Linux Movies Group

Linux Movies Group: Highlights of Meeting #6

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2002, 7pm
by Robin (rower@movieeditor.com)

Thanks to everyone who came and helped make the meeting a success! We met at Nation's Giant Hamburgers in El Cerrito (near Berkeley). Headcount was 6: Robin R., Gabrielle P., Jason H., Ramona H., and newcomers Kevin E. and Tom S. As usual these notes are just highlights of my hazy recollection of conversations.

There was some discussion about the status of Broadcast2000/Cinelerra. Probably the most complex open source video editor for Linux, nobody seems to be able to figure out how to operate it besides the original developer. Linux Media Arts, which includes the software as an enticement to buy their Linux workstations, has demonstrated it at NAB. Jason and Ramona's company Spectsoft used to work with LMA and Broadcast2000. As part of his video driver development, Jason is creating a commercial client-server DDR. That's not DDR memory, but digital disk recorder -- sort of like the old offline CMX tape editors.

Kevin, who is a communications consultant at Day Wireless, asked which Linux distro people like. Suggestions included Debian, Redhat, SuSE, Gentoo, and LNX-BBC. LNX-BBC is a recovery distro good for booting on a Windows or Linux machine as a forensic tool. It can be used to examine viruses or broken installs without loading the host OS. The distro fits on a credit card-size CD. We got on the subject of WinXP, which everyone seemed to agree was a big step backwards from Win2k, that the "Playskol" interface is particularly annoying.

Robin mentioned his plans for Film Gimp, and that he had a new web site for that at SourceForge.

This was our first time at Nations Giant Hamburgers. It isn't as upscale as Mel's, where the Open Source Programmers Group meets. However, it is easy to park, which is a nice change. We plan to keep LMG at Nations Giant and OSPG at Mel's.

Robin's notes from the Bay Area Motion Graphics Meeting

BAMG seems mostly a Macintosh Adobe After Effects group. Surprisingly, there was one Linux Tux T-shirt in the audience, but nobody knew much about Linux. Headcount was about 40, meeting was downtown San Francisco on July 1, 2002.

Artbeats digital stock footage gave a rather long demonstration of their product. Steve Holmes mentioned that Artbeat's helicopter footage was used in the movie Charlie's Angels. Steve demonstrated some AE tips, such as creating at photographer's blue sky background by combining a fractal filter with a gradient. He also did a Luna matte (black = transparent) and motion blur. Because he wasn't using many effects it took "only" ten minutes to render a short 720x486 clip on OS X. In the Q&A someone suggested T26.com as a source for fonts.

Alex Lindsey gave a demonstration of using Stitcher to create hemispherical panoramas. He said that if you shoot many of these you must have a Kaiden rig, a tripod that eliminates parallax by swinging through the nodal point of the lense. With cheaper lenses it is best not to use fisheye because of distortion. Just shoot more angles. At 0 degrees shoot 18 shots, at 32 degrees nine shots, at 65 degrees six shots, and at 90 degrees just one. Do likewise for negative 32, 65, and 90 degrees. JPEG digital images don't really have enough resolution. Use a better digital camera and TIFF.

The Orphanage (an independent film and production company launched by former ILM special effects professionals Jonathan Rothbart, Scott Stewart, and Stuart Maschwitz) demonstrated Magic Bullet, a new plug-in from ToolFarm that makes DV footage look more like film. That retimed as 23.976 fps, changed the color balance, and stretched the dynamic range. On problem footage it was easy to see an improvement, but good DV footage seemed to sometimes look worse. It was really hard to judge technically because it was being shown on a digital projector that didn't have ideal display characteristics to begin with.