Thought Experiment: The Ultimate Creative Content OS

Dave Girard has written a lengthy description of how to design the best possible operating system for creative pursuits (video editing, photo manipulation, and sound editing, in particular) — at least the the best possible one he can imagine by selecting from the best tools and behaviors that he finds in Mac OS X, Windows, and (mostly Ubuntu) Linux. He makes a compelling case for the OS (or at least a GUI on top of it) having baked-in support for a wide range of image formats and codecs, and makes some pointed jabs along the way at what each of these three big players do wrong.

Re: the best os for creative people

[loufoque]

PNG is already a replacement for GIF.

Re:Ooooh, pointy jabs at OSs

[robthebloke]

Sorry, but pointy jabs at OSes are well deserved in this case (ex-film industry guy here). Linux is used extensively within the film industry, but each studio requires a small army of linux gurus to patch and modify the OS and kernel just to keep the OS from constantly falling over. Whilst none of the gurus complain (they get paid a healthy salary), it's a real shame that an artist simply cannot perform these tweaks themselves (recompiling a kernel is not for the faint of heart!). You'll also find a few Mac pros knocking about, but there the problems are just plain ridiculous. The lag between new OpenGL version & GPU features, v.s. the adoption into OS X is just insane. If you're predominantly linux, with a few hundred mac OS X boxes, it's kinda nice to be able to provide the same toolset to users on both platforms (As an R&D programmer, my role was to help improve the performance of art tools). Sadly, if you have OS X in the mix, this becomes extremely unpleasant. You end up with the high performance version on linux (leveraging any GPU feature available to give the artists the ability to work on scenes with hundreds of millions of polygons), and then you have the crippled OS X version that craps out after 10 million (even though the GPU used in both machines is identical). Windows isn't without it's problems (being effectively stuck with a single user->single computer mindset), but at least you can still exploit the underlying hardware. The reality is, if you're a creative professional, working with computers is still a massive ball-ache. It's a shame that people who write the OSes haven't really put much consideration into figuring out how their users actually use the things.

Re:Video Editing

[Anonymous Coward]

Lightworks for Linux? www.lwks.com

Re:Video Editing

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now is Windows. Final Cut Pro was bastardized into Imovie pro. and Linux has absolutely nothing that is useable.

Oh dear...

Windows has a lock on it as the only platform that runs AVID and Sony Vegas for the only two professional platforms for video editing

Most of those switching from FCP7 went over to Premiere or Avid MC on OSX.

and After Effects as the ONLY EFX software platform that is useable.

I think you meant unusable and what is "EFX"?. AE is a motion graphics tool that evolved into a compositor and does neither very well.

And this makes me sad. All the Linux options are utter garbage or for making videos of your cat, none are usable for a feature length film or even a professional looking TV show.

Not true... you could edit your cat videos in flame, [autodesk.com] Resolve [blackmagicdesign.com] or piranha [ifxsoftware.com] (etc) if you wanted.

Of course the linux version of Resolve is $30,000 because... being the version in professional use it's only available with the control surface. Since you're making "a feature length film or even a professional looking TV show" and want to use linux, it should be right in budget for you!