[danceparty]

I don't agree, the entire visual effects industry, including their color departments, run on linux. Baselight and Resolve, are the two most common color correction programs in the industry, baselight exclusively runs on linux, and the big color companies (company 3, efilm, technicolor) all run resolve on linux. Coloring is done either on projectors, or broadcast monitors (something like a sony PVMA250 on the low end @ ~$6,000)

[foepys]

Do you by any chance have some links where I can read more about Linux as a front-end system in the film/graphics industry? This is field of work in which I would never have guessed Linux to be strong.

[berkut]

Pretty much (there's a bit of Windows at the smaller places) all the big VFX studios (ILM, SPI, Weta, Framestore, MPC, DNeg) are running Linux for almost everything involving content creation, using apps like Maya, Nuke (for compositing), Katana, Houdini, etc.

There are exceptions - some apps (ZBrush) don't run on Linux, so there are Windows machines around, but in general >= 95% of machines the artists and developers use are Linux at the big places.

And most of those apps use OpenColorIO as a framework for handling colourspaces.

[dtf]

It’s mainly in large facilities that run huge jobs with massive amounts of data. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Flame, Baselight, many in-house VFX software all run perfectly well Linux. And of course the cornucopia of renderers running on their server farms, as might be more expected.

The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.

[danceparty]

All true, windows is kept around for Zbrush and Adobe suite. I'd put it at around 5% of artist workstation count.

(I've worked at a few of the larger VFX studios mentioned throughout the thread)