Linux at the Movies

On the afternoon of the 25th of November 2004 after many months of careful planning Robin Rowe and

Mike Diprose of the IEE introduces Robin and Gabrielle The Pennine Lecture Theatre The Audience Arriving

his partner Gabrielle Panterra arrived at Manchester airport in England to travel to Sheffield to give a Linux at the Movies presentation in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.  It was great to see them. They looked fresh and awake in spite of their long journey from Los Angeles and Beverly Hills where the MovieEditor.com office is. We hastily bundled them into a nearby Volvo and took them to their hotel in Sheffield.  Friday the 26th saw them take a tour to see the Chatsworth estate.  They loved every minute of it.  The owner of Chatsworth had seen fit to put up the Christmas decorations.  A wonderful day out for anyone.

On the day of the presentation everything went almost like clockwork except for the sound system in the lecture theatre which had a life of it's own.The session took place on the afternoon of the 27th of November at the Pennine Lecture Theatre, Sheffield Hallam University,  Howard Street, Sheffield.  Although there was seating for about 200 people only about 100 people arrived.  Coffee and tea was served at 13.30 and the presentation began at 14.15.  The session finished at about 16.30 when everyone stopped asking questions.

Robin Rowe is a well known motion picture technologist.  His talk was about GNU/Linux as the dominant operating system in feature film animation and special effects in Hollywood.  Based in Beverly Hills Robin is a partner in the company MovieEditor and leads an industry association called the Linux Movies Group.    Just about every blockbuster motion picture you can see in theatres today was produced with GNU/Linux through Titanic, Shrek, Star Wars Episode 2 and The Last Samurai to many other popular films.  He described the movie making tools of the trade, including proprietary commercial products, internal programs based on code that is kept as closely held trade secrets and popular open source projects.  One of the open source programs Robin covered was CinePaint - http://www.cinepaint.org- which is a project that he leads.   Some of the killer features of CinePaint are as follows at the time of writing which is late 2004 ....

• Typical GIMP/Photoshop stuff
• Visible brushes
• 8/16/32-bits of color per channel (up to 128-bits RGBA)
• Motion picture file formats: Kodak Cineon, ILM OpenEXR, Maya IFF, 32-bit TIFF
• Frame manager
• Flipbook player

Both Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks have contributed patches and open source code to this project.  Gabrielle Pantera came along with Robin to help out and to discuss other points that people wished to have answered.  It was great to see both of them in action and hopefully we might be able to invite them back at some time. You can find out more about Robin and Gabrielle by clicking on the pictures of both of them on this page.

This event was sponsored by the South Yorkshire branch of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and Digital South Yorkshire.  If you would like to get hold of a poster for this event you can do that by clicking on the link below.....

Download a Linux at the Movies poster