I think you have it wrong and I'm writing this at Sony Pictures Imageworks on a CentOS box.

The film industry is mainly Windows and Linux, the larger the facility the higher the chance of it being a Linux house, but not always.

You hear "Macs make movies" so often and if anyone who doesn't work in the industry could see the state of things they would find the quote funny.

The main users of Apple products are producers and other pencil pushers running around with iPhones and Mac Pros, video files passed around during production are usually QuickTime files. Other than that a very limited amount of the business is anything Apple related. Final Cut is popular however its only one tool in the whole production chain and a facility doesn't need to equip everyone with a Mac just because its used. It is not uncommon to see a few Macs around facilities however you do not seem them in numbers.

I have only visited one all Mac based facility and even then they had RHEL dual booting macs. I can probably count on both hands how many visual effects studios I've seen or heard of that are all Mac based. Linux and Windows are no doubt the prominent players in the visual effects field. Linux isn't just on the backend either, plenty of facilities run Linux on the desktop and any one day there are thousands of artists typing grep and ls in a terminal somewhere. Its not just the bigger facilities either, plenty of smaller shops run Linux all around. If a facility isn't running Linux it most likely is running Windows.

Avids are used in editorial nothing more, so you do not see them in numbers. The Autodesk offerings have moved off Irix and are now HP/IBM Linux workstations.

Nvidia has the DCC market cornered with the Quadro line, I'm not going to get into the debate of whether they are wroth the price or not though. Even if a facility doesn't use Quadros in mass you can almost be certain the workstations have some sort of Nvidia card installed. Most applications in DCC are OpenGL based, since Nvidia has a track record of having a better OpenGL product, its not hard to understand why they might have a strong hold on the DCC industry.

Indeed, I'm almost certain the system lords have recognized the value of these planets and have dispatched units to the area.

That is how most learn VFX software and everyone in the industry knows it. The software companies don't really care except when people use it to make money, the personal learning editions are crippled most of the time in such ways that make them useless for learning. SideFX who make Houdini I think took the correct route and offer a fully functional personal edition for $99 US.

One could go on about how many people are running around with Photoshop installed but I'll save that for another day ;).

I have to disagree with you.

In the visual effects field and graphics world plugins are part of daily life. Yes you do take the risk of the software developer dieing out or adding your functionality to the base product.

There are a number of plugin based development companies that have been around for quiet some time and the products they offer are just as important as the applications they are made for. Every business venture has its risks and most often regardless of your business model you are at the whims of something.

You have a valid point however I think it can go both ways in some instances.

A few months ago I flew my mother and sister to visit in Los Angeles. My sister would be doing all the driving and not knowing her way around worried me a little. While not the best solution I ended up giving my sister and mother my iphone to use its gps while they drove around during the day. My sister would pull over, search for a location she wanted to go, hand the phone to my mom and start driving.

From all I gather they loved it and didn't have any problems using it. My sister also liked the Google street view for previewing the lay of the land so she would recognize things as she got close. Sure I will concede a Tom Tom sort of device would have been the ideal solution but you gotta admit the GPS on the phone did do its job. My 2 cents.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/

No I don't do IT work.

As to your laptop VPN suggestion, most facilities firewall off the wireless and internal networks from themselves.

"I can has my files" is exactly why I use services like Google and Dropbox, sorry you disagree. I'm not a tinfoil hat crazy as you appear to be so I don't mind someone controling my data. In all honesty I don't see any difference between Google and a financial institution when it comes to personal data. Both can be good and bad.

You had me most of the way until your last sentence.

I've used Linux for quiet some time and am lucky enough I can usually request Linux for my operating system at freelance jobs. That said I really don't give a rats ass about the cloud, Microsoft, Google, or where my data is.

At the end of the day all I care about is what works regardless of where it comes from. I have forgotten documents at home more than Google has had an outage preventing me from getting at my Gmail account. I have all my email at my employers forwarded to my Gmail account. The one or two times Google has prevented me from accessing Gmail I simply logged into the companies web servers that had my data still on them.

I'm not saying Googles services are the best or great at everything but obviously they are for some people or no one would use them. The last movie I worked on we used Google calendar and docs to push things around the office and to vendors. A 200 million US dollar movie I hope thats a productive enough office workplace for you.

And so what if Google has my data. I figure the chances of someone owning Google or a Google employee getting my personal data is about the same risk as someone owning my rig at home/work. Continue on bashing Google as the anti-christ reborn while I enjoy my use of there services.

I don't know why my post is marked as Troll.

Does no one know how many people rip stuff off youtube, vimeo, insert site X here, and edit the videos into parodies or god knows what else?

If you have a format that can't be readily edited I don't get how its going to go anywhere.

Not saying its ideal but it is a valid point.

Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.

Even on Linux where you would think ogg would be strongest is horrible in the ability to edit ogg files. I do screen captures from time to time and recordmydesktop only saves out ogg (ogv in later versions) files of the captures. I constantly have to run ffmpeg on the files and spit them out as png image sequences.

Outside the technical merits I don't know how you can expect to get traction on a format that barely anything if at all can edit the darn things.

Just my 2 cents.

If so we just track these Russian bot nets with a bugtracker.

Eclipse 3.2.2 still? When do they plan on upgrading it? I mean they upgraded to PulseAudio and we all know how stable that thing is. *sigh*

I've tried running Eclipse builds from other repositories and seem to always have issues with them. It would be nice if they updated to a later version.

I don't care about getting rich or losing 35lbs, if the video says I'll get a free pocket fisherman just tell me where to enter my cc #

PulseAudio has totally fubared my computer at work and my laptop at home. I disabled it and went back to alsa however I still get soundlockups and other odd things.

These machines ran perfectly fine before Ubuntu made the switch to PulseAudio. Its one thing that drives me insane about Linux distros. They will switch to something new well before its stable and warranted yet packages that are updated and should be the default are left behind "case in point Eclipse".

wtb achievment pst

I totally know what you mean and feel the same way

It can be hard to find a setup that fits like a glove and allows you to move around and work like its an extension of yourself. I've struggled with a decent setup for the last couple years and have finally got a good one going.

On my current job we are an all Windows house but my groove setup is with Ubuntu and Gnome at the moment. I'm lucky in that I'm a tools developer for an application which has both Linux and Windows ports. I can write my code in Linux and just have to hop on a Windows machine to make sure what works in Linux performs the same in Windows.

I've had artists come up and ask why I don't run the same setup as them, once I start flipping between workspaces on duel monitors with my apps spread all around they get the idea. I even setup another programer who sits next to me with Nvidia's workspace settings for Windows.

Once you find a setup that just works regardless of window manager or operating system your work output goes through the roof, I've noticed that holds true for me at least.