I went over to Sheffield on Saturday for a talk entitled “Linux at the Movies” by Robin Rowe, lead developer of CinePaint who had come over from Hollywood. The meeting was organised by ShefLUG (sponsored by the IEE, Digital South Yorkshire and the NTI West Yorkshire) who can’t seem to stop themselves from organising great events.
It was the most interesting talk I’ve ever been to. He started by talking about how Linux came to be adopted by the major movie studios (they migrated from SGI and IRIX) and the software they use for each stage in the production process. They seem to mainly use software developed in-house but also make use of CinePaint (which they also funded the development of and continue to contribute to – this was a suprise). He also talked about how the various special effects are done and showed several movie clips demonstrating this – it wasn’t related to Linux specifically, but it was very interesting none-the-less. What was especially interested was what he said about DVDs: basically the movie companies don’t really like them because they are better quality. While you wouldn’t notice a slight camera shake in the cinema due to the quality of the film, you would notice it on DVD so all the little imperfections stand out.
So in summary, it was great! And as usual all it cost was my train fare from Manchester to Sheffield.
I’ve also recently got myself a copy of Doom III (for Linux, of course) and I must admit that I’ve got rather mixed feelings about it. The gameplay seems to be Half Life meets Unreal Tournament and doesn’t really offer anything new. The graphics on the other hand are great, but my P4 3.06GHz with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce FX Go 5200 just can’t cope with changing the quality from the lowest setting which I think is absolutely appalling, especially since processors only go 600MHz faster than what I’ve got…
