Before Toy Story 3 was the incredibly successful short film Day and Night. The film is not only creatively entertaining but one of the best uses of stereoscopic animation ever done. This week we speak to Director Teddy Newton. Also from SIGGRAPH, we have a brief look at the SIGGRAPH Job Fair, one of the best gatherings of CG and effects professional recruiters in the world.

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For our readers in London, The Foundry is holding a release event on August 12th for their recently released Mari software. To be held at the VUE in Leicester, the event will be showcase the product from an artist and technical perspective as well as laying out the product roadmap.

Click here to register and attend the event.

fxguidetv episode #88 takes a look at PFMatchit, the new node-based camera tracking software from The Pixel Farm. The company has completely re-architectured tracking workflow in their new product to build for the future (see the press released posted here last week).

Mike Seymour also speaks with Scott Squires, one of the co-editors on The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures.

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Episode #87: In our first episode from Siggraph 2010 in Los Angeles we catch up with and Mental Images. Check back later for more Siggraph coverage including Pixar’s Teddy Newton: Director of Day and Night, VFX supervisor Scott Squires and more…

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We were already looking forward to Siggraph and here we are in the week before getting releases that make us even more excited to be covering the show. Pixel Farm is using words in the press release that follows that get our full attention “brand new architecture”, “node-based flowgraph architecture” plus they include a quote from our longtime fxphd 3D tracking guru and professor Victore Wolansky:

“The tracking market is long overdue for an overhaul, and this is a game-changing advance from The Pixel Farm. I think they’ve just re-invented 3D tracking,” said Victor Wolansky, VFX Artist, E3post, and 3D Tracking Professor at fxphd. “New products emanating from these developments will be a ‘must-have’ for anyone involved in the visual effects business.”

UPDATE July 28, 2010: More detailed press release and some images are after the read more and you can bet we’ll be checking this out at Siggraph.

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Advance news from Siggraph is already starting to roll in and here is some big news from The Foundry. The press release and some images are after the jump, but in a nutshell The Foundry is incorporating elements of Disney’s internally developed Paint 3D technology into Mari and Walt Disney Animation Studios’ technology group will participate in a Mari steering committee, contributing to the future direction of the software.
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When we talked with Scott Ross about six months ago you let us know by the number of downloads, emails and personal comments that it was one of our most popular podcasts. We check back in with Scott with an unusual proposal, for the duration of the podcast we put him in charge of the worldwide visual effects industry to get his view on what the industry needs to do for its health, growth and survival.

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This week Jason and Mike are joined by Stu Maschwitz, filmmaker and accidental technologist.

The guys discuss a recent ProLost post on the issues around SLR digital cinematography as well as the week’s news and an amazing video documentary project Jason is involved with. Please send us your comments red (at) fxguide.com

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Episode #86 features Industrial Light & Magic’s Jason Billington, going over work done on Transformers 2. The segment, recorded earlier this year at NAB, shows how they used Nuke’s 3D environment to layer footage of explosions and dust over cgi renders.

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Dr Michael Johnson discusses the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar and how technology has worked with the Artists over time. Michael has personally worked on every single Pixar film since joining the company in 1995. Before Pixar, Michael was with the Computer Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT, he also worked at Thinking Machines Corp and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Visit the fxpodcast page for direct downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link.