Valve has a working relationship with production studio Brown Bag Films, according to Kotaku, and agreed to license the engine for Deep.
I'm curious if you actually need a license to use an engine in a film. Presuming you produce all your own assets and otherwise have an appropriate license for the engine to render it once, is there any precedent for requiring a license to perform it as well? I'm assuming you don't need a performance license for NLE software like premiere or vegas?
Note "working relationship" rather than "license": the obvious advantage of building a movie in a game engine is that you could quite possibly very quickly commercialize a game based on the movie if it turns out to be a success.
And with that thought I felt my third eye open just a crack, revealing a vision of how movie/game franchises of the future might be funded and marketed. :) Interesting stuff, or at least, in a few years it might be.
That said the difference between the rendering of the artists workstation and the renderfarm is getting smaller and smaller. At some point folks like Weta will be able to put together pretty kick ass effects for the dailies. Its pretty good now but eventually ...
I'm curious if you actually need a license to use an engine in a film. Presuming you produce all your own assets and otherwise have an appropriate license for the engine to render it once, is there any precedent for requiring a license to perform it as well? I'm assuming you don't need a performance license for NLE software like premiere or vegas?