“For the Oscar award-winning movie Titanic the production studio
Digital Domain used Linux on a network of more than a hundred DEC
Alpha machines to render the special effects. However, they used
350 SGI machines running IRIX and a hundred DEC Alphas running
Windows NT for the artistic aspects of the production. Linux was
judged not-ready in 1997 for the video desktop. What’s developed
with Linux as a desktop operating system for video production in
the last few years?”
“For Linux to be a player in the realm of television and motion
picture production it must have stunning graphics capabilities,
high-performance disk I/O with support for the very large file
sizes video needs, integration with analog and digital video
input/output devices, and the actual video applications themselves.
As these capabilities are becoming available on Linux, the
companies that develop video applications (including the company I
work for) are looking at Linux in a new way.”
“Because Digital Convergence seems like too much of a mouthful
for a title, and Linux Multimedia too lame, we’ll call the column
Media/GFX. GFX is an abbreviation of “graphics” used in
television news rundowns and scripts, a term I picked up years ago
as technical director for news production at an NBC television
station. Media/GFX will tell about our travails with Linux over the
next year as we install multimedia applications and make progress
on the programming front and will discuss what it is like to
develop multimedia applications for Linux from scratch. My own area
of expertise is video software design using C++ and Java, and
that’s always interesting (and frustrating) on any platform. Video
applications are always some of the most challenging because of the
demands they make on the CPU, disk and I/O systems.”