software."

Sony Pictures' Imageworks, and Rhythm & Hues have made heavy use of Film 
Gimp, especially in films that use talking animals. Even the Coca-Cola 
"talking bear" commercials were created using Film Gimp, which runs on 
IRIX and Linux.

Rowe says that the Film Gimp user base is "quite small compared to The 
Gimp," which actually makes it easier to implement the GUI changes. "I 
have a lot fewer people that are going to say we want it this way, or we 
want it that way."

Originally Film Gimp had asked Linux Fund for $2,000, but Rowe says they 
were told "they don't give $2,000 grants. We're invited to come back 
next year and ask for another $1,000 grant. Basically I've cut in half 
what we'd planned to do."

For motion picture editors, Film Gimp is the Open Source alternative to 
Adobe Photoshop, but it provides benefits beyond simply being free and 
non-proprietary. "The thing that makes Film Gimp appealing is that it 
has made some accommodations to deal with hundreds of thousands of 
separate images, instead of just a few at a time." This is accomplished 
through the frame manager, a tool that Photoshop doesn't have.

The frame manager basically allows users to step backwards and forwards 
through frames (individual animation panels), and create "stores" or 
groups of frames that allow faster operations.

Rowe is an employee at MovieEditor.com, a company that, among other 
things, creates movie editing software. But, Rowe says, MovieEditor.com 
and Film Gimp have nothing to do with each other, since MovieEditor.com 
produces proprietary products and Film Gimp is licensed under the GNU 
General Public License.

Other movie animators such as Pixar and Dreamworks are running Linux, 
but are still using proprietary editing software like Maya, Houdini, and 
Renderman.