On 19 Jul, Havoc Pennington wrote: > On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:52:47AM -0400, Fred Heitkamp wrote: >> If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then >> only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big >> film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They >> probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running >> Windows. > > The digital effects and animation studios are typically using Linux > workstations, often migrated from SGI. They have some Windows/Mac for > specific apps sometimes, and some leftover UNIX workstations > sometimes. It's not just the render farm though. > > See here for example: > http://www.movieeditor.com/pubs/gu4dec.rowe.monday.abridged.pdf >
Excellent examples of how far Linux has gone in taking over movie production, but it missed a couple points: 1) Mr. Heitkamp said "view the final render". I would interpret this to mean the final film production work done on an Avid or similar system. So far, these systems remain Mac or Windows based. But Avid is hiring people with Linux experience and has released a few tools for Linux. The Linux penetration is coming. 2) This final view does not need 3D. The 3D graphics pipeline may be of interest in some of the earlier stages, but not in the final stages. And, in the earlier stages the really good rendering is not done with 3D graphics cards. You use the 3D tools for the preliminary sketches. 3) The final view needs tools that are special, and rarely available from traditional PC vendors. What you really need are very high quality display chains, preferably 12-bit resolution from frame buffer out to display (with no loss of quality or noise). You need extremely fast update and modify to the frame buffer so that you can rapidly adjust things like color balance, create psuedo-spotlights, and selectively adjust the appearance of subsections of the frame. The XFree86 2D capabilities and 2D image optimizations are actually quite relevant to these needs. They can't be used directly, but that is just because all the readily available cards are limited to 8-bits. R Horn _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
