Disney Animation Now Uses Presto Too?!

Fascinating!  Apparently I've been out of the loop on the animation software biz for a while (not surprising), as apparently DIsney Animation had transitioned over to using Pixar's "Presto" since Zootopia 2!!!   😱

https://web.archive.org/web/20260418122253/https://www.screendaily.com/features/making-zootopia-2-how-new-production-methods-and-technology-helped-deliver-a-box-office-smash/5213331.article

* Disney Animation have famously previously been a Maya shop.  (IIRC, since that year 2000-ish  "Dinosaur" film)... "Autodesk Maya"... yeah... Blenderheads who've followed my work for many years know my thoughts on that thing! 

Other famous "Maya shops" include:
* Blue Sky
* Weta
* ... and a whole bunch more, as for many years, it was generally considered the "Industry Standard"  (mainly due to its plugin API making it modular + extendible over its  expensive proprietary DAG-graph core)

* Pixar's "Presto" is an in-house animation software they starting rolling into production from around 2012 (i.e. IIRC, they started using it with the production for "Brave"?). 

It replaced the "Marionette" tool that they had been using for all their "Golden Age" films... which AFAIK owes its heritage to the pioneering tools from the 1980's the Lasseter + co used to animate classics like "Wally and the Bee" and "Luxo Jnr"

* Of a similar vintage is Dreamworks' "Preemo", which superseded a really primitive thing called "Emo".   (This one famously had its first outing on the HTTYD2 film, where all its parallelism and spiffy realtime performance and so forth was really able to be shown off! 

Picasa Replacement Project - On the cusp of starting something...

Over the past week or two, I've been doing quite a bit of photo filtering/curating and editing again - First, to get through all my pics from this year's Welly trip, which I was keen to finish editing as this year's birdy pics (silvereye season) were also quickly piling up!  😅

Truth be told, this time round, I've increasingly been feeling the limits of my current workflow + tooling.  (Chief bottlenecks are the limits I have around not being able to bunch sequences together for doing batch-edits, then being able to do multi-pass filtering/curation on those rough edits to whittle down to just the "good" set, and then from there being able to apply - sometimes in bulk - Darktable-style advanced quality tweaking effects (e.g. colour richness tweaks, and the "Contrast Equaliser" tool for color + sharpness boosting)... 

After spending some time doing a bit of design work (e.g. planning, concept-sketching, and/or also prodding what LLM's have to suggest), the volume of work needed to build what I actually want has also quickly become much clearer (i.e. it would be a *very* major undertaking, that I increasingly recognise I don't have the energy or time to actually sink into making a viable MVP that I can even remotely consider dog-fooding, without having already gotten massively sidetracked by it)

As much as I hate to admit it:  Yes, I *am* now considering maybe turning to GenAI to vibe-code up a MVP to my specs, to get over the sheer bulk of heavy lifting needed to get something usable...

As much as I hate GenAI in general, in this case, I very much care more about "the result" (in a timely way) than starting up yet another long-term grind to potentially nowhere...

Sigh...

I'm currently thinking the best way about it is to start from the LightCraft codebase, and hack in some more critical stuff from Darktable, then get GenAI to build me the core media-management engine on top of all that...   And then bolt my Picasa decoder on to be able to bridge all my old / existing database over too...