Film Gimp Released For Mac OS X

An anonymous reader writes "Film Gimp, the most popular open source tool in feature motion picture work, has released its first Macintosh version. Film Gimp is now available for Mac OS X, Linux, and SGI Irix. Film Gimp is a frame-by-frame retouching tool used by motion picture studios as an alternative tool to Adobe Photoshop. Film Gimp was used on the movies Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Stuart Little, and other productions."

Blowing my Excellent karma on this one

Phase 1. Imagine Beowulf cluster of these.
Phase 2. In Soviet Russia?
Phase 3. Profit?

Photoshop Trolls

Everytime The Gimp gets mentioned on /. in the last 6 months or so, the threads get polluted with Photoshop Trolls/Zealots with multi-post missives about how Gimp is a toy, good only for SourceForge Logos, and how it is considered by them to be a UI trainwreck.

Well, next time, link 'em back to this posting.

There is a professional and sophisticated use for The Gimp as a high-end tool, which doesn't require proprietary colour-space models, or CYMK matching printed output.

Re:Photoshop Trolls

I love Photoshop, but I wouldn't really consider it for this type of work. It really works best with single images - not working on a video sequence.

Even though I wouldn't trade Photoshop for (regular) Gimp, I wouldn't have any qualms about using FilmGimp if that's the tool I needed for the job.

I don't know why so many people are so passionate and interested in the tools other people use. Using the same tool doesn't make somebody a good designer/director/programmer/etc. When was the last time you went by a nice house being built and said "Say, nice work. What kind of hammer you using?"

- vin

Re:Photoshop Trolls

Being pure aqua is unlikely, since FilmGimp is based on GTK. However, things will get significantly faster when GTK gets a good cocoa port. There is some work in progress, but it isn't really ready yet. However, this still doesn't mean that it will look like Aqua.

To port FilmGimp to run natively on Cocoa is an undertaking that it doesn't sound like anyone is trying to take. Heck, nobody is going it for regular gimp either. And the windows ports of both are based on GTK for windows, not native. So, don't expect it anytime soon.

Fink unresolved-dependency blues

This seemed like a cool thing to try, as I've been following the Linux development for a while, but I can't seem to find "dlcompat_dev" in fink, and the film-gimp install fails without it.

As far as I can tell, my fink config is listing all trees. I know it wouldn't break my arm to install something manually, but it's just nice to see more complete install packages.

Otherwise, congrats to the team on another much needed media tool for OS X!

Cool. Any other replacements?

I'm willing to give anything a try. I recently got into creating my own short Star Wars films and used Photoshop to add in the lightsaber effects frame by frame.

Can Film Gimp load any kind of movie files? The problem with Photoshop is you have to (or as far as I know) use something like Adobe Premiere and convert the film to a .FLM file, then load it into Photoshop. When you do this, you lose all audio (which can be easily added back in, but that is just an extra step in a already long process). Will I need to convert it into something Film Gimp can read?

What about editing software for OSX, Linux, etc? Something similar to Ulead Video Editor? I'd love to make more movies and actually use legit (read: free) software and not be scared to post them.

And yes, I know I can Google for these answers, but it is better to have answers from people who have used the software and know what is good and what works (versus the company telling me it is good and works).

Quartz GIMP?

I noticed that the article said that there may be a Quartz port of Film GIMP in Q4 2003. Has the regular GIMP been ported to Quartz yet? I know the last time I used the GIMP on OS X, it used X11 like Film GIMP apparently does.

OS X? Not really...

Folks who think this will run natively on OS X will be disappointed. It runs on X11. So no pretty Aqua interface.

You need Fink to make it work.

Movie Industry and Opensource?

Wonderful. The movie industry fights opensource at every turn (ever heard of a DVD), yet welcomes it with open arms in the back office where they actually create the often crappy pieces of work that they make their money off of.

I wonder how good it is for the rest of us that they even use opensource. Do they let their own people view the movies on their workstations?

This is not OS X

OS X integrates Darwin and Aqua (and more). A OS X program has an Aqua interface. That's the main difference between an OS X application and a Linux program. Film GIMP seems to run under X Windows, which happens to run under OS X.

If you apply the same logic, Quark Express is available as OS X application (as it runs unter Quark), and my 1995 file comparison utility égale is an OS X app, as it runs in an Atari TOS emulator (MagiCMac OSX). Wow, I could write programs for OS X way before it was released. Amazing!