Linux and Open Source Software in Hollywood movie making

[Frank Cox]

Here's an article about Linux and OSS in movie making with example videos.

I hadn't realized that Rocky Linux was on such a big percentage of the workstations.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/01/aswf_foss_oscars/

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Gee, It's 100% free... That's why Hollywood uses it...

[Ryan Gallagher]

For a long time the best 3D software was on *NIX platforms... I wonder how much of this pie chart is skewed by the 3d modeling, animation, mocap, compositing, virtual-production, special effects processes. Editing and color grading would be an area I least expect it, but maybe even there the tools have gotten better.

There is also the fact that if you need to build some custom tools, it is perhaps easier to get up and running on Linux.

After reading closer, the whole article seems to be about the VFX side of the industry. So yeah, makes sense.

[Tiago João Silva]

VFX started on *NIX, because for most of the time it was the application of academic research and universities only used *NIX. And in post, even DaVinci video colour graders used *NIX (first SGI/IRIX, then Linux). So given that VFX houses already had *NIX people and their internal code targeted POSIX, it was a natural transition to move to another less expensive POSIX system like Linux, first for backend things like render farms, and later for workstations as Linux got better at being a desktop, applications like Maya were ported to Linux, and old *NIX systems fell to the wayside.
RockyLinux just means everyone has settled on the "RedHat" side of the tracks, because most non-FOSS code for Linux (distributed only as a binary, therefore not present on distros' repositories) only supports RHEL, expects bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL, and now that CentOS is not longer bug-by-bug compatible, Rocky (or Alma) is the cheapest way of getting that - big VFX houses will have enough staff engineers to self-support, smaller houses will likely get a support contract from CIQ.