By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2013/5/8 – Release 1.0-4 builds on CentOS/RHEL 6.4. Tarball and i686 rpm at SourceForge. I dropped the 1.3 and 1.2 releases because make rpm prefers 1.0-4 notation.

Here are notes on desktop CentOS operating system installation. Once we have that installed we will want to access SourceForge CVS. There are two ways to do that, anonymous and read-write (if you are a member of the CinePaint developer team).

Anonymous CVS

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cinepaint.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cinepaint login

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cinepaint.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cinepaint co -P cinepaint-project

Read-Write CVS

$ export CVS_RSH=ssh
$ cvs -z3 -d:ext:USERNAME@cinepaint.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cinepaint checkout cinepaint-project

SSH Identity Keys

Developers who don’t want to enter their password over and over whenever making a CVS change will need an identity key.

$ ssh-keygen -C your@email.address

This creates the files .identity and identity.pub in your .ssh directory. If you use more than one computer, you’ll to copy these files to each one. Next, copy the pub file to SF.

$ scp .ssh/identity.pub username@lfc.sourceforge.net:identity.pub

Next, ssh to SF and rename file.

$ ssh -l username lfc.sourceforge.net

$ mv identity.pub .ssh/authorized_keys

Logout and ssh again. You shouldn’t be asked for a password.

Building CinePaint

Install necessary developer libraries first.

# yum install lcms-devel libtiff-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel openexr-devel fltk-devel gutenprint-devel libXmu-devel

$ cd cinepaint-project/cinepaint

$ sh autogen.sh

$ sh configure.sh

=================================================================
Configuration Results

GTK CinePaint Version 1.0.0

General dependencies:
Gtk2 toolkit                 yes    2.18.9
DnD support                  yes    X11/Xmu
littleCMS                    yes    lcms 1.19
Oyranos                      no

Plug-ins with external dependencies:
Python plug-in:              yes    python2.6
OpenEXR plug-in:             yes    OpenEXR 1.6.1
Tiff plug-in:                yes
PNG plug-in:                 yes    libpng 1.2.49
Jpeg plug-in:                yes
Print plug-in:               yes    Gutenprint 5.2.5
FLTK dependent plug-ins:     yes    bracketing_to_hdr collect pdf
Thread dependent plug-ins:   yes    icc_examin
Flex dependent plug-ins:     yes    iol
=================================================================

by Robin Rowe

Robin Rowe at the Globe Theatre

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2013/3/26 – I’m back after two weeks in London. What a great city! I saw performances of Book of Mormon, Singin in the Rain, and went on tours of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and of the Benjamin Franklin House. I’ll be back in the UK in November to speak in Sheffield. Haven’t nailed down exactly when or what that talk will be yet, probably on game programming.

I got this note from a CinePaint fan:

Can someone put CinePaint to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for me? I had to migrate from Fedora 18 as it lost all usability. CinePaint can’t be found in any of the repositories. 

Yes, CinePaint is long overdue for an rpm update. I’m downloading CentOS 6.4 now to load into VMWare. Will have an update next week.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2013/3/23 – CinePaint welcomes Locate My Name as a sponsor. At www.locatemyname.com you search on a name and it shows how it’s distributed across the country and the world. Charts, statistics and tops are available. Useful for finding origins of names, curiosity, entertainment and genealogy research.

Currently the USA, Canada, France, Italy, Romania, UK are fully covered. The rest of Europe and parts of South America are partially covered. Locate My Name says they’re about to add data for Australia, Asia and African countries.

Check out your name for free at www.locatemyname.com.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2013/3/23 – Thank you to all who have sent me words of encouragement and CinePaint suggestions by email. I appreciate everyone who has continued to believe in CinePaint, who may consider Adobe Photoshop great, but can’t accept it as being the best possible tool for a production workflow.

CinePaint is special because it is intended for film production and was created by studio technologists. Those who write suggesting CinePaint merge with another open source project don’t get that. We have bigger goals. CinePaint isn’t just an image editor.

I make my money mainly from game software development. I get to work on exciting technology, but it’s the nature of being a Hollywood studio technologist that every project is urgent and mission critical. Waiting until the next time I’m between projects seemed a good plan. Then I’d have time to focus on CinePaint. I see now that there may not be any in-between time soon with my projects. Time for a new plan.

First, expect frequent progress updates like this one at www.cinepaint.org, so that everyone knows that the project is alive, even if progress is slow.

Everyone wants the GUI to be better in CinePaint. What I’ll be working on next is improvements to the CinePaint GUI. The Windows platform is what I primarily use in my day job. I use Visual C++ to develop code that runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Although working in Windows, I’m not going to put out a Windows build until it’s ready. I want to release on Linux first.

I will show new CinePaint screenshots next week.

By Robin Rowe

LONDON, UK (CinePaint) 2012/12/28 – Many people write me with questions or suggestions for CinePaint. Here are some great questions from a user about how the next CinePaint could work better for 2-D animators.

Q: I have been reading the docs on the website trying to find the answer to some things related to the creation of animation. I’m a Windows user interested in the coming release. At the end of the day, I’m looking for a bitmap-based program that will allow me to paint frames with an anti-aliased, circular brush whose opacity is linked to tablet pressure.

A: What you describe is what’s planned. CinePaint already has a flipbook and brushes and tablet support, so it shouldn’t be a big enhancement to accommodate what you want. While CinePaint almost does it now, many things need to work better for it to be a tool truly useful to animators. For example it doesn’t hold its frame rate on playback (may go faster or slower than 24fps), doesn’t sync sound, doesn’t reorder frames easily and doesn’t renumber frames automatically.

Q: CinePaint needs to be able to playback the animation at 24 FPS without me having to export it. Will it? The GIMP animation plugin requires a wait time to create a file to playback, which can get annoying. And, I would like to be able to go forward or backward one frame quickly with a keypress.

A: Making the filpbook hold its frame rate correctly and navigating the flipbook more easily are coming. CinePaint will use the standard J-K-L Final Cut keystrokes for playback control, along with the spacebar and arrow keys the way you would expect.

Q: I would like Undo to work after switching to a frame the change isn’t made on. Will Undo work across frames? Paint on Frame 1, change to frame 2, undo twice. Will it take away the stroke on frame 1? How about undoing to a change made before removing a frame?

A: There may be stuff broken in Undo that I haven’t even checked yet, however it should act the same way as any other image editor when you have two images open. As far as CinePaint is concerned each frame is just an image. That images are in the flipbook wouldn’t change how Undo works or any other feature in CinePaint. Undo is relative to the frame you’re on. At this time there’s no good mechanism for removing a frame from a flipbook. You would remove the file to do it. When there is support for removing a frame from a flipbook, it won’t delete the frame unless that’s what the user wants.

Q: How fast will CinePaint be when used to create animation from scratch? Can I quickly add, insert and remove frames in CinePaint? Will it quickly flip between images? Will there be noticeable latency between pressing the key and the new frame being displayed?

A: Well, if images won’t flip in 1/24th of a second CinePaint won’t sustain 24fps playback, so clearly the software better be fast. Add, insert and remove should be instantaneous. CinePaint has always been considered fast. The plan is to make it even faster. There are a few places in legacy code where significant speed increases are feasible, for example, in reading and writing images to disk. Another is doing tasks in the background with threads or deferring them until needed. Regarding that, I want to defer loading plug-ins until they’re actually called, not make the user wait for a bunch of plug-ins to load at program start that he or she may not even be using in that session. If CinePaint did that it would load instantly.

Q: I gather that the program works on a numbered series of images, which might mean that to insert a frame may take a while to renumber each image after the inserted frame?

A: There’s no reason renumbering frames need be expensive. Renumbering in RAM or renaming short sequences shouldn’t be an issue. If you want to renumber a whole feature, 100,000+ frames, that wouldn’t be so nice. However, that’s not how artists typically work. You would divide a film into scenes (a few minutes each) and build those into reels (20 minutes each).

Q: CinePaint needs a global frame rate that applies to all frames when played back. Will it?

CinePaint has nowhere to store that data now because it doesn’t have a sequence file type. Adding that feature will fix that and enable it to play flipbooks that have frame numbers out of order or even frames that are unnumbered images, mainly for making slide shows. CinePaint will have a frame sorter something like PowerPoint.

Q: I’ve read that the flipbook will play frames in sequence but has no concept of time. Is that true?

A: Yes, CinePaint needs timecode. Another feature being added. The sequence file would contain frame rate and timecode information.

Q: Soon?

A: I’m still aiming for January.

By Robin Rowe

LONDON, UK (CinePaint.org) 2012/12/10 – Gabrielle Pantera and I spoke at GLLUG this week and heard interesting feedback from the audience on the direction CinePaint may take. This was at the Mozilla Firefox space in London.

There were two presentations before us at GLLUG. Luke Leighton spoke about the Rhombus-Tech Project and the significant challenges getting Android SoC devices in compliance with the GPL. Every Android device is customized and Chinese chip makers generally consider themselves beyond the reach of the GPL. Leighton did report limited success, that one device had been open sourced with dramatic results in increasing its popularity. Hopefully, that precedent will encourage other chip makers to open source.

Andrew Lack spoke at GLLUG about his TinyBasic project for Raspberry Pi. Lack described the many improvements he’d made to an abandoned BASIC interpreter he’d revived and extended to support the Palo Alto BASIC dialect. While I was talking with Leighton before the talks, he pointed out that the graphics subsystem of the Raspberry Pi is not open source and because the GPU boots that device, it makes that entire system more closed than most people realize. Open hardware isn’t easy.

In discussing CinePaint at GLLUG, a challenge I noticed is that suggested improvements from potential users are often in the high-end, that it’s hard to keep the focus on moving CinePaint down market, to make it a general purpose system suitable for the mass market.

Some desired features that are on my short-list for implementation:

1. GUI Tray. The tray will be a filmstrip-like window that lets you see frame sequences in order as though printed on motion picture film.
2. Motion graphics. Simple motion graphics across multiple frames.
3. Storyboarding. Option to turn the tray vertical and place annotations to the right of each frame.
4. Stop-motion animation.
5. Rapid design prototyping. Quickly create beer can and cereal box designs with wrapped textures. OBJ file support.

Not new features, but needed to make CinePaint easier to support:

1. New build system based on make. Autotools and CMake are just too exotic to expect anyone but an expert to support, a barrier to new programmers joining CinePaint.
2. Mac and Windows support. The build system has been the big obstacle to efficiently releasing CinePaint cross-platform.
3. FLTK. That CinePaint uses GTK has always been a source of bugs. This C API isn’t very forgiving and is very hard to trace in the debugger. Safer C++ APIs such as Qt and FLTK are the most portable alternatives. I like FLTK because it’s much smaller. Significant work has already been done to bring CinePaint over to FLTK, but there’s more to do.

So, when will we see these wonderful features in CinePaint? The plan is a January release.

December 8th, 2012, Saturday, 12:30pm to 1pm
Mozilla Space London
101 St. Martins Lane
WC2N 4AZ

Map. Nearest tube is Leicester Square on the Piccadilly and Northern Line.

At the same time I’m working on making the CinePaint release ready there will be a Kickstarter campaign to provide the means to keep fresh CinePaint releases coming. That starts in two weeks.

Releasing CinePaint on Windows has been the #1 request I’ve received. If you have other CinePaint features requests or suggestions for the CinePaint Kickstarter campaign, let me know here or email me privately at robin@cinepaint.org.

Thanks everyone for your CinePaint support.

Robin

Has it been quiet here lately or what? Where’s the next CinePaint release?

I’ve been re-engineering a 165,000-lines-of-code C++ computer game project, working unbelievably long hours even by Hollywood standards. That’s kept me away from doing anything else. The next CinePaint is coming though. I look forward to getting back to work on it, hopefully later this month. I appreciate everyone’s emails and am sorry I haven’t been able to respond lately.  Thanks for being there. You’re in my thoughts.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2012/1/8 – I’m back from London. Had a great time there and productive discussions how to improve CinePaint.  While in London I received some suggestions for improving the website. The CinePaint WordPress template I developed from scratch so it doesn’t have the crud that many of the standard templates do. That makes it easier to make changes and faster to load, but also means more testing is needed to get rid of rough edges.

1. Make Twitter follow me banner smaller
2. Move sponsor links higher on the page
3. Instead of Google text ads run more banners
4. Try separating articles with something other than dotted lines
5. Make fonts more consistent(update CSS)
6. Check comments work on all articles
7. Place search bar consistently across pages
8. Fix so text doesn’t touch pictures
9. Link to Facebook page

Let me know anything else you notice.