Re: [FilmGimp] Re: [Gimp-developer] Film Gimp and GIMP

[Sam Richards]

Hi,

I am one of the "developers" of filmgimp, although really I am mostly bug-fixing and packaging it at the moment. While I'm not going to comment on accuracies of the web site, thats Robins area, but I would like to address some of the other issues raised...

Firstly, like everybody else, I would prefer to avoid the split in code, and cant wait for GEGL to make it into gimp.. However, I feel that filmgimp satifys a short term need which is for a 16 bit and floating point paint package, until the 2.0 release happens.

I would like to stress that some of the film-industry interest in filmgimp is as much for the floating point as the 16 bit. The need for floating point is for "High Dynamic Range" imagery which is used as a lighting tool, and not for final delivery. So while I can believe that many films can sucessfully be rendered in 8-bit, its quite possible that at least some of those films will be using HDR imagery, so there will be a need for a paint system that can help touch up these images.

The next major reason for developing filmgimp is a time-frame issue, VFX houses are rapidly moving to linux as their primary platform, and one of the many missing apps is a basic paint system (such as matador), the hope is that we can develop filmgimp to that level in a short time frame (6 months).
The issues that we are dealing with are:
* More recognisable UI - which generally means make it more photoshop like.
The issue here is that many of our artists will only need a paint system once
in a while, so we need a UI that is familiar to them.
* Improved brushes (over current filmgimp version).
* Better layer and channel support, in-particular for alpha channels.

These have been issues that we have had with gimp for quite a while, and I think its very interesting that RnH (the main filmgimp developers), have been slowly addressing these issues and that their goals are extremely similar to ours. I would like to believe that once 2.0 starts forming, that all of us start migrating over to that new code-base.

While there has been much talk about merging the filmgimp version back into gimp (or even the other way around), the difference are extremely large, even more if we talk about 1.3, I also would prefer to see filmgimp as a short term solution and rather than spend quite a bit of time trying a merge, I would personally prefer to spend the time later on 2.0, since most of the work and fixes that we would be doing during the merge would need to be redone for 2.0.

I would like to know what the roadmap for gimp is after 1.4? When is the merge for GEGL? Are you planning 16 bit support as a separate thing to GEGL? Are there any design docs for 1.3? How much work was it porting to GTK2.0?

Anyway, I have just joined the gimp-developer list, and will try to be more actively envolved, so that hopefully later I can contribute more to 2.0 down the road.

Thanks...

Sam.



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