Film Gimp is a film editing add-on to
The Gimp, the powerful
open source image editing software freely available to those using
Unix or
Windows. Film Gimp uses The Gimp as a base and builds on it to provide film authoring capabilities.
Even though the Gimp software suite and its Film Gimp derivative are little known outside of the open source community, millions have seen it's products in action. Many Hollywood films feature special effects created with Film Gimp. Rhythm & Hues, a Los Angeles post-production editing studio, uses Film Gimp to add special effects to movies such as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Dr. Dolittle 2, The Lord of the Rings, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Planet of the Apes. They are also the artists behind the commercials with the Coca-Cola drinking polar bears.
Film Gimp was made to remedy the fact that the regular Gimp could not easily support sequence work--obviously a key component in any motion-based media creation. Since everything about the Gimp is open, Rhythm & Hues was able to easily modify its own file formats to be compatible with the Gimp.
New ideas discovered during the development of Film Gimp will be applied to future versions of the original Gimp suite of software. One of the improvements is GEGL, the GIMP E Graphical Library. It provides an abstraction layer that allows various color depths and models to work independently from hardware issues. Therefore, development improvements to Film Gimp will also apply to the main Gimp packages.
Film Gimp is very incomplete now. A good understanding of using The Gimp base is essential to working with it. Volunteers can help out with programming, if they can. Right now, the only way to get a hold of Film Gimp is with CVS at the Gimp Web site below.
film.gimp.org
www.rhythm.com