i went to the gllug meeting tonight about filmlight’s baselight digital film grading system. it was really interesting. the presenter gave a brief overview of film and digital workflows too. you can read more about the system and architecture on the website, but the basics are that it uses a linux cluster with each node having a graphics card for output through dvi. they then use a custom built piece of hardware to combine the individual outputs to a full frame. each node works on a piece of the frame (1/n depending on how many nodes are used: 2, 4 or eight (i can’t put the number because wordpress automatically turned it into a smilie)). it seems that the movie industry is one place where there are a lot of interesting projects. he even mentioned that they’re looking using a new tyan motherboard that takes 8 dual core opterons.
i would say that a big plus to living in london is that there seems to be a good number of movie related companies without having to live in hollywood as well as enough linux/tech people to have good turn out for meetings. there was probably about 20 or so people at this meeting and there was a javascript meeting in the same building that had around 150 sign up. i had signed up for the javascript one at first, but didn’t realize it was the same night as this one.
the meeting was at westminster university’s new cavendish street campus again. i think the goodge street tube stop area would be a good one to live near. i think i would probably choose it over angel if i was looking right now.
update: i forgot to mention an interesting point from the guy from filmlight. one of the few proprietary bits of software they had to use was the nvidia video card driver. he actually said that they would trade performance for a card with free software drivers since it would allow them to fix problems and see the entire path. he also complained about binary drivers for talking to proprietary sans for data storage. they were apparently even worse by only supporting certain kernel versions, etc. i just don’t understand why any hardware company would want to make it more difficult to use/buy their hardware?