 Good afternoon. I'll be very quick because I have 40 pages to skim through in 20 minutes. So I'm going to be quick. First, this session, we're going to talk about how I use the free and open source software in the visual effects industry to do professional works. First, about me. My name is Woon Saak. What can I visit? Or you can call me Leo. I am visual effects supervisor and animation director, storyboard artist, screenwriter, sometimes voice talent, and everything about the video production. I have done it all. Everything but a programmer. Although I can write some few lines of Python script. I never consider myself a programmer anyway. You can contact me at my email here. If you want my email, you can contact me later. Next, this is what I have been doing for the past 20 years. I have been doing visual effects in this film. If you're from abroad, you may not know them, but they are very popular film in Thailand. So I also do some editing of film editor in this film also. Okay, we'll talk about what are the common softwares used in the digital content creation. I have categorized them into many categories. First, we talk about the OS. The common OS in the industry, of course, Windows or Mac. Some might say that professionals only use Mac, but that's not the case because you can find all kinds of systems in production house. Next, you have to use some kind of raster image editor. And there's no doubt the Photoshop ruled the world. Nobody never knows Photoshop for retouching, for drawing or painting. This is one and only application that everyone turns to. For local and graphic design, Adobe Illustrator is the one. So also for the typography, for the text. The compositor is used for combining images together, doing some green screen gene, extract a subject from the background and add some text, some local, some effects to the image. So the popular software are Adobe After Effects or in case of the larger studio where compositing is more complex, they might use Nuke from the Foundry or maybe some of them use Flame from Autodesk. And we're onto the animation part. There are two kinds of animations we're talking about. 3D and 2D animation. 3D is dominated by Autodesk. They have two major software that dominate the area, Maya and 3ds Max. While Maya is used for character animation and film and TV, 3ds Max conquers the architectural pre-visualization because it's blocked in that can render out realistic image. For 2D animation, Toon Boom has been in the industry for many years and has been standardized. Next, we need some simulation software to simulate the smoke, the fluid and the crown. Side-effect Houdini is the best software used for smoke simulation while real flow is where you go to for the fluid simulation. And for the crown, Massive Prime is the software used in the Hollywood film. Many major Hollywood films use Massive for their crown simulation scene. And we also need video editor. Two names that come up very often. The final cut from the Apple is the most popular among the professional because professional use Max and Final Cut seems more stable than Premiere. It doesn't hang as often as Premiere. And next for the color grading is about changing the colors of the film, beautify the image. We have Da Vinci Resolve from Blackmagic. Resolve has been in business for many, many years. Back then, they sell the Resolve as a turnkey system including software with hardware and service. Nowadays, they release the software side for free but with some limitation. So you can try out the Resolve yourself at home but without the control panel, the hardware side, you can try software on your own. Okay, that's a good thing. We have many options to choose from but what's wrong with them? What's wrong with proprietary software? First, as you can see, they are owned by a few organizations which may not be good for competition. And most of them are subscription based. You have to pay monthly fee to use them or they can be highly priced, very expensive to acquire except for Da Vinci Resolve which is free and the Pro version is quite cheap also. Now comes the most important aspect of using commercial software for me is about the asset ownership. Because when you create your asset, your art, you're drawing something in Photoshop, your file is in Photoshop format. If you run out of your subscription for Photoshop, you cannot open your files anymore so your files are held ransom by the software company. If you don't pay for using your software, you cannot open your art anymore. This is a questionable aspect of the software asset ownership. Now the last point is the hidden cost called the third party plug-in. Most software can operate on their own but to get the best result, they rely on some third party plug-in. Notably the after effects on their own, it cannot do much but there are lots of plug-ins for after effects. You have to buy and in combination, they might cost more than the software itself. So with all this flow, do we have alternatives? Of course the answer is yes and no in some area. Let's explore the first, the OS of course Linux. I've been using Linux for seven years also. Yes, but the distro I like is the ArchBase distro which is a rolling release. So you don't have to reinstall the system every couple of years. It's just the update and you get the recent version. Unlike the Ubuntu where maybe in five years you have to reinstall the whole system to get the latest version. And I think the ArchBase is more stable. For the rest of the image, nothing can replace Photoshop anyway but we can get by with combination from GIMP and Krita. Personally I like Krita more for the painting job but for the retouching, for manipulating the photo, GIMP has done better job. This is the sample of work I have been using Krita and GIMP. This is project Ramavatar. We take the wall art from what Prakal, the royal temple and move them and create the animation, 15 minutes animation. I'm responsible for the only five minutes but that five minutes is a full open source. Remember this project, we'll come back to it later, the Ramavatar. The vector image editor in this area is questionable because Inkscape has been around for so long but I feel its development recently has been stagnate. It doesn't improve in many years so it can do a simple job like drawing vector graphics but when it comes to professional work, the major flaw is it doesn't read the CMYK color space from Illustrator which is required for the printing job. The customer's logo always come in CMYK color space and Inkscape cannot read that which is a lid down and I have to keep a copy of my old version of the Illustrator just for this purpose. This is the job I have been using Inkscape to create the assets to draw the kind of graphics to use in animation. So you can use Inkscape to draw this kind of art. We don't have the time to watch them also, I'm going to skip it. Next, the compositor for combining images together becomes as a surprise that I chose Blender for this task but Blender is surprisingly stable for this job. It has a node-based system like the same workflow as Nuke so if you can get your head around the workflow you can go to work with Nuke just fine. I have been using Blender compositor for many years for every job I have done for the past seven years so there are many jobs with that. For the animation of course Blender because this is the main strength of the Blender itself which is the animation suite. In the recent version, the 2.80, it adds the capability of doing the frame-by-frame 2D animation so you can do the kind of Japanese anime style in Blender 2. These are my works when I use Blender. There are 2D and the upper corner one is 2D with frame-by-frame animation. For simulation, Blender, again, internal small simulation in Blender is good enough for simple tasks but for more complex tasks it's quite lacking, it's low also. And the fluid simulation is just acceptable but the good news is there is a third-party plugin for simulating the fluid, it's being developed right now and it's amazing because it uses the same algorithm as the commercial software. But the major pitfall is the crown simulation. It is non-existent right now. You can do some dumb crown walking around mindlessly and bump into each other and piercing through each other but not the way Massive handles the crown. Massive has a smart actor which the actor can sense the terrain and climb up the stairs, climb up the hill and when encounter another actor they can fight or they can run. That's how smart they are. But we don't have that kind of system in any open source software so this is lacking and I'm begging you developer, help me please. This sample of my work, this is not my expertise in doing the simulation so I only do the basic one, like billowing smoke and that's all. Video editor blender again. Why? Because it's simple enough and it doesn't support many formats and doesn't require any more setup than other software. You can just drag any video in and cut and add some transitions and that's fine. But it's lacking the professional features such as import and exporting, time code to be able to work with the other departments such as sound and color grading facility. So it's only good for amateur editor editing. It's not good enough for professional works but I managed to use the video editor to do some basic editing in... No I did not do this. I edited the animatic in the moving storyboard, draw the image and put it in sequence before you make the real animation. It's called the animatic. So with basic editing it's fine. You can arrange the image on the timeline and add some text and add some voice over. That's good enough for this kind of task but when you want to cooperate with the professional the other area is lacking. Oops. Now comes to the area that we severely lacking the alternatives. It's the color grading department. We don't have any solution for this. Nothing. No. But luckily Resolve is free so I can get by with that. But I really like some open source color grading software. Really. Please. I think because of the facility you need to adjust your screen, you need to profile your monitor and every projector out there you need the color profile of them to be able to correct the color. You know. I don't know. Maybe it's a lot about data gathering. Maybe it costs too much. I don't know why anyone hasn't been there on this subject. Okay. Now the good, the bad and the ugly of the open source software. Benefit. Of course it's free. Benefit, right? And it's fast. When you compare the Linux to Windows it's obviously that Linux is faster. At least in Blender. It works faster in Linux now. And it's fun for, I think for most of you enthusiasts out there, it's fun to use the software that you can. Tinker can modify to suit your needs. And it's also simple to install and to maintain. There's no license manager or extra processes to run in background. So your good computer is doing light work, just running the software you use. And it's safer because there's no bloatware installed. You can choose which component you want and which to left out. And the most important point for me is the asset. You truly own your assets. You can have your assets packed in your archive and along with the software you use. That's how I archive my project. I put everything in a snow hot disk along with the software version that I use for that project. And I can be sure that I can open my asset anytime I like without paying for the subscription or anything. Okay. When talking to the clients, the directors or producers, they... Good news. They don't care what you use. They just want the results. If you can deliver the job, they don't care what you use. In fact, they're also... When they peek at my screen, they also, wow, what are you using? It looks cool. Yes, that's Linux. And... When you talk to the investors or business owner, they also, wow, at first when they hear the software, they are skeptical too. What's the catch? The catch is for established business, they have their own pipeline already done for many years and switching to open source software, they need to change all that. And that might be set back for their business. And also the thought of ditching out their software that they purchase with expenses, of course. So it might be scary. Oh, I paid for that $1,000. I have to ditch them all away. That's scary. And for the new business that they are afraid of being left alone using the relatively unknown software and when they need help, they don't know who or where to turn to and that's their pain point for not using the open source software. When you talk to your coworkers or the co-production company, they are also looking for cooperation. They need the company that use the same pipeline as them. They need their assets to be able to work together with their assets. So to be able to encourage the use of open source software, we need to ensure that our assets are interchangeable with the proprietary software. Like the PSD file, Photoshop files can be open and display the same result in both Photoshop and GIMP and Queda and whatever with these other assets too. The hardest part is the 3D models because the Maya format, the MBMA is proprietary and they won't release the specifications. So no one can hack them and get to read them properly. That's the thing to consider. Well, for technical directors, their job is to ensure that the pipeline in the company works flawlessly. So they are always skeptical of that. Isn't the open source software in development? Is it finished? You are the developers. There's no finished software. They already release cycle of the software. You feature freeze and release and develop the new features and release. So there's no finished software. The only finished software is the date one. So we can, I don't know, for the open-minded tech director, we can discuss this. Okay, now back to you. How can you help with the situation? Of course, I have already mentioned some of the area that needs help. And you can join the established developer community. I suggest looking to blender community. It is well-organized and recently get major funding from AMD and Epic with Unreal Engine. So they have a lot of money to pour away to you. And if you don't want to work with the community, you can also develop the add-on or plug-ins on your own. It's better than recreating the kind of software from ground up. Because it takes time, maybe many years before your new software gets to the public. And maybe you wither down along the way before it gets released. Now, we come to my not-so-well-hidden agenda. Remember the Ramavatar? The Amoeba film, the creator of the project, Ramavatar need to discuss with the developer team to develop a new open-source tool for their next project, which involves the AI for image processing scripts to automate the certain tasks, assess management system and maybe other useful tools you can recommend. They need this to meet the grant criteria and the granted this one, NIA. We're gonna submit the proposal soon. So if you think you can help with this, come talk to me later. And that's all. You can choose me the email too. Thank you. Any questions, please? No? Okay, then I'm clear. Thank you.