Swashbuckler Tux

I’m sure that for generations into the future, Silicon Valley will be telling stories of how Tux saved the California movie industry from becoming just another outpost of that suburb of Seattle. We aren’t talking about landslide numbers of desktops or servers here, but the symbolism is inescapable. If Linux can produce entire movies and special effects in blockbuster films as varied as Sinbad, Star Wars, Perfect Storm, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings 2, then it must hold some great magic that can enchant even my own small desktop.

What’s the Secret?

Linux magic infuses two quite different aspects of movie making. The early application of Linux was to generate complex, true-to-life image sequences made using cheap but powerful “render farms” : compute clusters pioneered at the national defense and energy labs were discovered to be practical for computer graphics (CG) studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks. More recently, as the animated movie Sinbad demonstrates, Linux is being used in the full film production cycle ranging from the artist’s desktop to the final output onto film. Again the symbolism is unavoidable: Linux must be ready for my desktop if it’s a standard of the likes of Dreamworks or Disney/Pixar.

To the great pride and satisfaction of the Linux community, Tux has become quite the cinematic swashbuckler, leading the charge to a new “wow” in the ever changing, high-energy world of movie special effects. And the studios together with their support industry partners, such as HP and IBM, are discovering a pirate’s treasure in these successes of Tux.

Cap’n Tux is also visiting other ports of call in the movie industry. Tux is applying tricks learned in simulating and studying nuclear explosion data at top secret US research labs. Demanded by both the movie and TV industries, old films are being digitally remastered. Colorizing and remastering require petabytes of fast storage that can be viewed and manipulated simultaneously by collaborating studios spread across the globe.

Studios compete using Proprietary Tools

But as the hero of Dreamworks’ latest animation discovers, it takes more than bravado to be truly successful.

The challenge to Tux, just as it is to this latest celluloid version of Sinbad, is to realize that while fortunes and adventures come and go, real, long-term success requires hard work, perseverance, and more importantly, a spirit of giving and humility.

The inexpensive, high-performance computing (HPC) technology exploited today by Pixar, Dreamworks and others could never have been developed without the prior open source collaboration of the publicly-funded advanced research communities. Unfortunately, while notable exceptions such as “Film Gimp” exist, most animation and special effects technologies are being developed and maintained by the various studios as proprietary tools. In light of how true progress is made using the open source paradigm, this reluctance to share trade secrets seems a little shortsighted. For, it is not mastery of the technology alone that enables a studio to create its next blockbuster. There are many more compelling factors including artistry, story, action, and marketing. In fact, the major studios should realize that they can all benefit by sharing and collaborating on the basic technologies and that they then can differentiate themselves on what really matters in creating a winning film. The alternative is to remain islands of achievement without any one company being able to reach critical mass.

So, Hollywood, practice what you preach…er, animate. Try to balance each studio’s need to be the “coolest” with a vision of what can be achieved together. Then movies and special effects can progress to the next level of technology sparkle. A sparkle that always can be made brighter with even better tools.