WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:03.060 What did you experience the last time you watched a movie in a theater? 00:00:03.060 --> 00:00:06.640 Were you captivated by the fast-paced action and special effects? 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:12.340 Deeply moved by the characters that came to life during those two hours when the outside world just melted away? 00:00:12.340 --> 00:00:14.260 Yeah, movies are still magical. 00:00:14.260 --> 00:00:18.880 What was likely not top of mind was all the work that went into that movie, 00:00:18.880 --> 00:00:23.360 from the editing of the audio and video, to the special effects, the rendering, the coordination, 00:00:23.360 --> 00:00:25.260 and maybe hundreds of creative professionals. 00:00:25.620 --> 00:00:29.880 It turns out that Python plays a key role in coordinating all of that production work, 00:00:29.880 --> 00:00:31.700 and that's what this episode is all about. 00:00:31.700 --> 00:00:37.560 Join me as I talk with Rob Blau from Autodesk about Python in the movies and entertainment business. 00:00:37.560 --> 00:00:43.000 This is Talk Python To Me, episode number 46, recorded January 28, 2016. 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:49.940 I'm a developer in many senses of the word, 00:00:49.940 --> 00:00:54.300 because I make these applications, but I also use these verbs to make this music. 00:00:54.540 --> 00:00:58.860 I construct it line by line, just like when I'm coding another software design. 00:00:58.860 --> 00:01:02.000 In both cases, it's about design patterns. 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:05.060 Anyone can get the job done, it's the execution that matters. 00:01:05.060 --> 00:01:07.200 I have many interests, sometimes... 00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:10.900 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, 00:01:10.900 --> 00:01:13.960 the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. 00:01:13.960 --> 00:01:16.100 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:01:16.100 --> 00:01:18.080 Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @mkennedy. 00:01:18.080 --> 00:01:21.980 Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm, 00:01:21.980 --> 00:01:24.580 and follow the show on Twitter via at talkpython. 00:01:24.580 --> 00:01:28.940 This episode is brought to you by SnapCI and OpBeat. 00:01:28.940 --> 00:01:33.620 Thank them for supporting the show on Twitter via snap underscore CI and OpBeat. 00:01:33.620 --> 00:01:35.560 Hey, everyone. 00:01:35.560 --> 00:01:39.660 Two weeks ago, I told you I had a huge announcement that I was really excited to share with you, 00:01:39.660 --> 00:01:40.340 but couldn't. 00:01:40.340 --> 00:01:44.120 Now that everything is in place, it's time to share my big plan with you. 00:01:44.600 --> 00:01:50.000 When I started this podcast almost a year ago, I had modest expectations and more than a little 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:52.340 uncertainty about how it would be received by the community. 00:01:52.340 --> 00:01:57.600 And honestly, every day I'm blown away by how many people's lives I touch and help educate 00:01:57.600 --> 00:02:00.040 in some part of Python that was less well known to them. 00:02:00.040 --> 00:02:04.760 I get a huge amount of satisfaction spending time making Python more relevant to you through 00:02:04.760 --> 00:02:05.360 this podcast. 00:02:05.860 --> 00:02:07.780 I've been thinking about how I do more of that. 00:02:07.780 --> 00:02:14.000 I believe the natural counterpart to this podcast, which exposes people to new ideas and inspires 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:19.380 them to learn more about Python, is a comprehensive set of online courses to help you go from inspired 00:02:19.380 --> 00:02:24.860 to empowered, from new developer to highly effective developer, from specialized developer to a 00:02:24.860 --> 00:02:25.620 well-rounded one. 00:02:25.620 --> 00:02:30.860 So today, I'm announcing the first course and taking the first step on a journey to build 00:02:30.860 --> 00:02:33.580 this resource for you and the whole Python community. 00:02:33.580 --> 00:02:39.920 Over the next two years, I plan to release 20 high-quality online courses that will be between 00:02:39.920 --> 00:02:41.540 three to ten hours each. 00:02:41.540 --> 00:02:46.700 These no-fluff courses will strive to make you effective with some corner of the Python ecosystem, 00:02:46.700 --> 00:02:51.500 including the Python language, web apps, databases, GUIs, parallelism, and more. 00:02:51.500 --> 00:02:56.920 The first course will be about the Python programming language, and will take a fun and playful approach 00:02:56.920 --> 00:03:00.640 to teaching you the language details such as classes, loops, variables, and more. 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:03.860 It's called Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Applications. 00:03:03.860 --> 00:03:07.940 It'll be about six hours long, and it will be a comprehensive introduction to the Python 00:03:07.940 --> 00:03:08.300 language. 00:03:08.300 --> 00:03:11.560 If this project resonates with you, I need your help. 00:03:11.560 --> 00:03:16.380 As of today, I'm launching a Kickstarter to make the first course, this first step on 00:03:16.380 --> 00:03:17.420 my journey, a reality. 00:03:17.420 --> 00:03:20.960 Take a moment to visit the Kickstarter to see what it's all about. 00:03:20.960 --> 00:03:25.920 Just go to talkpython.fm/course, and you'll be redirected to the Kickstarter page. 00:03:26.480 --> 00:03:31.080 There are many reward levels, but the main one is the $29 student reward, which gives you 00:03:31.080 --> 00:03:33.820 lifetime access to the course at a significant discount. 00:03:33.820 --> 00:03:38.520 If you believe in this project and want to help, please tweet about the Kickstarter, share 00:03:38.520 --> 00:03:40.560 it with your coworkers, or even back it yourself. 00:03:41.200 --> 00:03:45.120 I'm really excited to start down this path to build something amazing for the community, 00:03:45.120 --> 00:03:46.880 and I can't do it without you. 00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:50.860 So any support or word-of-mouth endorsements you can give me will be deeply appreciated. 00:03:50.860 --> 00:03:52.800 Please let me know what you think. 00:03:52.800 --> 00:03:58.300 Send me a message over email, contact at talkpython.fm, or on Twitter via at Talk Python. 00:03:58.840 --> 00:04:03.900 I'm also doubling my efforts on this podcast as well, so keep listening and sending in suggestions 00:04:03.900 --> 00:04:07.160 and feedback, and I'll do my best to bring you interesting and relevant episodes. 00:04:07.160 --> 00:04:11.640 Now, let's hear from Rob Blau about making movies and video games with Python. 00:04:11.640 --> 00:04:13.660 Rob, welcome to the show. 00:04:13.660 --> 00:04:14.960 It's great to be here. 00:04:14.960 --> 00:04:15.620 Thanks for having me. 00:04:15.620 --> 00:04:16.620 Oh, you're welcome. 00:04:16.620 --> 00:04:17.560 Thanks for coming. 00:04:17.560 --> 00:04:19.760 I'm super excited to talk about Autodesk. 00:04:19.760 --> 00:04:22.440 You guys kind of make a little bit of everything. 00:04:22.440 --> 00:04:24.800 There's so many different pieces of software that you write. 00:04:25.440 --> 00:04:29.360 And it sounds like Python plays some pretty cool part in that. 00:04:29.360 --> 00:04:30.460 Yeah, definitely. 00:04:30.460 --> 00:04:33.420 So Autodesk is a great company. 00:04:33.420 --> 00:04:37.300 The company mission is to help people build cool things. 00:04:37.300 --> 00:04:43.220 So pretty much software that helps people realize their creative vision. 00:04:43.220 --> 00:04:49.780 The largest piece is kind of on the AutoCAD, like production architecture side. 00:04:49.780 --> 00:04:56.420 And the piece of Autodesk that I work in is the media and entertainment division. 00:04:56.420 --> 00:05:03.740 So we get to work with animation houses, visual effects houses, and help build the software 00:05:03.740 --> 00:05:08.340 that they use to do the cool things they do to put pixels and games together. 00:05:08.860 --> 00:05:09.860 That's really cool. 00:05:09.860 --> 00:05:18.680 So if I jump on a train and I go over to the airport and I get on a plane, fly somewhere, 00:05:18.680 --> 00:05:26.380 and find my way to a movie theater, how many of those different experiences are modeled or 00:05:26.380 --> 00:05:28.460 somehow created with Autodesk things? 00:05:29.300 --> 00:05:35.740 Chances are every single step of the way from the car that you jumped into, somewhere along 00:05:35.740 --> 00:05:39.960 the way from the factory that it was created in and the robots that made it, they were designed 00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:46.740 using some of the Autodesk software, the actual car itself, the models, all of the pre-visualization 00:05:46.740 --> 00:05:49.400 that people do in order to figure out what it's going to be. 00:05:49.400 --> 00:05:51.620 And then the actual instructions for building it. 00:05:51.620 --> 00:05:53.720 Autodesk makes products that do that. 00:05:54.860 --> 00:06:00.220 I mean, the city streets and the planning, it's incredible, the places that the software 00:06:00.220 --> 00:06:02.400 is used, and then the airplane, the exact same thing. 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:04.700 And then you're going to the movie theater. 00:06:04.700 --> 00:06:07.960 The movie theater itself was probably done by an architect who was using AutoCAD in some 00:06:07.960 --> 00:06:13.700 way, shape, or form, or Revit, which is used to build bigger projects and make sure that 00:06:13.700 --> 00:06:19.320 all of the various components in the building, like the HVAC and the design and the wiring, 00:06:19.320 --> 00:06:22.460 all talk to each other and will work once you actually build it. 00:06:23.620 --> 00:06:30.200 And then you finally get the movie showing and you start seeing, nowadays, almost every 00:06:30.200 --> 00:06:35.740 single shot has some kind of visual effect on it, whether it's just a little bit of 2D 00:06:35.740 --> 00:06:40.140 cleanup that happens up to the full 3D. 00:06:40.140 --> 00:06:46.140 The actual environment is completely created from scratch inside of some software. 00:06:46.840 --> 00:06:53.420 Autodesk makes some of the most widely used pieces of software for that, like Maya 3 Studio 00:06:53.420 --> 00:06:54.440 Max. 00:06:54.440 --> 00:06:59.840 All of those are used to model and render what you're seeing up on screen. 00:06:59.840 --> 00:07:02.000 That actually kind of blows my mind. 00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:04.920 That's even more intense than my original thought. 00:07:04.920 --> 00:07:05.760 That's awesome, though. 00:07:05.760 --> 00:07:06.960 It's really cool. 00:07:06.960 --> 00:07:12.340 Fun mission to have to just make it easier for people to realize their creative vision. 00:07:12.340 --> 00:07:13.620 It's a nice one. 00:07:14.020 --> 00:07:15.360 Yeah, I bet it is. 00:07:15.360 --> 00:07:17.600 So let's totally dig into that. 00:07:17.600 --> 00:07:20.560 But before we do, maybe sort of give me your background story. 00:07:20.560 --> 00:07:24.100 Like, how do you get into this place where you're working on basically building everything 00:07:24.100 --> 00:07:26.460 that makes up the synthetic world? 00:07:26.460 --> 00:07:29.680 I had kind of a roundabout way there. 00:07:29.680 --> 00:07:33.260 I went to school for computer science. 00:07:33.260 --> 00:07:42.300 So from Boston, went to MIT and graduated around the first tech boom, did a couple of dot coms 00:07:42.300 --> 00:07:47.440 at that point and built up kind of just a varied background. 00:07:47.560 --> 00:07:53.580 I did a lot of scripting, a lot of database work, a lot of just systems admin kind of stuff. 00:07:53.580 --> 00:07:57.940 Just there was a startup culture and you did whatever you had to do to get going. 00:07:57.940 --> 00:08:04.600 And from that, I went to actually a Linux conference and saw a presentation from DreamWorks, 00:08:04.600 --> 00:08:08.500 DreamWorks Animation, where they were presenting how they're using Linux because they were one 00:08:08.500 --> 00:08:14.720 of the first companies to switch over to kind of big open source software as the foundation 00:08:14.720 --> 00:08:16.200 of the technology that they're using. 00:08:16.200 --> 00:08:17.060 Interesting. 00:08:17.060 --> 00:08:18.380 What were they switching from? 00:08:18.380 --> 00:08:18.840 Do you know? 00:08:18.840 --> 00:08:20.180 Silicon Graphics? 00:08:20.180 --> 00:08:20.760 Yeah. 00:08:20.760 --> 00:08:22.860 Back in the day, it was kind of Silicon Graphics. 00:08:22.860 --> 00:08:23.060 Yeah. 00:08:23.440 --> 00:08:29.300 So they kind of had deals with Red Hat going and figuring out kind of the enterprise Linux 00:08:29.300 --> 00:08:29.780 distro. 00:08:29.780 --> 00:08:32.300 They were early in adopting all of that stuff. 00:08:32.300 --> 00:08:35.540 So you intersected there when they were talking about how they were using Linux. 00:08:35.540 --> 00:08:36.440 Okay. 00:08:36.440 --> 00:08:36.880 Exactly. 00:08:36.880 --> 00:08:44.560 And I got to talking with them and it turns out that they had an interesting job that was 00:08:44.560 --> 00:08:49.900 doing, it's called pipeline work in the visual effects industry, which is the software that 00:08:49.900 --> 00:08:53.220 helps tie together what all of the different departments do. 00:08:53.220 --> 00:08:57.320 So you've got an artist sitting there, they've got a very specific job to do. 00:08:57.320 --> 00:09:02.540 It's almost like in an assembly line in a factory, you've got your station where you're doing your 00:09:02.540 --> 00:09:07.320 very specific thing, except with an artist, it's a very creative process, but they still have to 00:09:07.320 --> 00:09:12.740 take work done by somebody else, get it working for them, do what they're supposed to do to it, 00:09:12.740 --> 00:09:15.260 package it up for somebody else and then hand it to somebody else. 00:09:15.260 --> 00:09:19.860 And all of those pieces other than that creative work is kind of overhead that it's 00:09:19.860 --> 00:09:21.740 nice to artists to not have to do. 00:09:21.740 --> 00:09:24.640 And that's where this idea of pipeline comes in. 00:09:24.640 --> 00:09:29.980 So I was kind of fascinated by that right from this original conversation. 00:09:29.980 --> 00:09:35.780 Plus I had about 10 Boston winters and the idea of California sounded pretty good. 00:09:35.780 --> 00:09:43.240 So I went to work for DreamWorks where I was for five years and was a member of their pipeline 00:09:43.240 --> 00:09:47.020 department, ended up being a supervisor in that department. 00:09:47.820 --> 00:09:52.600 And that actually is where I first started using Python extensively. 00:09:53.600 --> 00:10:00.880 The pipeline at DreamWorks was Pro-based because back originally when you were doing text processing 00:10:00.880 --> 00:10:06.500 and having to glue together different software, Pro made a lot of sense. 00:10:06.500 --> 00:10:07.000 Right. 00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:08.040 What year was that? 00:10:09.160 --> 00:10:12.200 That was about 2003, 2004. 00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:12.900 Yeah. 00:10:12.900 --> 00:10:13.920 I'm talking about right now. 00:10:13.920 --> 00:10:14.380 Yeah. 00:10:14.380 --> 00:10:17.240 Pearl was still in a pretty strong position back then. 00:10:17.240 --> 00:10:17.940 Exactly. 00:10:17.940 --> 00:10:26.140 And the pipeline that I'm talking about had been in place for like a good probably five, six, 00:10:26.140 --> 00:10:27.420 seven years before that even. 00:10:27.940 --> 00:10:30.660 So when it was written, like that was the choice. 00:10:30.660 --> 00:10:37.540 But there was something that was kind of interesting that was happening with software in the 3D space. 00:10:38.660 --> 00:10:43.660 There was already a couple of pieces of software that had Python embedded in them. 00:10:44.440 --> 00:10:53.140 And Maya actually, as one of the biggest, again, taking it back to an Autodesk product, was introducing a version that had an embedded Python. 00:10:53.960 --> 00:11:01.040 And at that point, if one of the biggest applications that you're using in your pipeline speaks Python natively, 00:11:01.040 --> 00:11:09.500 there was a pretty serious indication to DreamWorks as a whole that maybe committing to Python rather than Perl would be a great idea 00:11:09.500 --> 00:11:19.320 because all of a sudden, all of this integration work that we're doing doesn't have to end outside of the applications that we're trying to tie together. 00:11:19.320 --> 00:11:26.740 We get the chance to run inside the application with code that you're using to tie everything together, 00:11:26.740 --> 00:11:33.060 which is amazing because all of a sudden you can speak the same language throughout the entire pipeline 00:11:33.060 --> 00:11:42.160 and do a much more seamless handoff for the artists, kind of, which is, again, the purpose of all of this is to make it so that they can spend their time 00:11:42.160 --> 00:11:44.240 just doing as much creative work as possible. 00:11:44.240 --> 00:11:45.100 Right. 00:11:45.100 --> 00:11:45.980 Yeah, that's really cool. 00:11:45.980 --> 00:11:54.320 rather than trying to integrate Perl and Python and have some sort of handshake or handoff, just make it Python all the way through, right? 00:11:54.320 --> 00:11:58.200 Yep, which actually was, at the time, controversial. 00:11:58.200 --> 00:12:06.400 It was a pretty big jump to do, and it wasn't clear that Python was going to take hold in the entertainment industry the way that it has. 00:12:06.900 --> 00:12:09.540 But since then, nowadays, it's a no-brainer. 00:12:09.540 --> 00:12:14.580 Almost every new piece of software that comes out has an embedded Python interpreter, 00:12:14.580 --> 00:12:23.100 and Python studios around the world is the de facto language that's used in order to do this kind of work, 00:12:23.100 --> 00:12:28.060 in order to tie stuff together, or even just the tools that you write for artists. 00:12:28.060 --> 00:12:32.700 Unless it has to be compiled, you tend to gravitate towards Python to do it. 00:12:33.120 --> 00:12:34.540 That totally makes sense to me. 00:12:34.540 --> 00:12:38.900 What I think is interesting, and I see it happening in data science, I see it happening in education, 00:12:38.900 --> 00:12:43.520 you're telling me it happens here as well, which makes a lot of sense, 00:12:43.520 --> 00:12:51.700 is it seems like Python is becoming more and more popular, and that popularity is almost accelerating. 00:12:52.700 --> 00:12:59.940 The rate of popularity growth seems to actually be growing, which is really cool to be part of it as that's happening. 00:12:59.940 --> 00:13:03.240 Why do you think that is the case in the entertainment industry? 00:13:03.820 --> 00:13:08.040 I think I was thinking about this in advance of sitting down. 00:13:08.040 --> 00:13:18.960 A lot of it, I think it got its start by being so easy to embed and having kind of this kitchen sink approach. 00:13:18.960 --> 00:13:24.180 Those two things combined together made it so that with just a little bit of C code, 00:13:24.500 --> 00:13:32.300 all of a sudden, the scripting environment that you could offer people became incredibly rich. 00:13:32.300 --> 00:13:40.800 And because of the ease of exposing your C, C++ libraries through to Python, 00:13:40.800 --> 00:13:44.520 even if you just go natively to the Python C API, 00:13:44.520 --> 00:13:53.540 it meant that all of these programs that didn't necessarily have a great scripting language 00:13:53.540 --> 00:13:57.680 could have one without too much investment. 00:13:57.680 --> 00:14:04.440 Now, Maya actually did have an incredibly embedded scripting language, still does, called Mel, 00:14:04.440 --> 00:14:06.340 but it was only for Maya. 00:14:06.340 --> 00:14:08.440 And people were Mel experts. 00:14:08.440 --> 00:14:10.240 There was a ton of work done in Mel, 00:14:10.240 --> 00:14:15.740 but your world ended at the boundaries that Maya provided. 00:14:15.740 --> 00:14:19.240 And it didn't give you too much of a chance to extend outside of that. 00:14:19.240 --> 00:14:24.000 Whereas with Python, you get the exact same kind of scriptability, 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:27.840 but now you get to talk to the rest of the world and the rest of the universe 00:14:27.840 --> 00:14:30.200 that's also speaking Python, which is huge. 00:14:30.200 --> 00:14:36.580 So I think the application developers saw that, 00:14:36.580 --> 00:14:39.420 and it wasn't that huge an investment to say, 00:14:39.420 --> 00:14:41.020 like, hey, let's just slap Python in there. 00:14:41.020 --> 00:14:43.620 And then it paid dividends. 00:14:43.620 --> 00:14:48.560 And then once that started happening, it almost was a no-brainer. 00:14:48.560 --> 00:14:50.580 If you're going to be doing this work, 00:14:50.580 --> 00:14:56.180 you do it in a language that all of the big applications that you're running speak natively. 00:14:56.180 --> 00:15:00.140 And everything just kind of came together around that. 00:15:00.140 --> 00:15:02.620 Yeah, it just kind of snowballs from there. 00:15:02.620 --> 00:15:03.680 Exactly. 00:15:04.160 --> 00:15:06.560 And then once it's kind of established as the de facto, 00:15:06.560 --> 00:15:09.720 then everything else that comes in just has to speak it. 00:15:09.720 --> 00:15:15.220 In the industry, there's been a ton of new open source projects 00:15:15.220 --> 00:15:16.620 that are going on, 00:15:16.620 --> 00:15:21.620 like a standard way to pass 3D geometry between applications, 00:15:22.760 --> 00:15:28.260 a standard way of describing what's going on inside of a 3D scene. 00:15:28.260 --> 00:15:33.920 And every single one of those comes with Python bindings out of the box 00:15:33.920 --> 00:15:39.700 because everybody knows that you're going to have to interact with it via Python. 00:15:39.700 --> 00:15:40.560 Right. 00:15:40.640 --> 00:15:42.660 So if you don't have the Python bindings, 00:15:42.660 --> 00:15:46.640 it's almost like you don't have a mature scripting story or something like that. 00:15:46.640 --> 00:15:47.460 Yes. 00:15:47.460 --> 00:15:51.580 And it almost like that can be the bulk of your scripting story. 00:15:51.580 --> 00:15:55.200 And if you don't write it, then someone will write it really shortly 00:15:55.200 --> 00:15:57.480 because people need it. 00:15:57.480 --> 00:16:00.360 If you're going to be used, you need to speak Python. 00:16:00.360 --> 00:16:01.520 That's interesting. 00:16:01.520 --> 00:16:03.580 You were talking about sort of, you know, 00:16:03.580 --> 00:16:07.880 you had the scripting language Mel and it was doing fine, presumably, 00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:11.080 but it kind of, it could only do its thing. 00:16:11.080 --> 00:16:15.020 And I think that's also why Python's becoming one of the major reasons 00:16:15.020 --> 00:16:17.120 why it's becoming so popular in like data science 00:16:17.120 --> 00:16:20.940 is there are languages like R and so on. 00:16:20.940 --> 00:16:23.700 But if you want to build like a full stack sort of thing, 00:16:23.700 --> 00:16:26.340 like I want to do my, you know, the data science part, 00:16:26.340 --> 00:16:29.840 I want to do my science and my visualization and my web app 00:16:29.840 --> 00:16:32.480 and my database access all in Python. 00:16:32.480 --> 00:16:35.780 You know, you can't do that in these other more specialized languages. 00:16:36.460 --> 00:16:39.320 So it's interesting to see the parallels over there. 00:16:39.320 --> 00:16:41.280 Yeah, it is. 00:16:41.280 --> 00:16:48.200 I'd actually say the thing that I'm seeing where Python isn't in play as much 00:16:48.200 --> 00:16:51.600 comes from applications that were kind of originally developed 00:16:51.600 --> 00:16:56.220 for either like a very specific workflow or from outside the industry 00:16:56.220 --> 00:16:57.000 and they're coming in. 00:16:57.540 --> 00:17:02.940 a lot of those actually start with nowadays JavaScript engines built in 00:17:02.940 --> 00:17:07.680 because I think the same story has kind of repeated itself a little bit on the JavaScript side 00:17:07.680 --> 00:17:12.480 where it's so easy to embed at this point that for very little investment, 00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:16.640 you can go ahead and have a JavaScript interpreter running inside your app, 00:17:16.640 --> 00:17:19.480 just like you can have a Python interpreter inside your application. 00:17:20.140 --> 00:17:22.040 like within the entertainment industry, 00:17:22.040 --> 00:17:26.200 those are actually some of the big areas where we're kind of have a miss 00:17:26.200 --> 00:17:28.240 in terms of getting everything to talk to each other. 00:17:28.240 --> 00:17:36.400 Photoshop is a good example where there's various somewhat convoluted ways 00:17:36.400 --> 00:17:41.820 to try to get the JavaScript that Photoshop speaks to talk to Python outside of Photoshop 00:17:41.820 --> 00:17:44.540 and various places are doing that. 00:17:44.540 --> 00:17:51.480 But again, it's that idea of just how easy it is to create a scripting environment 00:17:51.480 --> 00:17:56.480 inside of these applications where there's a lot of value to being able to talk to it 00:17:56.480 --> 00:17:57.960 without writing compiled code. 00:17:57.960 --> 00:18:02.400 You know, I think the whole V8, the thing happening with Node, 00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:06.780 but really the V8 engine itself being a separate thing that you can host 00:18:06.780 --> 00:18:09.540 has done some pretty amazing stuff for JavaScript. 00:18:09.540 --> 00:18:11.020 Exactly. 00:18:11.560 --> 00:18:15.360 And I think some of the full stack, like it's Python all the way through, 00:18:15.360 --> 00:18:19.420 like the whole Node story and V8 is like it's JavaScript all the way through. 00:18:19.420 --> 00:18:20.300 Yeah. 00:18:20.300 --> 00:18:23.700 And it has a lot of the similar kind of parallels where it has a little bit more 00:18:23.700 --> 00:18:26.300 of the kitchen sink, not as much as Python does, 00:18:26.300 --> 00:18:30.580 but there's more and more JavaScript libraries popping up all the time, 00:18:30.580 --> 00:18:33.060 just like there are Python libraries too. 00:18:33.060 --> 00:18:36.680 So it's interesting just seeing that pattern replicate itself. 00:18:36.680 --> 00:18:38.880 It's kind of detrimental from where I'm sitting, 00:18:38.880 --> 00:18:40.880 because I would love it if all of those things spoke Python. 00:18:40.980 --> 00:18:41.860 It would make my job easier, 00:18:41.860 --> 00:18:45.720 but it's just kind of interesting seeing that take hold again. 00:18:53.720 --> 00:18:55.460 continuous delivery. 00:18:55.460 --> 00:19:03.160 Continuous delivery isn't just a buzzword. 00:19:03.160 --> 00:19:06.820 It's a shift in productivity that will help your whole team become more efficient. 00:19:06.820 --> 00:19:12.980 With SnapCI's continuous delivery tool, you can test, debug, and deploy your code quickly and reliably. 00:19:12.980 --> 00:19:18.880 Get your product in the hands of your users faster and deploy from just about anywhere at any time. 00:19:18.880 --> 00:19:24.120 Did you know that ThoughtWorks literally wrote the book on continuous integration and continuous delivery? 00:19:24.120 --> 00:19:29.260 Connect Snap to your GitHub repo and they'll build and run your first pipeline automagically. 00:19:29.620 --> 00:19:35.840 Thanks SnapCI for sponsoring this episode by trying them for free at snap.ci slash talkpython. 00:19:44.360 --> 00:19:45.240 That is super interesting. 00:19:45.240 --> 00:19:45.700 That is super interesting. 00:19:45.700 --> 00:19:53.900 It makes a lot of sense to say either Python or JavaScript as a proposition for somebody who's not a developer but needs to automate a thing. 00:19:53.900 --> 00:20:00.740 To say your API is C++ and you've got to have this compiler with these headers and these libs you're statically linking. 00:20:00.740 --> 00:20:02.720 That just doesn't fly, does it? 00:20:03.020 --> 00:20:03.520 No. 00:20:03.520 --> 00:20:09.020 The stuff that Python is used for tends to be a lot higher level workflow. 00:20:09.020 --> 00:20:12.140 I think you're taking workflow and translating it to code. 00:20:12.140 --> 00:20:14.680 So it tends to be pretty dynamic. 00:20:14.680 --> 00:20:16.680 It needs to be updated constantly. 00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:24.720 I mean, almost each project you'll be tweaking the stuff to work how the people working on that project need to work to get their job done most efficiently. 00:20:24.720 --> 00:20:27.060 And it doesn't need to be performant, I guess. 00:20:27.060 --> 00:20:30.380 Yeah, because it's just orchestrating the things that are probably written in C. 00:20:30.380 --> 00:20:31.560 Exactly. 00:20:31.560 --> 00:20:32.540 Interesting. 00:20:32.540 --> 00:20:40.040 You were talking about JavaScript and having the JavaScript try to interact with Python somehow. 00:20:40.040 --> 00:20:44.900 And obviously getting out of a JavaScript engine can be pretty tricky because they try to sandbox you a lot. 00:20:44.900 --> 00:20:55.320 But have you looked at PyPyJS or one of these embedded JavaScript foundation Python implementations? 00:20:55.320 --> 00:20:56.940 We haven't. 00:20:56.940 --> 00:20:57.980 I guess I should qualify. 00:20:57.980 --> 00:21:10.420 What I'm doing at Autodesk is actually a group that is putting together one of these production pipelines that is just part of a production management product that we make. 00:21:10.900 --> 00:21:29.900 So I'm now not working at a studio doing all this pipeline work, but working at a software company that is, again, just trying to make it so that the various workflows that we see being done in VFX and animation, just content creation in general, we make it really easy for people to get some of the grunt work out of that. 00:21:29.900 --> 00:21:35.400 Given that setup, we're not embedding the interpreters ourselves. 00:21:35.400 --> 00:21:41.900 So I'm working on the scripting code that's going to be able to talk to that application. 00:21:41.900 --> 00:21:44.920 So it's like Photoshop has JavaScript. 00:21:44.920 --> 00:21:52.440 We're not going to be able to embed Python in it, although we could do a plugin, get an embedded Python running. 00:21:52.440 --> 00:21:57.980 But then there's a lot of threading issues and other stuff that we've tried to be as seamless as possible. 00:21:57.980 --> 00:22:01.400 But you can only do so much with an application. 00:22:01.400 --> 00:22:04.660 It all depends on what kind of SDK and API they offer you. 00:22:05.120 --> 00:22:07.140 So we don't have that level of control. 00:22:07.140 --> 00:22:16.840 But we are looking at some standard RPC kind of libraries and trying to figure out what does make for a good bridge between those worlds. 00:22:16.840 --> 00:22:17.740 Right. 00:22:17.740 --> 00:22:24.400 I think probably the easiest way to bridge JavaScript to another thing is some kind of network layer, right? 00:22:24.400 --> 00:22:28.800 Network layer or even if you're not going over the network. 00:22:28.800 --> 00:22:29.660 Yeah, exactly. 00:22:30.260 --> 00:22:35.620 Like RPC, even if it's just talking to another process on the same machine. 00:22:35.620 --> 00:22:36.620 Yes, exactly. 00:22:36.620 --> 00:22:39.060 But making that a really rich communication channel. 00:22:39.060 --> 00:22:42.700 And there's some impressive projects out there that do that. 00:22:42.700 --> 00:22:51.400 And we're actually kicking off an effort to evaluate them and try to pick one that's going to work well for us. 00:22:51.660 --> 00:22:59.100 One of the things you'd sent over is you talked about sort of Python and games. 00:22:59.100 --> 00:23:00.740 And what's the story there? 00:23:00.740 --> 00:23:01.560 Sure. 00:23:01.560 --> 00:23:12.880 Games is kind of an interesting take on all of this because VFX and pixel production has been around longer 00:23:12.880 --> 00:23:17.620 and has a bunch of different constraints than games have. 00:23:17.620 --> 00:23:34.280 So far, games have really been driven by the game engine and the developers as almost separate from the creation of the models and the shaders that show up in the game. 00:23:34.400 --> 00:23:36.140 All of those need to play well together. 00:23:36.140 --> 00:23:47.300 But it's almost been more of an agile developer kind of style than a cascade of content flowing between different departments, 00:23:47.300 --> 00:24:00.800 which is what you see in animation and VFX, mostly because the complexity of all of the environments and models that VFX has been playing around with has been higher than what you've seen in games. 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:14.560 But that's actually switching a lot nowadays, where the complexity of production in a game is a lot of times higher than what you would see in a feature film. 00:24:14.560 --> 00:24:19.980 The need for this kind of pipeline is showing up in games more and more. 00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:32.140 But they've got this whole coding side to the game where the artists are just a piece of what's going on and they need the developers in order to tie everything that they're creating in. 00:24:32.140 --> 00:24:34.180 And it all comes together in the game engine. 00:24:34.180 --> 00:24:38.280 That is what's actually going to be running all this stuff at the end of the day. 00:24:38.280 --> 00:24:44.660 What we've seen there is there's some game engines that speak JavaScript coming out now. 00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:47.060 The tried and true has been .NET. 00:24:47.060 --> 00:24:51.760 Just a lot of this has been pretty Microsoft-centric. 00:24:51.760 --> 00:25:01.500 And the .NET code can speak Python, the iron Python that's out there, which has been kind of an interesting tie-in for us. 00:25:01.500 --> 00:25:07.760 Or Lua, actually, is another scripting language that a lot of the game engines tend to speak. 00:25:08.140 --> 00:25:10.440 But it's yet another kind of separate world. 00:25:10.440 --> 00:25:13.540 Even the .NET side has limitations. 00:25:13.540 --> 00:25:16.740 It lets us do kind of basic Python integration. 00:25:16.740 --> 00:25:24.400 But you hit brick walls pretty quickly when you want to do cross-platform networking stuff or GUIs, especially. 00:25:24.400 --> 00:25:32.240 You have to start writing things specifically for the .NET flavor as opposed to treating it just like another Python interpreter that's out there. 00:25:32.520 --> 00:25:32.880 Right. 00:25:32.880 --> 00:25:37.940 Yeah, you get very, very specific, like WPF-type stuff. 00:25:37.940 --> 00:25:41.320 You can't do PySide, PyQt type of things. 00:25:41.320 --> 00:25:43.660 That kind of, which is much more cross-platform. 00:25:43.660 --> 00:25:48.500 Can you give me just your feedback on what you've done and what it's like to work with IronPython? 00:25:48.500 --> 00:25:49.620 I haven't actually... 00:25:49.620 --> 00:25:54.060 I've played with it and looked at it, but I don't really know much about it. 00:25:54.060 --> 00:25:55.180 So it'd be interesting to hear. 00:25:55.180 --> 00:25:58.020 I've actually found it to be pretty good. 00:25:58.020 --> 00:26:10.660 The boundaries that you hit are kind of what you'd expect, where Python itself starts having dependencies on third-party libraries, like SSL implementation or the GUI kind of side of the world. 00:26:10.660 --> 00:26:21.220 But, I mean, personally, I've had fun little side projects like getting IronPython up and running in a plugin for Microsoft Office projects. 00:26:21.220 --> 00:26:24.960 So that, you know, there's an API that's available only via Python. 00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:33.960 You can start interacting with it from within Excel in order to kind of get deep scripting ability within something like that without having to write visual basics. 00:26:33.960 --> 00:26:37.960 So that you can, again, reuse that Python code base that you've got. 00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:39.460 Yeah, that's quite interesting. 00:26:40.220 --> 00:26:57.300 It's kind of a Frankenstein kind of approach, but a lot of the integration that we end up doing has some element of that because you're really trying to establish this rich Python programming environment in all of these different spots. 00:26:57.300 --> 00:26:59.400 And some of them are more conducive to it. 00:26:59.400 --> 00:27:03.120 Some of them, you kind of have to jam it in. 00:27:03.120 --> 00:27:05.320 They resist a little more, huh? 00:27:05.680 --> 00:27:06.120 Exactly. 00:27:06.120 --> 00:27:09.660 IronPython was a Microsoft project. 00:27:09.660 --> 00:27:14.560 I think it was created by people inside Microsoft or maybe they created it and promptly joined Microsoft. 00:27:14.560 --> 00:27:16.820 I can't remember the exact chronology of it. 00:27:16.820 --> 00:27:25.080 But they, a while ago, set it free and said, we're not really doing anything more with IronPython, but it's now this sort of open source project. 00:27:25.080 --> 00:27:26.420 The world can have it. 00:27:26.960 --> 00:27:33.340 And I just, like, a few hours ago, although it's been out for a couple of months, learned about this thing called Pyjion. 00:27:33.340 --> 00:27:34.620 Pyjion? 00:27:34.620 --> 00:27:36.260 P-Y-J-I-O-N. 00:27:36.260 --> 00:27:37.420 Have you heard of this? 00:27:37.420 --> 00:27:41.280 I've heard the name, but I don't actually know much more than that. 00:27:41.280 --> 00:27:49.040 It's kind of a competitor to PyPy, which is a JET compiled runtime implementation for Python. 00:27:49.400 --> 00:27:54.420 But this is one that runs on the new open source cross-platform version of .NET. 00:27:54.420 --> 00:27:57.360 So maybe there's something interesting there coming in the future. 00:27:57.360 --> 00:27:57.780 I don't know. 00:27:57.780 --> 00:27:58.420 We'll see. 00:27:58.420 --> 00:28:03.720 But it's interesting to see them taking kind of a second shot at something like that. 00:28:03.720 --> 00:28:04.220 Cool. 00:28:04.220 --> 00:28:05.280 I'll just check that out. 00:28:05.280 --> 00:28:29.240 Because something like that could potentially open up, like, the game engines that speak .NET to the deep integration with kind of the rest of the creative process that would share the pipeline from feature animation and the kinds of complex asset builds, like the models and the various assets that you see on screen, that process for games. 00:28:29.240 --> 00:28:30.460 Yeah, absolutely. 00:28:30.460 --> 00:28:37.280 I mean, IronPython seemed really cool, but kind of like you were saying, its limitation is you're all in on Windows. 00:28:37.280 --> 00:28:39.840 Like, it only runs on Windows. 00:28:39.840 --> 00:28:45.620 You have to really program against the .NET, so at the time, Windows-specific APIs. 00:28:45.620 --> 00:28:50.940 But with the cross-platform plus this, you know, maybe that sort of opens up again. 00:28:50.940 --> 00:28:52.360 It's going to be really interesting. 00:28:52.360 --> 00:28:53.500 I don't know where it is. 00:28:53.500 --> 00:28:55.400 Is that the mono environment? 00:28:55.400 --> 00:28:56.100 No. 00:28:56.100 --> 00:29:06.760 No, it's the mono environment was Miguel de Caza's work on sort of re-implementing .NET, which is Herculean. 00:29:06.760 --> 00:29:10.380 And they've gone on to do Xamarin, right, with the mobile stuff. 00:29:10.520 --> 00:29:26.800 So this is a new effort called the Core CLR by Microsoft to do a shell or a core kernel of .NET that's totally cross-platform that you can do on OS X and Linux and sort of, but, you know, official, not like a sort of frenemy-type project in what they're doing. 00:29:27.160 --> 00:29:36.700 So it'll be interesting to see if this can bring a really rich version of Python to that story, kind of like we have Jython for Java. 00:29:36.700 --> 00:29:37.900 Exactly. 00:29:37.900 --> 00:29:40.500 But, you know, that's not really updated really quickly. 00:29:40.500 --> 00:29:43.760 So maybe, I don't know, I have high hopes, but they may get dashed. 00:29:43.760 --> 00:29:44.060 We'll see. 00:29:44.060 --> 00:29:46.120 I hope it comes out awesome. 00:29:46.120 --> 00:29:46.460 We'll see. 00:29:46.460 --> 00:29:48.040 Definitely dig into that. 00:29:48.040 --> 00:29:48.380 Thanks. 00:29:48.380 --> 00:29:49.160 Yeah, you bet. 00:29:49.160 --> 00:30:04.280 This episode is brought to you by OpBeat. 00:30:04.280 --> 00:30:07.040 OpBeat is application monitoring for developers. 00:30:07.040 --> 00:30:11.500 It's performance monitoring, error logging, release tracking, and workflow in one simple product. 00:30:11.500 --> 00:30:18.220 OpBeat is integrated with your code base and makes monitoring and debugging of your production apps much faster and your code better. 00:30:18.900 --> 00:30:21.340 OpBeat is free for an unlimited number of users. 00:30:21.340 --> 00:30:28.880 And starting today, December 1st, OpBeat is announcing that their Flask support is graduating from beta to a full commercial product. 00:30:28.880 --> 00:30:32.820 Visit opbeat.com slash Flask to get started today. 00:30:32.820 --> 00:30:48.320 There sounds like a lot of positive news from all the cool things you're doing and the way you're able to weave these pipelines together. 00:30:48.640 --> 00:30:53.340 I want to kind of talk about what you see, the sticking points and so on a bit. 00:30:53.340 --> 00:31:03.380 But before we do, maybe just to give me and everyone else a better idea, could you describe what the steps are and this pipeline that you talk about? 00:31:03.380 --> 00:31:05.000 What are people doing? 00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:06.160 What does the software have to do? 00:31:06.160 --> 00:31:08.480 Just so we get a little more concrete idea there. 00:31:08.480 --> 00:31:14.320 The kind of nature of this is that you can go down these giant rabbit holes. 00:31:14.320 --> 00:31:17.700 Like you can go extremely deep into automating things. 00:31:18.360 --> 00:31:27.660 And traditionally, only fairly large studios that could afford having an R&D department had the ability to go deep. 00:31:27.660 --> 00:31:35.560 Lots of places had pipelines, but they tend to be pretty easy handoffs rather than tackling a lot of the deeper issues. 00:31:35.800 --> 00:31:39.560 It can start as early as a script. 00:31:39.560 --> 00:31:53.980 If you've got a script that you're thinking of making a movie of or that you need to do visual effects for, it tends to come in from some program that stores it as an XML file. 00:31:53.980 --> 00:32:03.840 You can write a parser for that in Python and use that in order to get a listing of here's all of the different scenes in the movie and here's the characters and location, things like that. 00:32:03.840 --> 00:32:12.820 Which, if you were doing this by hand, traditionally you would do a breakdown where you would just build up a spreadsheet of all of those things so that you can start getting your head around what you have to build. 00:32:12.820 --> 00:32:19.280 You go ahead and you start storyboarding things so that you get an idea of what everything is going to look like. 00:32:19.280 --> 00:32:21.980 And there's various software that's built around storyboarding. 00:32:22.240 --> 00:32:26.120 I mean, Photoshop is kind of one of few players in that area. 00:32:26.120 --> 00:32:37.060 Even then, you tend to just have these images that you're working on and then tracking those to say, OK, here's the current storyboards that relate to this scene. 00:32:37.060 --> 00:32:44.420 We want to hand them off to editorial that's going to start cutting them together into a movie that we can watch to get a sense of how this plays together. 00:32:44.420 --> 00:32:47.280 There's lots of iterations there that go back and forth. 00:32:47.280 --> 00:32:57.320 So you have to keep track of those files and know which ones were approved, what the notes were, so that whoever's going to be doing the next iteration on that can take those into account. 00:32:57.320 --> 00:33:05.940 And it's really trying to put some organization around a very creative, quick iteration workflow without getting in the way of that creative process. 00:33:06.500 --> 00:33:14.920 So then you start getting this editorial content together where you're cutting together these images on a timeline and you get a sense of timing. 00:33:15.440 --> 00:33:27.420 That tends to be a place where you need a lot of R&D to dig in because a lot of the editorial software out there, Avid being the biggest one, tends to be a little bit of a black box. 00:33:27.420 --> 00:33:37.480 You've got Final Cut, which has an XML spec that you can start taking apart, but you don't get a chance to understand too much of what's going on inside of editorial software. 00:33:37.720 --> 00:33:38.200 Sure. 00:33:38.200 --> 00:33:47.800 So are you guys doing actual processing of MP4 files or raw assets in Python and looking at them, that kind of stuff? 00:33:47.800 --> 00:33:58.560 So an example of how Python would tie in over there, not with Autodesk, but my previous job at a studio that's in Portland called Leica that does stop motion animation. 00:33:58.560 --> 00:34:08.780 We actually, there's a C library around this file format called AAF that is what the Avid editorial software speaks. 00:34:08.780 --> 00:34:12.620 And it's a pretty obscure format, very complicated. 00:34:12.620 --> 00:34:14.400 The API is very complicated. 00:34:14.400 --> 00:34:33.060 And we wrapped that with Python bindings so that we could take a export from Avid and really deconstruct it, which meant that we actually were able to know which storyboards an editor cut in where and what characters were in that storyboard. 00:34:33.060 --> 00:34:55.720 So that when you're going ahead and putting together a shot, you would know generally the contents of that and all of the comments that came through, all of the notes that the director had for the storyboard artist, which is incredibly valuable because in the shot, you've got to go ahead and take your 3D models and bring them in. 00:34:55.720 --> 00:35:15.600 So having the list of what's already been included from the storyboard artist gives your layout artist who's doing that work a leg up and you can get started and you can write a tool to automate the initial pass at that and then let him actually do the creative piece of that, which is where you should be spending his time rather than searching for the right models to put in. 00:35:15.600 --> 00:35:24.700 And then when it gets to animation, it's really valuable for the animator to be able to see all of the notes that the director had for the storyboard artist because they're very applicable to the job that he has to do. 00:35:25.460 --> 00:35:32.780 And none of that would be readily available without being able to connect the dots between all of those different handoffs. 00:35:32.780 --> 00:35:48.780 So connecting those dots and managing those handoffs and making it so that you can deal with this explosion of data that happens throughout this process in a kind of tractable, meaningful way is what the pipeline is responsible for. 00:35:49.000 --> 00:35:49.220 Okay. 00:35:49.220 --> 00:35:49.280 Okay. 00:35:49.280 --> 00:35:51.700 That gives me a really good view into it. 00:35:51.700 --> 00:36:02.060 I think it seems like there's all these different apps that the various people have to use, editors, artists, and so on, and they don't necessarily talk to each other. 00:36:02.060 --> 00:36:02.580 Right? 00:36:02.580 --> 00:36:03.660 So you're kind of writing. 00:36:03.660 --> 00:36:04.060 Yeah. 00:36:04.060 --> 00:36:12.260 So you're kind of writing this glue that can turn that into like one almost distributed data source or something. 00:36:12.260 --> 00:36:12.560 Right? 00:36:12.560 --> 00:36:13.760 Right. 00:36:14.180 --> 00:36:39.220 It's kind of like if you're used to using Excel on one front and you've got this text editor that you use on another front, if you were able to kind of connect those together because it knew that you're doing accounting work and it was able to actually react to the files that you're saving from the text editor, parse them, and automatically bring them into your spreadsheet so that you didn't have to manually do that. 00:36:39.220 --> 00:36:45.280 Each time you've changed one piece of information and get the rest of it in sync with that. 00:36:45.280 --> 00:36:49.020 It's kind of that on an extremely grand scale. 00:36:49.020 --> 00:37:03.060 I don't know if you have the answer off the top of your head or really no, but I'm thinking about all these different processes and all these different raw editions and then produced and sliced up editions. 00:37:04.060 --> 00:37:08.740 So these files, you know, if I go and get like a movie, it's probably a couple of gigabytes. 00:37:08.740 --> 00:37:15.520 But what's the data, the total data size for like a modern production movie or something? 00:37:15.520 --> 00:37:16.420 Do you have an idea? 00:37:16.420 --> 00:37:19.680 Oh, we're in many terabytes land nowadays. 00:37:20.200 --> 00:37:32.760 Yeah, it is terabytes and terabytes in order to do the models and the effects work and all of the simulations that need to happen in order to get the quality that we're seeing on screen. 00:37:33.820 --> 00:37:39.360 It's incredible the amount of data that goes into just those final pixels that you see. 00:37:39.360 --> 00:37:44.920 So like the gig, couple gig download that you get, which is a really high quality video that you could watch. 00:37:44.920 --> 00:37:45.700 Yeah. 00:37:45.700 --> 00:37:52.680 Each of those, you know, frames as gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes, like hundreds of gigs behind it alone. 00:37:52.680 --> 00:37:56.660 So we put it all together at 24 frames a second for feature length. 00:37:56.820 --> 00:37:58.400 It definitely adds up. 00:37:58.400 --> 00:37:58.740 Yeah. 00:37:58.740 --> 00:37:59.820 Wow, that's crazy. 00:37:59.820 --> 00:38:14.360 It is the scale and especially just the amount of data and the number of people involved and the amount of handoffs that happen in order to achieve that thing that is on the screen is pretty amazing. 00:38:14.360 --> 00:38:16.060 Yeah, I bet it is. 00:38:16.620 --> 00:38:22.220 Everything sounds really good, but you said that there was actually some issues that you were running into. 00:38:22.220 --> 00:38:28.280 Like one of them was that using Python 3 in this world is not something you can just necessarily jump straight into. 00:38:28.280 --> 00:38:38.220 A lot of the issues kind of around Python use almost come from how successful Python has been and how it's embedded in so many different places. 00:38:38.460 --> 00:38:53.360 We just have this versionitis problem where currently the code that we're writing, we actually support back to Python 2.4 because there's some versions of software that are out there and they've been updated since. 00:38:53.360 --> 00:38:58.260 But studios are pretty notoriously slow to update if everything is still working. 00:38:58.260 --> 00:39:00.640 It had Python 2.4 embedded in it. 00:39:00.640 --> 00:39:05.840 There's definitely a lot of Python 2.5, 2.6 that's still out there. 00:39:06.080 --> 00:39:08.900 The majority of modern stuff is on Python 2.7. 00:39:08.900 --> 00:39:14.920 There's like one notable source project that's made the jump to Python 3. 00:39:14.920 --> 00:39:29.200 But because the nature of this pipeline work is to glue stuff together, when you have a jump that's not backwards compatible, it kind of makes it hard because you have to have two different code bases. 00:39:29.200 --> 00:39:37.480 There's one that will run for all of the environments that are Python 2.5 based and one that will run for everything that's Python 3.5 based. 00:39:37.880 --> 00:39:40.180 And you can kind of work to minimize this. 00:39:40.180 --> 00:39:50.620 But there's definitely this hard jump that happens because not all of these pieces of software are going to update their Python interpreters at the same time. 00:39:50.620 --> 00:39:58.740 And there's nothing that says that you'll be able to, as a studio, be able to update to that version of that software at the same time. 00:39:58.960 --> 00:40:08.840 It gets into a whole lot of issues from just cost, support, licensing, getting the bugs out of it, down to having the resources to update your code to run in Python 3. 00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:10.020 Wow, that's crazy. 00:40:10.020 --> 00:40:18.680 That's going to be an interesting cliff for the visual effects feature animation world to get to the other side of. 00:40:18.680 --> 00:40:26.940 There's various attempts within the industry to try to control this versionitis issue because it's not just Python. 00:40:26.940 --> 00:40:31.180 There's all sorts of common libraries that are used throughout production. 00:40:31.180 --> 00:40:33.780 And whenever they don't match, it causes issues. 00:40:33.780 --> 00:40:38.640 So there's a VFX reference platform that tries to standardize some things. 00:40:38.640 --> 00:40:41.680 Python 3 isn't even on the radar of that. 00:40:41.680 --> 00:40:48.400 I think Python 2.7.whatever is the target for the foreseeable future. 00:40:48.400 --> 00:40:56.160 I think it's probably going to be dropping support with a combination of security issues that just force updates. 00:40:56.160 --> 00:41:00.600 That'll be the thing that finally gets us as an industry to the other side of that. 00:41:01.440 --> 00:41:13.920 But it is kind of unfortunate just because of the wide range of versions that you have to support and the dependent libraries and all of the complications that come up trying to develop software in that kind of an environment. 00:41:13.920 --> 00:41:16.920 Yeah, that really, that's quite challenging, it sounds like. 00:41:16.920 --> 00:41:26.340 I mean, when I think of people that are using Python 2 and they say we can't switch to Python 3, in my mind, I often think of a couple things. 00:41:26.340 --> 00:41:34.060 Like one is we have a quarter million or more lines of code that was tested and is working on Python 2. 00:41:34.060 --> 00:41:39.000 And we're just not going to change that because it's too risky and it's just, you know, it's not broken. 00:41:39.000 --> 00:41:40.220 We don't really want to mess with it. 00:41:40.220 --> 00:41:41.120 That kind of thing. 00:41:41.120 --> 00:41:48.880 And then the other is we've got some key library that we depend on, some package that itself is only Python 2. 00:41:48.880 --> 00:41:52.300 So until that gets upgraded, you can't only flip your app, right? 00:41:52.780 --> 00:41:57.240 But this is a whole nother level, like those two things still apply. 00:41:57.240 --> 00:41:58.860 They definitely still apply. 00:41:59.940 --> 00:42:01.280 They're just one part, right? 00:42:01.280 --> 00:42:10.480 Because you've got multiple compiled, distributed, shipped, non-updating, potentially pieces of software that have a host of versions packed into them. 00:42:10.480 --> 00:42:12.320 And you've got to fit into that. 00:42:12.320 --> 00:42:13.120 That's pretty crazy. 00:42:13.120 --> 00:42:19.360 And then you guys are building software that works with multiple versions of those, right? 00:42:19.360 --> 00:42:21.560 Because you're not building the pipeline to make a movie. 00:42:21.560 --> 00:42:24.520 You're building software to give to the people that are making the movie. 00:42:24.520 --> 00:42:28.220 So it's just, you know, a few more dimensions there. 00:42:28.220 --> 00:42:47.600 It actually is one of the things that really excites me about the project that I'm working on where almost for the first time, rather than building one of these just for a particular studio or as kind of just an open source project, we're trying to do it with the resources of a company like Autodesk behind it. 00:42:47.680 --> 00:42:58.360 Autodesk, which all of a sudden, like the jump to Python 3, which for the industry as a whole feels like it's a huge issue. 00:42:58.360 --> 00:43:07.840 It gives us a place where if all of these vendors for the major applications got together and said, okay, here's the version where we need to switch to Python 3. 00:43:07.840 --> 00:43:22.200 We could do a lot of the legwork for the industry as a whole and get stuff going and create that bridge over to Python 3, which doesn't exist if every studio had to do that themselves and manage it themselves. 00:43:22.200 --> 00:43:23.220 Yeah, that's really interesting. 00:43:23.220 --> 00:43:31.560 You're one of the few groups that lives, you basically are one of the few groups that live between all these pieces of software where everyone else is just consuming it, right? 00:43:32.120 --> 00:43:32.620 Exactly. 00:43:32.620 --> 00:43:43.080 And everyone, you know, almost every company figures out a way to get that in-between stuff written in order to automate stuff that they do. 00:43:43.080 --> 00:43:44.340 It's just too tedious otherwise. 00:43:45.160 --> 00:43:55.360 But we're kind of a central place where we can do that, which gives these software developers someone to work with in order to figure out some of the issues. 00:43:55.360 --> 00:44:02.260 And we definitely wouldn't encounter all of the issues that studios out there could see with the setup. 00:44:02.520 --> 00:44:11.020 But we at least can take it a big step further and prove that this kind of integration does work on the other side of that giant chasm. 00:44:11.020 --> 00:44:12.580 And here's how we did it. 00:44:12.580 --> 00:44:15.620 And here's the issues we found and help other people cross it. 00:44:15.620 --> 00:44:23.040 So another thing that you said that was kind of challenging, kind of like this version story, is PySide and PyQt. 00:44:23.040 --> 00:44:28.860 Can you maybe first of all tell people what that is so that everyone knows? 00:44:28.860 --> 00:44:30.480 And then what's the story there? 00:44:30.480 --> 00:44:37.980 Sure. Qt is a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit. 00:44:37.980 --> 00:44:50.280 So you can build complicated applications using Qt as the components that you're using to build all of the GUI widgets and do it in a way that's cross-platform. 00:44:50.280 --> 00:44:55.560 So it runs on Linux and on OSX and on Windows. 00:44:55.760 --> 00:45:06.380 Yeah. And one thing I'd like to add about that is that's one of the few cross-platform UI frameworks that I think looks modern and really good on all the different environments. 00:45:06.380 --> 00:45:09.580 Like a lot of times you're like, whoa, that is definitely not native. 00:45:09.580 --> 00:45:11.860 That looks like a weird app or whatever, you know. 00:45:11.860 --> 00:45:15.440 But I think Qt or Qt, it's nice. 00:45:15.920 --> 00:45:19.040 Yeah. I mean, it has a rich set of widgets. 00:45:19.040 --> 00:45:20.260 They're very configurable. 00:45:20.260 --> 00:45:23.160 It ties in nicely with the native OSs. 00:45:23.160 --> 00:45:24.440 It's been around a while. 00:45:24.440 --> 00:45:25.980 It's been used in a ton of places. 00:45:25.980 --> 00:45:28.460 Some huge applications use Qt. 00:45:28.460 --> 00:45:30.220 And it's funny that you say it looks modern. 00:45:30.480 --> 00:45:39.680 There's actually been this divide in the Qt world between Qt4 and Qt5, similar to the kind of the jump to Python 3, where Qt5 is this big leap forward. 00:45:39.680 --> 00:45:47.260 And that's one of the other things that the entertainment industry is trying to navigate the jump from Qt4 to Qt5. 00:45:47.640 --> 00:46:00.540 And to go back to what is Qt and what is PySide, PySide and PyQt are two Python bindings to that Qt library so that you can build these cross-platform, good-looking, complicated UIs in complete Python. 00:46:00.540 --> 00:46:01.820 It's pretty prevalent. 00:46:01.820 --> 00:46:02.580 It's out there. 00:46:02.580 --> 00:46:03.040 It's great. 00:46:03.040 --> 00:46:07.800 But PyQt is not open source. 00:46:07.800 --> 00:46:09.380 There's licensing restrictions around it. 00:46:09.380 --> 00:46:18.780 It makes it hard to build a commercial product around that, even though kind of supporting it as a runtime is completely doable. 00:46:18.780 --> 00:46:24.240 But in order to actually run a PyQt app, you need to be licensed if it's a commercial software. 00:46:24.240 --> 00:46:34.160 PySide, it was the branch, was another implementation of that Python binding in order to kind of get around those licensing restrictions to make it so that within Python, 00:46:34.160 --> 00:46:40.360 you could build these rich GUIs without having all those licensing constraints that come with PyQt. 00:46:40.360 --> 00:46:45.560 The problem with PySide is that it's one of those open source projects that's kind of stalled out. 00:46:45.560 --> 00:46:51.560 And there has not been a version that supports Qt5. 00:46:51.560 --> 00:47:01.040 So ironically, one of the big reasons that the industry can't cleanly jump over to Qt5 is because Python is everywhere. 00:47:01.040 --> 00:47:06.760 And people have used Python to build these really awesome production tools that are Qt4. 00:47:06.760 --> 00:47:10.480 And there needs to be an upgrade path for all of that code. 00:47:10.480 --> 00:47:20.320 So figuring out how to kind of breathe some life into the PySide project and get it going has been a topic of consideration. 00:47:20.320 --> 00:47:31.020 And it's something that, with the help of that VFX reference platform that I talked about earlier, because they are trying to drive this jump to Qt5 because there's a lot of improvements there. 00:47:31.020 --> 00:47:33.580 Qt4 is starting to show some age. 00:47:33.580 --> 00:47:41.240 They're trying to drive some life into the PySide project in order to get this update to be possible. 00:47:41.760 --> 00:47:51.260 It's an interesting thing where, again, this dependency and having all of these different apps coordinate this kind of an upgrade affects how we use Python and what's possible. 00:47:51.260 --> 00:47:55.320 I tend to really think about, I guess, how that kind of paints you into a corner. 00:47:55.320 --> 00:48:05.320 I did play around with PySide and PyQt and ran into the issue of, well, the licensing on PyQt, it seems overly restrictive. 00:48:05.320 --> 00:48:12.960 I'm not really against commercial software, but it seems like, I don't know, it just seems harder or more restrictive than it should be. 00:48:12.960 --> 00:48:16.440 But then again, I tried to use PySide and it was like almost working. 00:48:16.440 --> 00:48:18.180 It was frustrating. 00:48:18.680 --> 00:48:21.220 But I knew if I could get him to work, I'd have something really cool. 00:48:21.220 --> 00:48:23.960 But I kind of gave up and went and did something else altogether. 00:48:23.960 --> 00:48:24.920 Yeah. 00:48:24.920 --> 00:48:26.920 We do a ton with PySide. 00:48:26.920 --> 00:48:32.360 It would be amazing to have it be under more active development. 00:48:32.360 --> 00:48:34.200 Like I said, it's almost there. 00:48:34.200 --> 00:48:35.340 You can do a lot with it. 00:48:35.340 --> 00:48:44.560 There's definitely kind of low-level issues with memory management and things like that at the interface between the Qt world and the Python world. 00:48:44.560 --> 00:48:57.060 that if it was under active development, we would be seeing some upgrades happen that would clean that up and make it easier to develop rich Python GUIs that are embedded in these giant applications, 00:48:57.060 --> 00:49:12.080 which is where we actually realize a lot of just saving artist time so that they don't have to hunt around for files or manually export things knowing the settings that they do. 00:49:12.080 --> 00:49:19.720 And then they can just get back to doing the creative part of their job. 00:49:19.720 --> 00:49:27.620 And all of that currently for a lot of places, unless they bought the license for PyQt, is done in PySide. 00:49:27.620 --> 00:49:41.820 Have you considered using some of the fully native options like Py, OBJ, C, OS X, and Iron Python and WPF on Windows and just having a separate UI layer? 00:49:41.820 --> 00:49:43.820 Definitely thought about it. 00:49:43.820 --> 00:49:51.860 It's a lot of overhead when something like PySide is there and you can write it once and have it work everywhere. 00:49:52.620 --> 00:49:54.840 Yeah, it makes perfect sense. 00:49:54.840 --> 00:50:12.380 It's something I've been thinking about some native apps in Python and I'm like, well, you know, how much, I guess it depends on how much of your code and complexity is in the UI itself and how much you can push down to packages that those two distinct UIs that you'd have to write would consume, you know? 00:50:12.380 --> 00:50:23.000 I mean, at that point, you start wondering, like, would it make sense to have the GUI level written in actually Objective-C for OS X directly and embed a Python interpreter and tie it in like that? 00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:33.400 Like, at that point, it being in Python, you start wondering if having that layer be Python makes sense because you're having to code it specifically for the operating system itself. 00:50:33.620 --> 00:50:37.080 And for the GUI work, you get to use Xcode in a really deep way. 00:50:37.080 --> 00:50:37.700 Right, right. 00:50:37.700 --> 00:50:39.840 Maybe just use Xcode and like Swift now. 00:50:39.840 --> 00:50:41.860 So that's pretty close to Python, actually. 00:50:41.860 --> 00:50:42.680 Something like that, right? 00:50:42.680 --> 00:50:43.160 Exactly. 00:50:43.160 --> 00:50:43.680 Yeah. 00:50:43.680 --> 00:50:45.240 Yeah, but you'd lose all the packages. 00:50:45.240 --> 00:50:45.880 Anyway. 00:50:45.880 --> 00:50:46.500 Exactly. 00:50:46.500 --> 00:50:49.460 And it needs to talk to the rest of the pipeline. 00:50:49.460 --> 00:50:59.680 Again, your general knowledge of what's going on in the production and how to translate between these different applications is usually Python logic. 00:50:59.960 --> 00:51:02.500 So you've got to figure out a way to talk to that. 00:51:02.500 --> 00:51:03.420 Yeah, yeah. 00:51:03.420 --> 00:51:05.580 It's a super interesting set of trade-offs to consider. 00:51:05.580 --> 00:51:09.240 I personally would love to see PySide really come on strong. 00:51:09.240 --> 00:51:09.780 But... 00:51:09.780 --> 00:51:10.380 It'd be amazing. 00:51:10.380 --> 00:51:10.780 Yeah. 00:51:10.780 --> 00:51:12.160 All right. 00:51:12.160 --> 00:51:15.440 I have just enough time for a few more questions for you before you go. 00:51:15.440 --> 00:51:16.360 All right. 00:51:16.360 --> 00:51:19.280 So if you're going to write some Python code, what editor do you open up? 00:51:19.280 --> 00:51:21.500 That's funny. 00:51:21.500 --> 00:51:24.260 I have switched over to Sublime. 00:51:24.260 --> 00:51:28.200 I was kind of diehard VI Vim for a long, long time. 00:51:28.400 --> 00:51:30.700 And Sublime was the first thing that I saw that I was like, okay. 00:51:30.700 --> 00:51:35.920 It's fast enough to launch and fast enough to get going that it competes. 00:51:35.920 --> 00:51:40.620 There's still definitely some stuff that I miss from them. 00:51:40.620 --> 00:51:43.780 But I've grown addicted to multiple cursors. 00:51:43.780 --> 00:51:45.060 Yeah. 00:51:45.060 --> 00:51:45.520 Okay. 00:51:45.520 --> 00:51:46.000 Very cool. 00:51:46.000 --> 00:51:46.200 Yeah. 00:51:46.200 --> 00:51:47.220 I like Sublime as well. 00:51:47.220 --> 00:51:47.980 That's nice. 00:51:49.280 --> 00:51:55.080 There's, you know, many thousands of packages out on PyPI that people can go grab. 00:51:55.080 --> 00:51:59.780 What are some of your favorites that maybe not everyone knows about that they should check out? 00:51:59.780 --> 00:52:00.760 Oh, man. 00:52:00.760 --> 00:52:02.280 I mean, it's not on PyPI. 00:52:02.400 --> 00:52:17.020 But I do think PySide and kind of being able to build a GUI in complete Python and then even package it up with like Py2XE, Py2App or that kind of flavor of that is a pretty amazing thing for people to do. 00:52:17.880 --> 00:52:24.920 It's just kind of cool to be able to take something and actually hand it off as a self-contained thing to somebody else to run. 00:52:24.920 --> 00:52:26.080 Yeah. 00:52:26.080 --> 00:52:26.900 That is really cool. 00:52:26.900 --> 00:52:36.400 And I don't think I or any of the guests have spoken about Py2App or Py2XE or CXFreeze or any of those categories of things. 00:52:36.480 --> 00:52:41.300 Maybe you could just tell everyone out there, like those you can go pip install at least one or two of them, I think. 00:52:41.300 --> 00:52:42.340 Yeah. 00:52:42.340 --> 00:52:45.060 Some of them just come with the Python distributions. 00:52:45.060 --> 00:52:55.040 So it's a way of basically compiling down and freezing the Python interpreter and your code together as a native executable. 00:52:55.040 --> 00:53:04.080 So on OSX, the Py2App will actually create a bundle that has all of the Python embedded in it. 00:53:04.080 --> 00:53:05.060 And the same thing with Py2XE. 00:53:05.900 --> 00:53:10.880 You get a standalone EXE that you can run on Windows and it'll run your code. 00:53:10.880 --> 00:53:20.460 So if you combine it with PySide, then you get this EXE that you double click on and you don't even necessarily know that you're running Python under the hood. 00:53:20.460 --> 00:53:30.340 You got to take the code that you wrote and the speed with which you got to develop it because it's all scripted and you're able to put it together with something like PySide. 00:53:31.140 --> 00:53:39.640 And at the end of the day, you end up with this self-contained thing that you can just email to somebody without them having to set up any infrastructure under it and they'll be able to run it. 00:53:39.640 --> 00:53:40.780 Yeah, that's really cool. 00:53:40.780 --> 00:53:43.380 And you can, it takes your packages and everything, right? 00:53:43.380 --> 00:53:43.980 Yep. 00:53:43.980 --> 00:53:45.120 It embeds it all. 00:53:45.560 --> 00:53:48.680 Yeah, I haven't had a real good use case for that because I mostly do web stuff. 00:53:48.680 --> 00:53:57.060 But yeah, it's really cool to think, you know, instead of zipping up a bunch of scripts and sending them, I go, oh yeah, and you need to, you know, pseudo-pip install this while you're at it. 00:53:57.240 --> 00:54:00.880 Just go, you know, here's your .app, double click it. 00:54:00.880 --> 00:54:02.840 Or here's your .exe, double click it. 00:54:02.840 --> 00:54:03.700 It's great. 00:54:03.700 --> 00:54:04.480 Nice. 00:54:04.480 --> 00:54:08.440 Final call to action or anything people should check out? 00:54:08.440 --> 00:54:12.120 Let's say there's calls to action. 00:54:12.120 --> 00:54:17.360 Then people who are interested in open source development and the PySide, I would recommend that. 00:54:17.360 --> 00:54:19.760 It would be amazing to get people interested in that again. 00:54:19.760 --> 00:54:20.740 All right. 00:54:20.740 --> 00:54:21.120 Awesome. 00:54:21.300 --> 00:54:23.140 And how do they find this project that you're working on? 00:54:23.140 --> 00:54:27.520 Is it something that's out or something you're working on still that's going to come out? 00:54:27.520 --> 00:54:30.480 It is out in a beta form. 00:54:30.480 --> 00:54:35.680 There's a production management software that Autodesk sells called Shotgun. 00:54:35.680 --> 00:54:37.780 You can go to shotgunsoftware.com. 00:54:37.780 --> 00:54:43.360 And everything that I've been talking about is the pipeline developer section of that. 00:54:43.360 --> 00:54:44.960 So the project is Toolkit. 00:54:44.960 --> 00:54:48.360 We're the pipeline toolkit for Shotgun software. 00:54:48.360 --> 00:54:49.640 All right. 00:54:49.740 --> 00:54:51.780 It sounds like a really interesting project. 00:54:51.780 --> 00:54:59.200 And definitely got a fresh look at all the barbs that live in the different versions of all these things. 00:54:59.200 --> 00:55:00.320 Yeah. 00:55:00.320 --> 00:55:06.880 I would say if people are kind of interested in the stuff that I was talking about, the project that we work on is source shared. 00:55:06.880 --> 00:55:11.240 We've got public repos on Git. 00:55:11.240 --> 00:55:17.900 The license is you kind of have to be using Shotgun as a product in order to use the project. 00:55:17.900 --> 00:55:22.840 But all of the Python code is there for people to look at, improve upon. 00:55:22.840 --> 00:55:29.960 We try to do it as a very open project so that everybody that does this kind of work can join together as a community. 00:55:29.960 --> 00:55:31.360 That's great. 00:55:31.360 --> 00:55:33.340 It's been really fun talking to you, Rob. 00:55:33.340 --> 00:55:34.280 Thanks for being on the show. 00:55:34.280 --> 00:55:35.000 Thank you. 00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:35.680 It's been a pleasure. 00:55:35.680 --> 00:55:36.220 Yeah. 00:55:36.220 --> 00:55:36.560 Bye-bye. 00:55:38.140 --> 00:55:40.700 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:55:40.700 --> 00:55:45.440 Today's guest was Rob Blau, and this episode has been sponsored by SnapCI and OpBeat. 00:55:45.440 --> 00:55:47.180 Thank you guys for supporting the show. 00:55:47.180 --> 00:55:50.620 SnapCI is modern continuous integration and delivery. 00:55:50.620 --> 00:55:56.760 Build, test, and deploy your code directly from GitHub, all in your browser with debugging, talker, and parallelism included. 00:55:56.760 --> 00:55:59.900 Try them for free at snap.ci slash talkpython. 00:56:00.900 --> 00:56:03.740 OpBeat is mission control for your Python web applications. 00:56:03.740 --> 00:56:09.060 Keep an eye on errors, performance, profiling, and more in your Django and Flask web apps. 00:56:09.860 --> 00:56:15.120 Please take a moment to check out the online course Kickstarter at talkpython.fm/course. 00:56:15.120 --> 00:56:20.640 You get a discount for the course by signing up early and the satisfaction of helping create something amazing. 00:56:20.640 --> 00:56:27.440 You can find the links from this show at talkpython.fm/episodes slash show slash 46. 00:56:27.440 --> 00:56:29.760 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 00:56:29.760 --> 00:56:31.960 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 00:56:31.960 --> 00:56:32.960 It should be right at the top. 00:56:32.960 --> 00:56:36.700 You can also find the iTunes and direct RSS feeds in the footer of the website. 00:56:37.000 --> 00:56:41.260 Our theme music is Developers, Developers, Developers by Corey Smith, who goes by Smix. 00:56:41.260 --> 00:56:43.960 You can hear the entire song on talkpython.fm. 00:56:43.960 --> 00:56:45.840 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:56:45.840 --> 00:56:47.420 Thank you so much for listening. 00:56:47.420 --> 00:56:49.540 Smix, take us out of here. 00:57:06.960 --> 00:57:11.600 First, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. 00:57:11.600 --> 00:57:13.660 you