eyeon announced a new version of their flagship composting product Fusion today, which gets a bump to version 6. The release joins the stereoscopic compositing crowd with integrated compositing and viewing. They also have put time into improving their 3D system with a new 3D Open GL renderer, environment mapping, bump maps and more.

We’ll be talking to eyeon next week at SIGGRAPH, but in the meantime, click through for the press release…..

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Many readers will know Richard Szalwinski as one of the founders of Discreet Logic. After having left Discreet a while ago, Richard and a few other ex Discreet friends such as Mike Hughes have surfaced at a new company called Xtranormal. The company produces visualization software based on natural speech and produces simple 3D video animations. In its simplest form it will allow socal networkers to make 3D animations from simple normal english scripts. In its most advanced form it holds the promise of blocking and previz for ‘the rest of us”. Keen to see what creative professionals can do with the software, and to offer a glimpse at the technology roadmap, Xtranormal will be at Siggraph in a whisper suite.

A short interview with Mike Hughes and information on how to make an appointment at Siggraph can be found after the jump.
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fxguidetv is back this week with a special pre-SIGGRAPH episode. Mike Seymour recently sat down with Paul Debevec to catch up on the research Debevec and his team have been doing. It’s very interesting stuff, including a cool discussion about separating the specular and subsurface properties of skin and how it relates to creating high resolution facial geometry. In addition, they also discuss some of the must-see highlights of the SIGGRAPH conference.

fxguidetv will be netcasting multiple episodes next week from SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link. Visit the fxguidetv page for the direct RSS feed links.

Red Giant, one of our favorite plugin vendors, has acquired the motion plugin portfolio of Digital Anarchy. The plugins include PlaneSpace (formerly 3D Assistant Lite/Pro), a 3D layer animation tool; Datamator (formerly Data Animator), which creates and animates charts and graphs in 3D space; Psunami (formerly Psunami Water), a photorealistic water and wave generator; ToonIt (formerly Toon It!), which creates cartoon-style art from video footage; and Knoll Light Factory Spark, a version of the popular lens flare generation tool especially for FFI and Smoke.

One really bit of great news about the acquisition is that Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm QuickTime codec is now going to be distributed free of charge (along with PlasmaFX and Color Theory). Microcosm is a 64-bit lossless codec which can achieve compression rates around 5:1. It’s a great tool for saving space on high quality renders from graphics applications.

For more information about the acquisition, click through for the press release and check out Red Giant’s FAQ about the acquisition…

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A revised Red Centre Episode #011 is up – we had some killer server issues this week, but it is all solved and we are sorry for the delay.

This week we discuss workflow from a personal point of view. We discuss Jason’s recent baby TVC spot – which was shot all on RED. We then head to Europe to discuss rigs in Switzerland and Austria for our Red Room.

We want to thank again all our listeners who have been really great in emailing and messaging us. Your support makes everything possible. Thank you.