A Case Study from the Foundry
What follows the Apocalypse? Extinction, of course. Like its predecessors, the third installment of the Resident Evil trilogy is rife with zombies, survivalists, Milla Jovovitch, villains, and… zombies. But given that this was the final chapter (so says the official word), the filmmakers wanted to send fans of the video-game-inspired film series off with a lasting impression. To create it they looked to the VFX experts known for dealing handily with the undead on films like Silent Hill, Skinwalkers, Dead Silence and Dawn of the Dead — Mr. X.

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Glue Tools has released v2.5.7 of its Cineon and DPX QuickTime Components. This new release now includes direct support for 10-bit Uncompressed YUV 422 codecs in Final Cut Pro. This development greatly improves loading and playback speed for Final Cut Pro users. By performing the conversion inside the Cineon/DPX Pro QuickTime components, several internal steps that QuickTime normally performs are eliminated, improving speed and ensuring 10-bit image compatibility. Conversion from 10-bit YUV is also supported during the export process in Final Cut Pro. Cineon or DPX frames can be exported directly from YUV based projects, with no color change or gamma shifting.
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Our latest episode of fxguidetv is now available via iTunes. We have coverage of the release of the first RED cameras, Nuke, and an interview with vfx art director Doug Chiang. Chiang has art directed films such as ‘Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace’, ‘Forest Gump’, and ‘Terminator 2′ and we took the time to chat with him at the recent SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego. fxguide/fxphd will be receiving RED camera #22 later this week in California….more on that in the coming days and weeks….

We have also added a new lower bandwidth iPod and iPhone friendly version of the netcast, which is available in a new rss feed. The file sizes are about 30% smaller in size and are formatted to play on the portable devices. Yeah…I got a iPhone the day they came out so now it’s time to add this to the available formats. You can subscribe to the low bandwidth version via the standard rss feed or use this link to subscribe in iTunes.

We finished our 8th Episode from Siggraph with an exclusive interview with Syd Mead. Syd was brought down to Siggraph By Softimage to talk at the XSI user group. Part of our interview with Syd can be seen in Episode 8 but we will be rolling out longer versions by request in coming weeks. And not only longer versions of key interviews but a whole host of additional new interviews.

At Siggraph Softimage donated a free copy of XSI Education version to all the Siggraph Student Volunteers and launched XSI 6.5, repackaged and re-priced XSI Essentials & XSI Advanced, and Face Robot 1.8 – for game development pipeline.

For more information on XSI, click through to read more…
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In a press release, eyeon announced the first 64-bit desktop compositing application on the market, Fusion®64. Fusion64 will be the first desktop compositor in the industry to break the current accessibility limit of 4 gigabytes (GB) of both virtual and physical memory. eyeon’s extensive developmental knowledge secures the benefits of multi-core and multi-processor systems. This enables Fusion artists to take advantage of more RAM and system resources for a more interactive scope.

“Fusion 5’s architecture was specifically designed to bring 64-bit desktop compositing to the visual effects market. With the new generation of multi-core processors, coupled with GPU acceleration, Fusion64 now gives our clients the resources to effectively produce the best possible level of content.”
Isaac Guenard, Senior Product Manager of eyeon Software

Building on the release of Fusion 5.2, Fusion64 includes OFX plugin support, a new Vector Motion Blur tool, enhanced 3D scene importing, 3D LUTs accelerated by GPUs, expanded metadata handling for DPX, Cineon and OpenEXR formats, Python scripting and Tracker’s new infinite sub pixel precision method.

Fusion64 will be included in eyeon’s subscription program.

It’s been a great week here at SIGGRAPH2007 covering the show and we hope you’ve been enjoying the coverage. Sony Pictures Imagework’s Rob Bredow lead a great course given by the crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks about the making of “Surf’s Up”. It was a fanastic presention to a packed room — in fact, attendess had to wait a bit to get in to the presentation as there was no space.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Rob after the course and talk about the making of the waves for the movie….and that coverage is in today’s first ep from San Diego. If you enjoy the interview, you should definitely check out the course notes that Rob has posted over at his 185vfx web site. We also interviewed Les Zellan from Cooke lenses about some of their technology and how it will play into the visual effects market.

We’ve got two more episodes left from San Diego, viewable only over at AWN as streaming netcasts due to the high volume we’re sending out. The folks at AWN and vfxworld — Dan, Shannon, Bill, Deron, Mark, and Andy — have been incredibly helpful in getting things set up.

If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to our regular fxguidetv high resolution netcast.

In this episode we look at Emerging technology here at fxguide.
At SIGGRAPH each year there is a display of Emerging technologies, some are purely research projects such as robotic head sets, others have a more commercial application - such as Microsoft’s Surface table.

We also interview Paul Debevec and discuss not only his ‘holographic display’ but also discuss the electronic theatre and some amazing new research that allows regrading of faces from a reference performance of even another similar actor.

In coming episodes we talk to the work of ILM, PIXAR, SYD MEAD, MUDBOX and many others.

We want to thank everyone who has been emailing us and stopping us at the show to say how much they have been enjoying the show. It has been hard work doing two shows a day but we have been having a ball. And we have some insanely cool interviews still to come.

The second SIGGRAPH episode is up - this time we speak to the founder of Massive, Stephen Regelous about massive 3.0 and the windows version of the software. Massive also includes Mental Ray support and new hair and Lanes features. Click special SIGGRAPH box in upper right of this page to view.

Click below for more and to see the Massive’s teams favorite TVC spot !

In the upcoming episodes we talk to Paul Debevec, Rob Bredow (Surf’s Up) and even Syd Mead !
Check back as we are posting episodes twice a day !

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We are here and the shows have started!

Let me outline our SIGGRAPH coverage - we are doing 8 fxguidetv shows from San Diego, these will include interviews with artists such as the guys from Surf’s Up, ILM and Transformers, the senior renderman team, plus leading equipment manufacturing news and some other cool stuff such as the Animators IRON FJORG! competition.

These special SIGGRAPH episodes of fxguidetv will not be available via iTunes due to bandwidth requirements - to view them click the link in the top right of this web page to get instant access… and don’t forget to check back for more episodes all week long. In the first episode we catch up with the new Toxik, in the second episode we talk about the new version of Massive Software, with founder Stephen Regelous.

PLUS on the fxphd Dean’s Blog we’ll blog the week, and inside fxphd (for post grads only) we’ll provide detailed technical discussion of the papers and courses.

So check it out… we hope you enjoy our unprecedented coverage of SIGGRAPH 2007

Autodesk announced Toxik 2008 — and the big news is that it will now be offered as a standalone app without the database. This is hugely welcome news, as it brings Toxik to the same type of app as Nuke, Fusion, and Shake. It would be one thing if it used a database and as an artist you didn’t know it. But this wasn’t the case with the app, as Oracle added to the apps complexity and requirements. Now it can be judged on its merits as a compositing tool without being burdened by the database.

The price was also reduced as well…single versions are available….and bicubics. We’ll have coverage about this news from Siggraph next week on fxguidetv, but until then you can read the press release by clicking the read more link….
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