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RE: A common problem
by tupp on Tue 12th Jan 2010 01:25 UTC in reply to "A common problem"
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It is really painful to honestly describe the state of multimedia procuction applications on Linux (and thus pretty much all Unices) today.

The big studios predominantly use Linux and OSS programs in post production imaging.

For example, the open source nature of Cinepaint is the main reason why the major film studios and major animation houses use it, and not Photoshop. Not only is the development a lot faster (having 32-bit color depth years before Photoshop), but they can (and do) accelerate the app's development if they need a feature.

Post production techniques are constantly developing at a rapid pace, and every minute of the average theatrical feature film costs about one million dollars to make. With that kind of money involved in every detail and with competitors writing their own image manipulation code, do you think that the studios are going to settle for the stock features of off-the-shelf proprietary programs like Photoshop? They need an image editor that they can develop in-house to their advantage. This advantage is why Cinepaint is so much more attractive to the studios than Photoshop.

Here's the NLE/compostitor, Piranha:
Piranha has been around forever on Linux. Scroll down the Piranha web page and note some of the features. One could say that Piranha is slightly more sophisticated than Final Cut Pro!

Same goes for Piranha's little brother, Ant:

Another big advantage of Linux NLEs over FCP: one can change to a darker theme so that the OS's window elements aren't glaring into one's eyeballs in a dark edit bay.

The ugly thing is the people who always say that there is no problem on Linux with availability of good multimedia production apps. As soon as you say 'music', somebody will come along and say Ardour or Rosegarden. In 3D it's Blender, in image editing it's GIMP

What's wrong with Ardour? ... Blender? Both are incredibly powerful programs.

GIMP is better than Photoshop in many ways. First of all, it's easier to use. I have been able to accomplish a lot of things in GIMP, that my professional photographer friends couldn't do in Photoshop, with years of Photoshop experience. Recently, a friend of mine (who is a pro with probably eight years Photoshop experience) could not figure out how to separately extract the images in an animated gif, so he emailed it to me. I had never done it before, but, using GIMP, I was emailing him the separate images within ten minutes of when I received the gif.

The open source nature of the GIMP is an advantage. One can fork it off into new editor if one desires -- such as Cinepaint!

I can use the latest version of GIMP/Cinepaint compiled for 64-bit. Try that on a Mac with Photoshop! ;-)

Furthermore, I can put GIMP/Cinepaint on a small Linux distro on a live CD (or live USB stick) and it will boot on almost any X86 PC, so I can travel with my photo editor and I don't have to worry whether it will be comptible with the OS on the machine that I encounter.

If I use Tiny Core Linux, both the OS and GIMP combined on the live CD/USB come to only 17Mb! Try that with your proprietary software!

I can do the same with Ardour, Blender and probably with Ant and Piranha.

By the way, Photoshop relies on the open source dcraw for its Adobe Camera Raw plugin to import raw camera files (an essential function for pro photographers). Read the second sentence:

I hear a lot of vague criticism of OSS and Linux, but when it gets down to the details, I find that it is often superior to the alternatives.

Also, give the OpenShot guy a break. He's probably been coding his NLE for less than a year, and he's accomplished a lot it that short time. No one should expect it to be perfect right now.

Edited 2010-01-12 01:43 UTC

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