The Peach open movie project, initiated by the Blender Foundation and hosted at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, is an innovative project to produce high-quality digital media with open source tools.
Another interesting project in this space is Justin Frankel’s REAPER project. These tools, in addition to the venerable GIMP, are rapidly commoditizing the software needed to produce digital media of professional quality.
Unfortunately, I lack the artistic talent required to make nontrivial projects with these tools, but I’m looking forward to consuming the creations of my more talented friends. In addition, a lower barrier to the creation of digital media means a rapid increase in the amount of multimedia data to be stored and analyzed. Doing machine learning over audio, image, and video data is something that Hadoop should handle well. If anyone has a project using Hadoop to do data mining over a multimedia data set, let me know!
