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     Iron Man is a blockbuster hit due to a focus on acting, great action sequences and seamless big budget visual effects by lead facility Industrial Light and Magic, steered by visual effects supervisor John Nelson. Alongside ILM was The Orphanage and we drill down on just one aspect of the film - the Heads Up Display - in this week's fxpodcast with designer Dav Rauch. read story.... Posted on: May 09, 2008   At NAB 2008 in Las Vegas, eyeon introduced their new conforming and versioning app called eyeon Generation, which has been in development for about two years. The app contains conforming and editing tools, compositing, collaboration with annotation, versioning, as well as render management. The release will bring a new and valuable type of workflow to the desktop compositing market. read story.... Posted on: Apr 16, 2008  Adobe has surprised some by moving towards a web app model for the crown jewel of Adobe: Photoshop. We review the new effort and see how viable it is for serious production. read story.... Posted on: Apr 10, 2008  NAB starts this weekend, so we spoke to the organizers and worked out our fxguided tour to get the most out of NAB. With a massive investment in seminars and events, NAB now provides some really cool content discussions and presentations. Check out the talks, the presentations, events and the key parties. read story.... Posted on: Apr 08, 2008  We are rarely presented with something truly new and inventive, but the work of Minivegas is really worthy of the term 'groundbreaking'. For client S4C they have created a set of promos that automatically animates in realtime to the exact pitch of the presenter's voice. Every day each promo is unique. This fully automated solution is both technically and creatively impressive, and also often a load of laughs. read story.... Posted on: Apr 03, 2008  DI is a process often reserved for the top films involving days of film scanning and large budgets. Local Hero Post is focused on providing a DI solution for the independent filmmaker, offering high quality at prices more in line with the budget of an Indie film. In this week's fxpodcast, we discuss with owner Leandro Marini the approach Local Hero has taken to make this possible. read story.... Posted on: Mar 31, 2008  From U2 to Hanna Montana. From Beowulf to Journey to the Center of the Earth. 3D is hot once again. One of the strongest trends in visual effects films today is stereoscopic capture, post production and projection. Technology is catching up just when theatre owners are looking for ways to hold and appeal to a media saturated audience. We explore the theory and practice of digital 3D stereo imaging. read story.... Posted on: Mar 25, 2008  In a broadcast filled of commercials with talking animals, dancing animals, and even animals with a point to prove, the Coke spot "It's Mine" stood out from the crowd. We speak with The Mill's creative director Angus Kneale and Senior CG artist Ben Smith about the work that went into making one of the most popular spots from the big show. read story.... Posted on: Mar 19, 2008  10,000 BC by director Roland Emmerich takes audiences to a time when mighty mammoths shook the earth. In this in-depth article we examine just one part of this blockbuster film and drill down on complex task of producing photorealistic mammoths that, while not the heros of the film, certainly gave the film power, gravitas and some ripping good thrills. read story.... Posted on: Mar 07, 2008  One of our favourite films of 2007 was The Kingdom. If you missed it - rent it. Peter Berg's film is a powerful action drama based around a criminal investigation shared by two cultures chasing deadly terrorists before they are ready to strike again. We explore the seamless visual effects delivered by Rhythm & Hues and explore the amazing opening titles which both inform and set the tone for the entire film from the PIC Agency. read story.... Posted on: Feb 28, 2008   It is hard to believe that Paul Debevec published his PhD just ten years ago. His work in defining high dynamic range images (HDRi) was almost immediately adopted by the major effects companies and expanded into one of the most significant visual effects areas of the last ten years. Debevec's latest paper, which builds on HDRi and his now famous light stage, has just been presented at Siggraph this year. This is a stage rig that can reproduce the exact lighting captured and recorded via an HDR capture. read story.... Posted on: Aug 04, 2005  In our continuing 'Art of ...' series we turn to one of the central issues for compositors - keying. This weeks fxpodcast, which accompanies the article, covers the Primatte keying plugin with Scott Gross of IMAGICA Corporation of America. read story.... Posted on: Nov 21, 2005  In our latest story in our series of "Art of stories", we explore the Art of Optical Flow. Optical flow is one of the most interesting growth areas of visual effects technology. We talk to the people that invented it, developed it and used it in such films as What Dreams May Come, Mission Impossible and the Matrix series. In this week's accompanying podcast we talk to Bill Collis who produced the original bullet time optical flow retimings in the Matrix and is now head of technology at the Foundry in London who make the Furnace set of plugins. read story.... Posted on: Feb 28, 2006  In our continuing and popular "Art of..." series, we tackle wire and rig removal. Far from being the most glamourous of visual effects, in reality wire removal is extremely challenging. We audit the current approaches and techniques of the craft. In this week's podcast, we speak with Aaron Rhode from The Orphanage about the complex 2D and 3D solutions for scenes with wires. read story.... Posted on: Oct 27, 2007  In part one of a two part series about tracking, Mike Seymour covers the history of 2D and 3D tracking in visual effects. Today's artists might take it for granted, but what companies and individuals helped bring image processsing innovation to the field and change the industry forever? Read more... UPDATED: Aug 31st. read story.... Posted on: Aug 24, 2004  In part 2 of the Art of Tracking series, we take a look at the various software applications for 2D and 3D tracking. The software developers of these apps give us some technical insight as well as tips and suggestions how to get great tracks. read story.... Posted on: Sep 09, 2004 From U2 to Hanna Montana. From Beowulf to Journey to the Center of the Earth. 3D is hot once again. One of the strongest trends in visual effects films today is stereoscopic capture, post production and projection. Technology is catching up just when theatre owners are looking for ways to hold and appeal to a media saturated audience. We explore the theory and practice of digital 3D stereo imaging. read story.... Posted on: Mar 25, 2008  In this fxpodcast, we get an update on Toxik with product manager Chris Vienneau. He also talks about some of the image processing requirements, forming the basis of the 32-bit HDR pipeline. Our feature article examines image processing in compositing apps, with tips from our own experiences as well as from the manufacturers. read story.... Posted on: Nov 28, 2005  Double Negative was lucky enough to have a good amount of time for pre-production on Batman Begins, as this allowed the team to develop some new innovative, inventive and robust workflow and pipeline tools. Paul Franklin from Double Negative breaks down the shots, the new tools they developed and their OpenEXR pipeline that required over a million digital stills to photographed. read story.... Posted on: Jul 18, 2005  In the conclusion of our two part series on Double Negative's work on Batman Begins, Mike Seymour continues his conversation with Paul Franklin. Franklin breaks down the shots, the new tools they developed and their OpenEXR pipeline that required over a million digital stills to photographed. We aim for the story and podcast to each provide something different, so if you haven't listened to one of our fxpodcasts yet, now is the time... read story.... Posted on: Jul 25, 2005  We are proud to discuss the latest work from the ICT in LA. If you loved our Art of HDR story - this shows the latest research which will be shown in Siggraph 30th July. We speak to Per Einarsson and Sebastian Sylwan who worked with Paul Debevec and the rest of the team at ICT to take the HDR Lightprobe / light stage to the next level. Jeff Heusser and Mike Seymour from fxguide were lucky enough to tour LS6 just after it was first operational. read story.... Posted on: Jul 31, 2006   In this week's podcast we talk to Greg Strause, of Lola and Hydraulx and John Bruno visual effects supervisor of X-Men, about the amazing 25 year digital facelifts in X-Men: The Last Stand. We are also joined in our companion written story by Eric Saindon who headed up the Weta X-Men 3 team . read story.... Posted on: Jun 12, 2006  Software developers try to cram as many new effects as possible into their product -after all, it's those features which lead to sales. Workflow changes and fixes which help artists get their work done often get left behind. In this week's podcast and story, we take a look at the new release of Adobe After Effects and how they bucked this trend. read story.... Posted on: Feb 20, 2006  GMC “Big Dig†is big - the carmaker’s vision, as well as the task laid at the feet of the filmmakers. The spot was helmed by Space Program’s Justin Klarenbeck, and completed by rhinofx in NYC. We spoke to Arman Matin, Creative Director/CG Director of rhinofx and not only do we review before and after shots, but we reprint the original pitch document for the visual effects - so you can judge for yourself how the team performed. read story.... Posted on: Dec 13, 2005  An email went out today to customers of Shake... fxguide has obtained a copy of it (click read more to see it!): read story.... Posted on: May 02, 2002  Photoshop CS2 has been announced as part of the new CS2 Suite. We will be roadtesting it fully in coming weeks, but were keen to have a first look at the HDR 32bit capabilities. read story.... Posted on: Apr 06, 2005  Rumour over the last several months was that discreet was considering the future of combustion for the Macintosh. Today we can officially confirm that Combustion 3 will be available for the G5 under the next planned Mac OSX release, Panther (10.3). read story.... Posted on: Sep 09, 2003  The huge visual effects movie Transformers racked up the biggest July 4th single-day gross in boxoffice history. We speak to director Michael Bay and, for a something different, guest writer Robin Rowe looks in depth at the editing of the megahit blockbuster. read story.... Posted on: Jul 09, 2007  Director Alfonso Cuaron directs the new gritty drama Children of Men, and in the finest tradition of Blade Runner the future is a bleak and depressing place. For the visual effects team it is also a place filmed in long, complex, traveling single take shots with little or no 'set' lighting. The shots often required massive 3d tracking and compositing. read story.... Posted on: Jan 04, 2007  In this week's podcast we have a huge treat - an hour-long detailed discussion of the visual effects in Tim Burton's smash hit Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. fxguide talks to all three major fx houses: MPC, Cinesite and Framestore CFC. We get an overview and then breakdown one sequence in detail in the podcast and discuss the relationship between physical models and vfx in the written story. read story.... Posted on: Aug 29, 2005  RED has begun shipping their RED ONE camera After many people initially questioned the project and some even called it a sham, the RED team today proudly delivered their first 25 cameras. We were there to pick up our camera number 22. In characteristic RED style it was informative, crazy and a really great place to be. read story.... Posted on: Sep 01, 2007 |
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