jyonkov
Neven Boyanov
Bertrand
Daniel Radev
Stefan Stefanov
Apostol Apostolov
ihayes2000
Jean
Online VFX
As i’m working in the VFX industry since 12 years, i always thought that the tools that we use are totally unadapted and obsolete. This coming more real than ever with the years.
2 years ago, i decided to rally my ideas from my own experiment around a concept. This concept is large and can’t really be describe in few lines. But there is the main ideas.
But let’s talk first about the software industry. I hate this old school business model of making desktop software, selling it, and justify annual upgrades for making money, even if we don’t know what new functionality to put, we let few new bugs, increase the binary size and make it run slower to obligate clients to buy a new computer.
In 2001, i was using a compositing software called Shake. This software was really perfect. Very fast, binary of 8Mb, impossible to crash it, very new and open philosophy, etc. It was used by the major VFX studios for make movies like Starwars or Lord of the Rings. What’s append, in 2002, Apple acquired Shake’s company and stop the smart development, stop the Windows and Irix version and make a MacOS bugy and slow one, and now this software is no longer sold and updated by Apple. But a huge part of the industry continue to work with, even with the 2001 version on Windows. For me, this example is very good, users don’t need economic upgrades but just smart tools. Another example is about the Adobe softwares, Photoshop is the leading pictures manipulation software on the market now, but what if i’m looking a little around it. Nothing new since 5 years, only attractive words around little improvement, still bugy, binary is about 1Gb now, and you need a fucking Nasa computer to work correctly. So most of the Photoshop’s operators that i know are still using older Photoshop versions. The tools was good 5 years ago, with everything to work properly, we know where are bugs and computers are fast enough now to made it run correctly.
What’s new now? Since few years are coming online apps. Google doc is a very good example of what to do. Simple app, light, easy and handy for free user and more advanced with support for clients. I love this business model.
My idea is very simple, made a complete picture manipulating online apps based on a media repository and a single rendering engine.
1 – Media Repository:
No new ideas here! I was thinking about such thing few years ago. Now such tools are very usual. Except that movie industry users need the medias to be in local network, remote web access for uncompressed pictures or video are not really possible yet. Also, a real user interface, no complexes setup, think artist way, not programmer’s way. Mesh is a very good example. With a versioning system, it could be perfect.
2- Media Manipulating Tools:
What are pictures tools? There is a bunch of software’s kind that use different GUI system for do the same things. Editing, color grading and compositing are very similar softwares. Only GUI allow you to do different things and work on different parts of the media more or less comfortably. The main idea is to setup all those differents GUI all around the same rendering engine.
Advantages are users can define them own way of working, all clients are always up to date so no compatibility problems exchanging projects, an online plugins and scripts repository will allow users to send rendering remotly all over the world without installing new plugins, new version, etc.
A simple version could be free to let new users work and train with the app, and a professional versions could be rent with extra GUI an functionality depend of clients. More precise tools and dedicated hardware control.
The renting tools idea is really great for industry. Rather than buying very expensive tools, they could only rent software even for a day in some cases. It’s also better for manage production pipeline and operator’s licenses. It can be more precise in prices range over a project.
The Open fX project is also very interesting for making plugins inter compatible. It already exist every possible functionality. The use of GPU in 2D software still rare and not often used in smart way. GPU for make sound processing just even don’t exist yet.
Off course, the greatest probleme making such application is to find a way to make the browser’s GUI and the local media communicate together. It’s not really possible to work remotly on a web server for profesional that use a lot of uncompressed contents.
My google presentaion
3 – Media Project Tools:
No finished online tools exist for managing film, tv, print or any media projects. This could be a very good starting point making money. Free simple and graphical tools to let people get addict, and more complete and professional tools in rent.
Conclusion:
I think that the software industry is really deeply changing. All artists that i know are really tired of existing old school softwares and they are always looking for something lighter and smarter. Of course i can talk about this for weeks. But all what i just described don’t exist yet. It should.
Daniel Radev 4:29 am on January 25, 2010 Permalink |
HTML 5 specification would allow processing local data from a browser to some extent (both SQLStorage and Local Storage APIs).
The problem however is that VFX industry works with huge amount of data (in Avatar case 1.5 Petabytes row material, I read somewhere) and speed is critical.
However it worth to discuss what and how can be done
As for the harnessing GPU,I think OpenCL is very promising (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL)
Bertrand 9:32 am on January 25, 2010 Permalink |
Yes, you’re right, local storage is critical for such project. It’s very common to exceed 1 Gb of data by picture on a 3D movie.
OpenFX is based on OpenGL. Now there is a lot of advanced VRML/OpenGL plugins for browser but no general standard. Flash is the most interesting GPU based platform today for 2D rendering.
Processing(http://processing.org/) also is really cool! It’s java based and it’s relatively fast.
But the point of this article is more about the fact that there is no graphic app web standard yet.
Neven Boyanov 7:57 pm on January 26, 2010 Permalink |
A lot of the tools you’re using today are old-fashion because they’re inherited by much older products and that’s because very few large companies exist in that area of business that produce such software.
The ideas that you propose here are great but they are beyond the capabilities of a small to mid sized company, there’s too much work that needs to be done. The problem is the time. It could take too long and by the time of its completion it will be old fashion again.
The other approach is the community, a.k.a. open source. The problem in that case though is that you need a (very) large company to back this project. Because, the open source projects do not exist by themselves, they exist because companies of various sizes fund them. And here comes the problem – the companies that would be interested in such project are not those that would support any open-source project, they are all proprietary. May be they have their own reasons not to like the openness, that’s not our concern.
Here I should say that it is common misunderstanding that the open source and the openness in general is created by enthusiasts that work for free. No. It’s a philosophy. You either have business that makes money anyways and you’re (self-) confident enough to open-source your creations, or you just fund yourself with your personal savings. There’s another, thirds, case where you’re helped by other people (your rich uncle on your mother’s side or your wife who’s working while you’re in the lab) who may believe that you’re genius and you cannot take care of yourself but you should be given a chance.
So, you have to (1) find a company that already has such functionality or is willing to build such by your recommendation, or (2) find a company/organization/person that will support (i.e. fund) such open-source project.
I know that this may sound discouraging or skeptical but it is not. It works the same way everything works in the capitalism. It’s a free market. And we have high hopes for the humanity of the richest capitalists.
Eisneim 12:58 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
awesome stuff！！