HISTORY: CinePaint

by Robin.Rowe@CinePaint.org
12.15.06

CinePaint has two major incarnations. The original architecture, known as
Film Gimp, and a later ground-up rewrite called Glasgow. Both CinePaint 
Film Gimp and CinePaint Glasgow will be around for a while until Glasgow 
stabilizes. CinePaint Glasgow is designed to work natively on Windows, 
Linux, and Mac OS X. 

Glasgow was developed at the University of Scotland with funding from the
EU. Although similar in appearance, it isn't based on GIMP (or Film Gimp) 
and doesn't use GTK (the Gimp Toolkit GUI). Glasgow uses a toolkit called 
FLTK developed by the film industry. FLTK is the toolkit used by and
developed for the Academy Award-winning commercial compositing software
D2 NUKE.

Film Gimp was continuously in use in the film industry from 1999 onward
despite never having a release by GIMP. However, the open source 
community was unaware of Film Gimp. Robin Rowe, then a columnist at 
Linux Journal, wrote a story about Film Gimp in 2001. Readers wrote to 
ask for his copy (a build-ready tarball, not the broken version in GIMP 
CVS) and  began to send him patches. On July 4, 2002, Robin Rowe 
released Film Gimp version 0.1 on SourceForge. This embittered many 
GIMP hackers who view Film Gimp as competition. The SourceForge 
project was later renamed CinePaint.

The film industry funded several GIMP developers from 1998-2000 to 
revise the GIMP core to support 16 bits per channel. A deep paint 
alternative to the recently discontined SGI IRIX version of Adobe 
Photoshop was needed by the film industry. Hollywood also needed a 
deep paint program for the emerging Linux platform. Motion picture 
technology company Silicon Grail (later acquired by Apple) and motion 
picture studio Rhythm & Hues funded the development. Silicon Grail 
expected Film Gimp to become GIMP 2.0, but that didn't happen. In 
2000 the GIMP hackers announced a new "road map", an architecture 
called GEGL (gegl.org) that effectively orphaned Film Gimp. Film 
industry support of GIMP ceased. The nexus of GIMP development shifted 
to a group in Germany unrelated to Hollywood or UC Berkeley.

GIMP (gimp.org), a popular open source 8-bit paint program, is
useless to the film industry because it doesn't support the standard 
film industry file formats of Cineon and DPX (and later OpenEXR). 
GIMP is inherently inadequate for these formats because they have 
higher color fidelity (16 or 32 bits per channel) than the GIMP 
core architecture can handle. GIMP began as a student project at UC 
Berkeley. Before the founders of the project graduated (quit) RMS 
convinced them to donate GIMP to open source under GPL/LGPL.

For more information on CinePaint see www.CinePaint.org. For more 
information on motion picture software technology and Linux see 
www.LinuxMovies.org.

### 