VFXWages.com launches
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 […]
Read the Article
da Vinci Announces Native .R3D Support
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 […]
Read the Article
New fxpodcast – Showing Film Some Love
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, […]
Read the Article
HD Expo (and Continuing the Image Quality Discussion)
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 […]
Read the Article
VES and ASC Team up for Image Quality
The Visual Effects Society (VES) Technology Committee & American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) held a session this past Tuesday in Hollywood called Image Quality Considerations for Cinematography and Visual Effects. This was a standing room only event at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater, Eric Roth (head of the VES) said in his opening remarks that […]
Read the Article
Autodesk Introduces Softimage 7.5 Software
Autodesk today released an update to SOFTIMAGE|XSI, which it acquired from Avid back in November, and the update renames the product to Autodesk Softimage. Read the press release after the jump
Read the Article
Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face
A talk from the 2009 TED Conference has been posted featuring Ed Ulbrich, from Digital Domain, explaining the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create younger and older versions of Brad Pitt’s face for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Watch the clip here
Read the Article
VES Awards – Report and Photo Gallery
It was a good night for Digital Domain at the 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” took home four awards and a commercial for Bacardi made it five. The HBO series “John Adams”, “The Changeling”, “WALL E”, and “The Dark Knight” all took home multiple awards and New […]
Read the Article
VES Awards – The Winners List
The 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards were held tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. In addition to the award categories a VES Lifetime Achievement award was presented to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall and the George Méliès Award for Pioneering was presented to Phil Tippett. The winners in individual categories […]
Read the Article
HPA Technology Retreat 2009
The Hollywood Post Alliance describes their 15th annual technology retreat on their web site with the heading “Now more than ever! Arm your Brain”. In these challenging economic times it is important to be thinking in new directions and looking for all opportunities. We take a trip to the desert for some inspiration and to see what the HPA Technology Retreat has to offer.
Read the Article
Gridiron Flow Beta for Mac Released
One of the more interesting products in development over the last year has been Gridiron Software’s Flow — an asset, versioning, and time tracking package for artists. It works behind the scenes to track what you’re working on and what files were used to create the end result. Just drag a render to the Flow […]
Read the Article
The Foundry: Looking for Showreel Material
It’s that time of year again, when manufacturers are looking for material to add to their tradeshow reels. The Foundry is prepping their reel for NAB and looking for cool stuff that features work done in their products: Nuke, Furnace, Keylight, Ocula, Tinder, and Tinderbox. If you have work that you’d like to have featured […]
Read the Article
And the BAFTA Award goes to…
Starting the award season the British Academy of Film and Television Arts held the BAFTA Awards tonight. The winner for the category Special Visual Effects is: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan McGuinness, Edson Williams Full list of BAFTA winners can be found here. The VES Awards are next on […]
Read the Article
The Orphanage suspends operations
Late yesterday we got word that The Orphanage in San Francisco was suspending operations. The confirmation came quickly on Orphanage co-founder Stu Maschwitz’s ProLost blog. The company was founded in 1999 by Stu and co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart and according to The Orphanage website had a staff of more than 160 artists with […]
Read the Article
Imagineer Announces Plans for 2009
We haven’t heard much from the folks at Imagineer since some big changes at the company in the second half of last year. Today they announced that the first half of the year will see significant upgrades to their mocha and mocha for After Effects tracking products. They also plan to announce details on upgrades […]
Read the Article
The Foundry’s 2009 Nuke Roadmap
The first ever Nuke master class in London was held in Soho today and over 200 artists from all around Europe attended the event. The session was definitely geared towards artist-types and started with the Foundry’s Jon Waddleton covering python scripting for artists. There were also a ton of cool tips and tricks shown by […]
Read the Article
fxguidetv – Episode #51 is on the Air
A new episode of fxguidetv is available for your viewing pleasure. It features an interview with vfx supervisor Eric Durst, who chats with Mike Seymour about the craft of turning elements of a script into visual effects which help tell the story. Also, we have a look at a fun Levi’s 501 spec spot helmed by […]
Read the Article
All is Forgiven: Sale Ends
The Foundry and Autodesk have rebuilt the arrangement we reported on earlier this month and the Foundry will once again fully develop Sparks for the Autodesk Systems products. We had reported earlier in the month on the complex issues leading to the Foundry slashing prices to just 10% of their normal price, and the loss […]
Read the Article
Nominees announced for 2008 Oscars
The three films nominated for the Visual Effects category for the 2008 Academy Awards are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron The Dark Knight Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin Iron Man John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mahan The Academy […]
Read the Article
GenArts buys SpeedSix
Today GenArts made good on recent talk of expansion and announced the acquisition of SpeedSix. We speak to Steve Bannerman, Chief Marketing Officer of GenArts about the new expansion. He talks exclusively with fxguide and discusses the possible move to market custom plugins.
Read the Article
Valkyrie: Serious Drama from SPI
SPI has produced some spectacularly seamless visual effects for the period drama of Valkyrie from director Bryan Singer (Usual Suspects, Superman Returns) and staring a serious dramatic performance from Tom Cruise (War of the Worlds. Rich Hoover, vfx supervisor on Valkyrie spoke to us about the complexity of doing such a powerful historical film.
Read the Article
VES Announces Nominees
The Visual Effects Society (VES) today announced the nominees for the 7th Annual VES Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding visual effects in over a dozen categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games. Nominees were chosen Saturday, January 17, 2009, by numerous panels of VES members who viewed submissions at the FotoKem screening facilities in […]
Read the Article
A list ups and downs
Autodesk: cuts 750 jobs We spoke to Autodesk overnight. They confirmed that 10% of jobs across the board had gone. Some friends from M&E division have gone, from offices around the world not just in Montreal. All of the final people have not even been decided, in some cases areas they have been told there […]
Read the Article
fxguidetv 50th episode + 10 years of fxguide.com!
The new year brings a new episode of fxguidetv and it’s a milestone for us: our 50th episode. We decided to have some fun at take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the past year and a half. What an 18 months it was! We also take a look ahead at […]
Read the Article
British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) nominees
The British Academy Film Awards nominations were announced today. Nominees for the category Special Visual Effects are: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan McGuinness, Edson Williams The Dark Knight– Chris Corbould, Nick Davis, Paul Franklin, Tim Webber Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull– Pablo Helman Iron […]
Read the Article
Passing of a Friend: Richard Spöhrer
We learned with great sadness that The Pixel Farm’s Richard Spöhrer suddenly passed away on the last day of 2008. We reflect on what he added to our industry and how he touched many of us not only with the many products he was involved with, but with his kindness and generosity as a person.
Read the Article
Australia fxpodcast
With the Bake off for the Oscar Nominations this Thursday in LA, we speak to Iloura’s Peter Webb about the film Australia. One of seven films in the running for the Oscar’s three nominations for best visual effects. Peter was part of the team at iloura that handled much of the end of the film, including much of the bombing of Darwin.
Read the Article
64-bit OS X Version of SynthEyes now Available
The powerful but affordable SynthEyes camera tracking application is now available in a 64-bit version for OS X Leopard. The new version provides a bit of a speed increase, but the main benefit with a 64-bit app is the ability to use more than 4 GB of RAM. This is useful for maintaining longer and […]
Read the Article
Autodesk Shows a bit of OS X Love
As foreshadowed in the rumor mill yesterday, Autodesk today announced 3 new OS X versions of their products: Toxik, Mudbox, and ImageModeler. The most interesting development is probably the release of Toxik, which brings a new high end compositing package to the Apple platform. The rumor of on OS X Toxik version has existed for […]
Read the Article
Bakeoff list for 2009 Oscars
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 81st Academy Awards®. The films are listed below in alphabetical order: “Australia” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” “The Dark Knight” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” “Iron Man” “Journey to the […]
Read the Article