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- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Like most post production studios use linux... Weta Digital runs Red hat...
- simeonb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yep, it has been this way for a while. The transition came from using SGI's to linux with nothing in between. The only exception I know about was ESC. ILM, Tippet, Sony, Rhythm and Hues, and DD I know transitioned from SGI's to linux. I am not sure where small and medium shops stand. Now that SGI's are so out of date, Discreet is being forced to release flame on linux as well. Now Flame, Shake, Nuke, Houdini, Maya, and XSI all run on linux, and for pipeline, windows will just get in your way, and python or perl makes sure that nothing is any harder than it needs to be. QT/perl or QT/python also work really well because all the systems can be guaranteed to have it installed and development of proprietary GUI's can be done relatively painlessly.
- prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Not a suprise. Hell, Apple sells more Linux versions of Shake than OSX versions. If there's once place Linux is definitely king, it's in movie production.
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not to mention that SGI transitioned to Linux themselves. I think ILM still uses their hardware.
Somehow they're still in business, don't know how long that will last. - ntufar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4AutoDesk is known for close relationship with Microsoft. This relationship consists of following: Microsoft pays AutoDesk real money to never ever ever ever EVER even fathom to think about porting AutoCAD to a platform other than Windows.
I was very surprised to see that AtoDesk to have something under Linux. After reading the article I see that it's something that AutoDesk recently acquired and did not manage to kill off Linux version right away fearing customer uproar.
Maybe if more influential AutoDesk customers keep demanding Linux version AutoDesk will take Linux market seriously. - simeonb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@sqr13
Those prices only happened within the last week, and now Shake is being phased out. Shake may cost less on a mac, but the cost of it on Linux is still well worth the money, and converting an entire studio's pipeline over to OSX would cost a lot more in labor than the difference between the cost of shake licenses. - elook, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2daVinci (http://www.davsys.com/), the world's best color-correction system, uses Linix as well. It was RedHat last time I worked with a 2K.
- drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The difference was always more expensive for Linux.
Basicly for the shake version of Linux it always cost the cost of the version for OSX PLUS the cost of the 'top line' model of the PowerMAC (the default configuration.)
So if you wanted to run Shake with Linux then it cost you the same as buying a powermac with Os X and shake... And still I am not suprised that Shake for Linux was more popular.
I can see this for two reasons...
1. Linux was always has been (and still is) aviable for hardware that is much more powerfull then anything that Apple offers. Sure you can buy a Linux computer for 400 bucks, as you can for a 'refurbished' Mac computer.. and you can get multicore systems for both systems... but you can also get computers for Linux that cost 25,000 dollars and are extremely powerfull.
2. Linux dominates the high-end portions of the movie industry. Probably more for 3d work then anything else. It makes sense that if your using a computer with lots of other apps that you paid big bucks for you'd want to use your all your apps on the same workstations.
For movies that were made using a lot of Linux machines...
Titanic was the first movie to use heavily linux stuff.
Shrek movies... They even used 'The GIMP' in the first one, not sure about the second. They said that Gimp was the best application for making textures, better then photoshop.. but they were starting to run into that 8 bit per channel limit.
At least the last two movies of the 'Lord of the rings' movies heavily depended on Linux. They used 'Cinepaint' to render the arrows in the major ogre battles. BTW, Cinepaint is currently the only Free Software application used in studio movie production. http://www.cinepaint.org/
It uses a 32bit per channel engine and is designed for film editing/touch-up.
Although actually Blender3d was used in the storyboard proccess on Spiderman 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
Although obviously Blender supports Linux, Windows, and Mac, so I don't know what operating system they used.
Digg reported a while ago that Linux is was used to help make 'Cars'
One reason for Linux's succcess is because it's open source and movie studios can modify it easily for clustering and other duties without having to deal with other corporations. They like their stuff to be very propriatory to their studio often and the license for Linux allows them more privacy and flexibility. (GPL only requires you to release code to those that you distribute the software to) I'm serious about this... studios doing high end work require very specific things.
Also most studios have had a long history of using Unix machines (and 3d accelerated X windows) through SGI Irix. As x86-based machines overtake these SGI MIPS machine it was simpler for the studios to go to Linux then to go with anything else and Linux is cheap and easy to work with (when you already have years of unix programming experiance under your belt)
Proof of this is the existance of ATI and Nvidia propriatory drivers. These things weren't made for your average linux user.. These things were originally made for the high end workstation-class video card market and the studios are willing to pay for this sort of thing. If it was just the 'consumer' linux market there would be no love for Linux from either corporation.
For instance Pixar was looking for somebody or some group to help improve the debugging capabilities of programming in a Linux environment. GDB is less then satasfactory and they are willing to pay good money to fix this. - KCorax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wait aren't all those people using Macs ?
No ? Does that mean that apple is lying ?
Noooooo, I'll never feel safe again in this wretched world... - busta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm doing an internship at Autodesk in the fall... doesn't really have anything to do with anything but I thought i'd mention it anyways >=)
- avatarpalin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Really....? Linux version? Does it scale to a cluster easily?
- srg13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Really? The Mac OS version costs $500 and the linux version costs $5000. 10 times as much... Thats the new version (4), I think that the mac OS price used to be around $1000 - $2000 with version 3.
- t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Why Is The Title Capitalized In A Way That Makes No Sense?
- thecwin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah. Not really big news. Production and post-production has been known for using Linux. Sometimes even when software isn't as great, it's outweighed by the ability to customise software and how it works in clusters. Linux is used in more creative things than people give it credit for, however it's usually used in the more technical parts of the process...
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