Linux Movies Group

Linux motion picture technology

Linux Movies Group Meeting

Recap of meeting #3, Wednesday, April 3, 2002, 7pm
by Robin (rower@movieeditor.com)

Thanks to everyone who came and made the meeting a success! Headcount 7: Robin, Gabrielle, Ken, John, Drew, Kelsi, Dave. As usual, these notes are highlights of my recollection of conversations and not complete or necessarily accurate. This month is more fuzzy than usual because I am writing this later and can hardly make out what my notes meant.

Ken talked about Gmen, a Renderman-like open source project. Drew talked about a relativistic raytracer. He said a feature would like is saving the pipeline. Drew mentioned that PDI does motion blur exclusively as post process. Robin talked about how he would like a natural language interface to a 3D modeling package. Drew said he would like a parameterized scene library and pie menus.

Kelsi talked about going to Italy for the summer.

Drew mentioned that libstroke is based on a 3x3 telephone keypad metaphor, not curves. Emacs has gesture support too, but seems better than libstroke.

The X2X extension lets you slide windows across two monitors.

David mentioned his role at San Francisco SIGGRAPH as a board member. He is thinking about changing fields. He was a baker at Uprising Bakery.

Drew spoke about using Python to get video output from the Pinnacle DC10 board. He has a Web site with some sample MPEG clips at Alta Bates Hospital. He has a chat log project that he uses /JOIN IRC notation so he can search logs. He has written Light 9, a lighting event control system written in Python. Drew has been doing the lighting for twelve years for the Piedmont Community Theater production of Guy and Dolls. The lighting is synchronized to the music.

Drew talked about a problem he has restoring a SCSI backup tape. The tape has a bad header, but the data is intact. A "feature" of the DAT tape reader is it can't low-level read a tape, but aborts on a bad header. He is still looking for a solution.

We talked about Alameda County Computer Recycling Center and BNC. Two local organizations that provide free computers.