Re: [CinePaint] cinepaint vs Gimp

I work for the Moving Picture Company in London, a large VFX studio, and
amongst the creative/technical staff, we're also around 95% linux. We do
most of our work with Maya and PRman and it's just easier to maintain a
large render farm and lots of workstations and in-house software on linux.
Everything works better, except for one thing. The only reason we have *any*
workstations running Windows is so that the matte painters, texture artists
and concept art guys can run Photoshop CS. If we had a stable, full
featured, bit-depth-agnostic replacement for Photoshop, we'd probably have
no need for Windows. I hate to denigrate CinePaint because it's a project
with vast potential, but as it stands (at least in my home installation on
Ubuntu), it isn't nearly stable enough or easy enough to use for that kind
of work. As a semi-professional photographer in my spare time, I'm seriously
considering blowing a lot of money on a Macintosh machine just so I can run
Photoshop (without having to use Windows), which seems like a terrible vote
of no confidence in linux.

I guess my point is that from the perspective of a VFX professional there is
a massive and seemingly basic (all of the film industry standard 3d
modelling, rendering and compositing software runs on linux) gap in the
linux software arsenal that CinePaint nearly, but not quite fills. I'm
really hoping that Glasgow will plug the right holes and fill that gap for
good :)


Niall


Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

> 95%?  That is indeed surprising to hear.  I am currently employed
> by a small start up venture, and even though it would reduce software
> costs to virtually nil, I would be extremely reluctant to even
> suggest Linux.

Yup, 600 employees when all cylinders are running (Feb-June just
before Summer movies come out) and another 150 in India.  3/4 of the
software is in house.  There is a team of 10+ developers.

> But, as I understand it, in the commercial graphic arts world
> productivity is all that matters.  To please that overly fastidious
> crowd becomes the paramount concern.

Yea, thats the biggest issue.  Over half the employees are project
hire for a specific movie or commercial.  So you want people to come
in and hit the ground running or with minimal training.  Many of the
in house apps have shortcut keys and menu layouts very similar to
their commercial equivilants so people can pick up the application
easily.

I know the gimp people were really pissed off at gimpshop (photoshop
ui mod) but people are much more likely to use opensource apps when it
feels familar to something they have already used.  Personally I
really tried hard to use gimp for textures on a whole animation back
at version .7(1996 I think) but just found I worked 2-3x faster with
the photoshop gui.  Much of the interface was just very clumsy.  Time
is money.

-deke

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