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Film Gimp has been in use for many years in feature motion pictures. Film Gimp was used by studio Rhythm & Hues for Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Cats & Dogs, Dr. Dolittle 2, Little Nicky, Grinch, Sixth Day, Stuart Little, and Planet of the Apes. Sony Pictures Imageworks used Film Gimp for Stuart Little II. Hammerhead Productions used it for Showtime and Blue Crush, and will use it for The Fast and the Furious II.
What is Film Gimp? Film Gimp is an image retouching and painting tool with features similar to GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. Film Gimp, GIMP, and Photoshop are general purpose tools that can be used in many ways. However, each tool's design is recognized as appealing especially to a particular type of user. Photoshop is recognized as a tool for print artists. GIMP is recognized as a tool for Web artists. And, Film Gimp is recognized as a tool for motion picture artists. That's not to say Film Gimp can't be used for print and Web tasks. Anyone who wants to retouch or paint images can use Film Gimp. What it means is that satisfying motion picture studio users is Film Gimp's primary mission. What is the "Film" part of Film Gimp? What makes Film Gimp better for working with 35mm film? Film Gimp has vast dynamic range: 16-bits per channel (64-bit RGBA). That's more range than can be displayed on a computer monitor (24-bit RGB), but can make a visible difference when working with film. Film scanners have more range than monitors, and can capture a superior image from film. Even with images that started in 8-bit, conversion to 16-bit can preserve color information that can otherwise be lost during the editing process. Such loss of fidelity can be visible as banding when an image is eventually printed back to film or blown up to higher magnification for a still print. The extended dynamic range of Film Gimp appeals not just to 35mm cinematographers, but to 35mm still photographers as well. Still photographers can think of Film Gimp as having many more F-stops of range, of being capable of capturing much more subtle nuances of color in a vast blue sky for instance. Film Gimp handles 8-bit, 16-bit linear, and 16-bit float images. Digital photographers and videographers use lossy compression methods such as JPEG or MPEG. For a small tradeoff in picture quality, the files can be made much smaller. That's why JPEG and MPEG are such popular formats on the Web. However, for highest image quality, artists use uncompressed or losslessly compressed images such as TIFF, RLE, Cineon, and EXR. Film Gimp supports many formats in this realm -- formats unfamiliar to the typical Photoshop or GIMP user. Film Gimp includes support for JPEG, PNG, and other common formats. Supported File FormatsMotion picture tools have to cope with individual frames that are huge. Scanners are typically set to 2k resolution, that is, two thousand pixels wide. A frame in television DV format is 720 pixels wide. It is possible to pack these huge 2k motion picture frames into a codec such as Quicktime, but it doesn't gain anything to do so. The resulting file would be humongous and very difficult to handle. Instead, motion picture frames are simply handled as numbered images. Motion picture tools understand that a directory of numbered images is actually a movie. Film Gimp is much more nimble at handling numbered images than doing the equivalent {File}{Open} operation over and over again in a general purpose tool. Film Gimp knows what "Next" means.
Film Gimp provides a Store Frame Manager and flipbook under the {Dialogs} menu.
To be continued....