A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 1, 2006 23:01 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Oh, and Cinepaint's next-gen effort is called 'Glasgow'. They are moving away from GTK system and are moving towards FLTK for the toolkit.

http://cinepaint.bigasterisk.com/Glasgow

So now Linux has...

image manipulation:
Gimp -- image editing.
Krita -- painting/image editing
Glasgow/Cinepaint -- film image editing.
Inkscape -- SVG vector based graphics editing.
Xara XL -- vector based image editor
Scribus -- desktop layout and publishing..

3D graphics:
Blender -- 3D model creation and animation suite with video composition engine.
Wing3d -- modeler

One of the neato things about Blender is it's integrated Python engine. Other apps like Gimp use python also. With that you can do some crazy-cool stuff. Also they are working with integration into CrystalSpace and CEL and such for 3d game development. There is even a Python IDE called SPE that while normally standalone can be used in Blender as a plugin for procidural manipulation of 3d objects and such.

Of course there are the gaming and 3d engines. CrystalSpace and Ogre3d are some of the more commonly commented things. You can go on with that for a long time.

video editing and creation:
Cinelerra -- 'professional'-style NLE and composition
Jahshaka -- composition and effects
Kino -- 'easy'-style NLE
Diva -- NLE using Gstreamer and Mono in development
Piviti -- NLE using Gstreamer and Python in development

Then for Audio we have projects beyond count. It's amazing. Ardour, Rosegarden, Audicity, Seq24, Jamin, Hydrogen, the Jack and qjackctl sound routing system, etc etc etc.

Linux has become a multimedia playground.

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 1, 2006 23:35 UTC (Wed) by briangmaddox (subscriber, #39279) [Link]

I dunno, while I agree with you to a point, the problem we have as a
community is that some of the applications you mentioned are barely useful
in some cases.

Advanced video editing is an area where Linux still really lags behind.
Cinelerra is feature rich, but requires voodoo and a chicken sacrifice to
compile and the main devs seem proud of that. The cvs.cinelerra.org fork
is better, but both branches still crash quite a bit. To their credit,
however, the cinelerra.org people seem to be pretty good about trying to
fix up the bugs and make it so it's at least buildable. Jashshaka is a
bit better, but it's turning into an odd political slugfest. Even the
commercial MainActor isn't quite stable enough to do video work that your
job depends on.

I think we have some pretty good video applications that do the more
common editing tasks such as Lives and Kino. And both of these
applications are really good for what they do. But we've got a way to go
for more advanced compositing and editing operations.

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 2, 2006 0:03 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Oh definately. NLE is something that lags behind in Linux.

Otherwise I feel that things like Blender and other applications are much more capable then people give them credit for. One of the major troubles is that stuff like 3D development is FREAKING HARD.

It takes a huge time investment for people to learn how to use even the best applications for audio and graphic work. Open source stuff just doesn't have a very good reputation at this point for this sort of thing and unless people are realy able to devote time to learning how to use them they simply are not going to compare to propriatory applications they've been using for years.

For instance once you get proficient at modelling in Blender it is about the fastest modeler you can use in terms of workflow. People can realy hammer out some high quality stuff once you get going at it, but most people aren't going to give it a enough time to get to that level of expertese. Irregardless of what goes on or what app your going to use it's going to take a long time before you'd get to the point were you start making good stuff. And recently, especially with the work gained with developers working with real artists in the Orange project Blender has managed to get out from under some severe old limitations.

Another example is that the movie people that made the Shrek came out and said that Gimp, bar-none, was the best application for making and developing textures for 3d models, including photoshop. (Of course nowadays movies have progressed to the point were Gimp's lack of deep color depths realy has come back to bite that project.) But anytime Gimp gets mentioned anywere you have people telling others that it's the worst peice of crap they've ever used.

And although I am not a musician or whatnot audio work in Linux has a huge amount of potential for a artist and even professionals.

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 2, 2006 0:08 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well now that I think about it I think I overstated Dreamwork's endorsment quite a bit. I was a bit excited. :-)

But still they said that it was a very good application for textures.

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 2, 2006 8:46 UTC (Thu) by pbaum (subscriber, #4514) [Link]

Oh definately. NLE is something that lags behind in Linux.

BTW, does anybody know the status of Diva and PiTiVi? They started promising, but currently look pretty dead.

Peter

A comparative look at the GIMP and Krita (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 2, 2006 22:38 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I donno.

Looks like the last cvs commit for Diva was 8 months ago. :/
And I heard the guy being interviewed on that british linux podcast what doesn't seem that long ago.

For Pitivi it was 4 weeks ago. Some trouble with internationalization and python. They moved from sourceforge to Gnome also it seems like.

I don't know about Diva, but with Pitivi the main developer(s) work for Fluendo. Maybe they are just to busy with something else right now?

I think that being based around Gstreamer is a problem for these guys development-wise. For instance I beleive that the idea for Pitivi was as it was being developed it's a sort of test bed for gstreamer technology..

A lot of the stuff they are working on probably doesn't use the same versions of software that are provided by Ubuntu and other distros. So maybe it's tough to get testers and such.

Personally the Pitivi seems more interesting, but for a while there it seemed that Diva was doing great. They had a functional beta release and everything you could download.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 2, 2006 4:04 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Oh, and Cinepaint's next-gen effort is called 'Glasgow'. They are moving away from GTK system and are moving towards FLTK for the toolkit.

I was curious about this comment, so I went to the Cinepaint page to find out why they want to switch.

Maybe I'm weird, but I really don't understand why people developing a tool for editing gigabytes (or more) of digital video are willing to spend so much effort switching toolkits in the interest of "shedding 10mb of GTK code to make CinePaint smaller".

Whatever, to each his/her own.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 2, 2006 7:43 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well it seems that GTK is a bear for them to work with and with FLTK they get to relicense the code to make it more compatable with non-free software. Like do it MIT or something like that.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 2, 2006 11:49 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

They'd need to make sure they got rid of all the external GPL code if they wanted to do that sort of relicensing.

On top of that, there is nothing stopping you from writing non-GPL programs that make use of GTK+.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 2, 2006 10:26 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Interesting. A bit surprising about the fltk choice. Considering the move to C++ I would have expected Wx for its cross-platformness or Qt with the upcoming lightweightness and cross-platform GPL license. There's nothing wrong with fltk but both Wx and Qt has a much larger mindshare.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 2, 2006 12:24 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Cinepaint would have to be ported to another toolkit anyway: it was still
gtk1. And fltk is used a lot in and around Holywood, so it's not a weird
choice.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 3, 2006 3:44 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I understand that they have to migrate from a non-maintained toolkit anyway, and FLTK was chosen for speed, not for memory consumption. This makes sense for a video editor.

Moving from GTK to FLTK?

Posted Nov 4, 2006 19:13 UTC (Sat) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

It's hard to believe that the speed of a high-end video editor is dominated, or even significantly impacted, by the speed of the GUI toolkit (nor did they provide any benchmarks demonstrating this unlikely assertion). The problem is that you are working with gigabytes of video and images, not that you are trying to draw billions of buttons and menus.

If they simply prefer FLTK as a matter of taste and familiarity, and think it is easier to switch toolkits entirely than to upgrade from GTK+ 1 to 2, that's up to them. But the strange arguments about memory consumption and performance give a weird impression.