fxNewswire
VFXWages.com launches
Filed under: fxNewswire by Jeff Heusser @ 10:43 am on March 31, 2009

Back in August we did a podcast and article with Steve Hulett from The Animation Guild where he made the comment “How many visual effects houses do you know say to their top guys “uh, keep it to yourself what you’re making”… it’s against the law.” He went to talk about his feelings that not talking about wages is bad for workers, but we all know that this can be a delicate area.

VFXWages.com has been in beta and has just gone public. It uses data from users to produce anonymous data to help people determine wages in the visual effects industry.

Read their press release after the jump:
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fxNewswire
da Vinci Announces Native .R3D Support
Filed under: fxNewswire by John Montgomery @ 11:34 am on March 17, 2009

With NAB a month away, add another manufacturer to the list of those natively supporting the .R3D format. Today, da Vinci announced add-ons to their Resolve grading systems which allow varying levels of speed for decoding RED files. The three new products range from a software-only solution which is available for all Resolve systems to a dual server system which provides instantaneous decoding and real-time performance on their high end R-4K system.

Click through for the full press release from da Vinci…..

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fxNewswire
New fxpodcast – Showing Film Some Love
Filed under: fxNewswire by Jeff Heusser @ 4:31 pm on March 9, 2009

We tend to chase the latest technology here at fxguide, but we starting thinking that film is still the dominant media for motion picture photography and projection. So we went to one of the major sources, Kodak, to find out what they have been working on. As you’ll hear when we talked with Gary Einhaus, CTO and General Manager of Kodak Digital Cinema, Kodak is involved in every aspect of the digital workflow as well as constantly raising the bar with better and better film stocks for both production and projection.

By the way thanks to those who have written to us to make sure we were OK, we know it has been a bit of a gap between podcasts.

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.

fxNewswire
HD Expo (and Continuing the Image Quality Discussion)
Filed under: fxNewswire by Jeff Heusser @ 1:39 pm on March 6, 2009

HD Expo has been around since 2001 and holds conferences in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York as well as internationally. Kristin Petrovich, President of HD Expo explained that they are in the process of transitioning the name to “creatasphere”.

On March 5th the HD Expo was held at the Hilton at Universal City, featuring an exhibit area and sessions ranging from ones on the RED camera to others by Adobe, Panasonic, a session about Indie Filmmaking, among others.

The keynote was titled “The Cinematographer as Artist, Expert, Collaborator”. This was to be a conversation with Cinematographers Wally Pfister (“Dark Knight,” “The Prestige,” “The Italian Job”) and Dion Beebe (“The Memoirs of A Geisha,” “Chicago,” “Miami Vice”). Dion Beebe was unavailable, leaving it to Wally and Moderater Peter Caranicas, Managing Editor, Variety. As Wally Pfister was unable to attend the VES/ASC event last week it turned out to be a good session for filling in some pieces in the story we did on that event.
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