Using The GIMP or Cinepaint for Post-Production?

The GIMP or “Gnu Image Manipulation Program” is a lot like Adobe Photoshop. I’ve been using it for many years now and can honestly say that The GIMP and/or it’s brother Cinepaint (a fork of the GIMP) has been used, in some way or another, on almost all of the film editing projects I’ve worked on, as well as many of the posters and websites I’ve been involved with over the years.

The GIMP is one heckuva great image program, especially for doing web-type work, where it truly shines. It’s free software and is released under the Gnu Public License. It’s definitely worth downloading and checking out. And don’t worry, it runs on just about everything – from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OSX, to FreeBSD, to Sun Solaris, and so much more! It has a lot of plugins, can work with animation in some aspects, and can do just about everything that Adobe Photoshop can do. It is actively developed and has a large user base. The greatest part is the user-base – if you have a problem, the people on the user forums are more than willing to lend a hand.

Right now, I believe the GIMP’s biggest limitation is that it is still only 8-bit. What does that mean? Well, if you’re shooting minidv or hdv, you’re shooting in 8-bit, so don’t freak out. 8-bit just means that there are only 256 different shades of a color (not to be confused with 256 colors!). The best way to think of it is in terms of black: if you have 256 levels of black, then level number 0 would be all black and level number 255 would be all white (the range goes from 0-255, not 1-256). If you were working with 10-bit, then it would be 1024 shades of black. If you were working in 16-bit (like you can do in Adobe Photoshop), then you would have 65536 levels of black.

The biggest issue that plagues 8-bit is a phenomena called “banding”, where you can see the shades of black resembling bands or stripes. It’s usually not a big deal with a single frame, since a single frame will go by so fast that no one will notice, but it is a big deal when you have to work with several seconds of video or more. The GIMP can accept some 3rd party add-ons that do 16-bit, but for it to become a real contender to Adobe Photoshop for editing film stuff, it really needs to work with more than 8-bit images.

So what can you do if you don’t want to move to Photoshop and yet want 16-bits or more? Insert Cinepaint. Based off an older version of The GIMP, a branch forked off the main GIMP project and focused more on film. Cinepaint used to be called Film GIMP, but was given its new name so as not to confuse anyone. Not only can it work in 16-bit, but it’s even able to do 32-bit floating point, if needed.

The problem I have with Cinepaint is that it is notoriously buggy and will crash much easier than I care for. BUT, since it can do 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit, and it can work with high fidelity image formats, such as Kodak Cineon, SMPTE DPX, and ILM-NVIDIA OpenEXR files, as well as the standard JPEG, TIFF, and PNG files, I find that this program is a much needed part of my workflow.

Not interested? Maybe you will be when you realize that some big films have been using Cinepaint: Elf; Looney Tunes; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; The Last Samurai; Blue Crush; 2 Fast, 2 Furious; Harry Potter; Cats & Dogs; Dr. Dolittle 2; Little Nicky; Grinch; Sixth Day; Stuart Little; Stuart Little II; Planet of the Apes; & Spider-Man.

So, would you use these programs to replace FCP, Premiere, Shake, After Effects, or Combustion? No, these programs are not designed to do the work of a Non-Linear Editor or any of the big-dog compositing programs. They are painting tools that are used to retouch movies. I’ve used them for dirt and hair removal on film projects, adding muzzle flashes, cat removal (in the corner of a frame once, we had a cat that jumped into the frame who supposed to be there), and otherwise cleaning up a picture.

So, to wrap this up – if you haven’t downloaded and installed The GIMP or Cinepaint, you are seriously missing out. So what are you waiting for? Go get them and allow your film to reap the benefits!

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