RealViz Stitcher, perhaps the best program available for patching together multiple images to produce a master high resolution wide angle master shot. We talk to RealViz Product manager Stephane Negri about Stitcher 5, and examine its relationship to Photoshop.

The ultimate student film might be Birthday Boy – Sejong Park’s film which earned an Oscar nomination last year and played at Annecy 2005. Park’s film was brilliant and it certainly pushed him onto the worldwide stage. But not everyone can get an Oscar nomination. Also at Annecy last year, a bunch of french students were invited to produce short films to be screened before each day of the festival. One such film was le Building. It is a g

fxguide has been working the Foundry regarding Furnace for some months – and this will result in an fxguide live event in LA, 2nd of March. The Foundry’s image processing tools are so hot, that they have just been incorporated into the new After Effects 7 as standard. Every copy of AE 7 ships with Kronos integrated into AE – we talk to the Foundry team, and invite you to see all of the foundry’s Furnace plugins running on MAC, PC, and Linux at a special te

It is rare the crew at fxguide is really impressed with another site, but we started to notice a site that consistently produced great stories blogging the VFX world: vfxblog.com Then we woke up one day and vfxblog had beaten us to a story on a film — a film which one of our own founders was a compositor on! We had to learn more – and this led to the site’s founder Ian Failes joining the fxguide team. We welcome him knowing he will continue to keep us o

Mark Ruff is a photographer who specialises in frozen moment multi-camera time splices. After many years with a film rig and then a digital rig, Mark has developed a near real-time system. It uses an array of digital cameras, each attached to an array of Mac Minis, feeding a master Mac G5. In seconds it produces a composited, stablized and deflickered effects sequence at full HD resolution (or up to 3K as required). We discuss the evolution of the rig and

As it is almost Christmas we figured we’d explore a different side of visual effects and talk to someone who creates the scripts and characters that we daily need to film and composite. We decided to talk to an entremely successful writer and producer. Doug Naylor is a funny guy, he writes funny comedy, but the business of writing for visual effects – especially for a tight budget, cult classic – with global appeal is a tough job. This week, Doug Naylor k

noitulovE is an amazing rush – a visual effects spectacular. William Bartlett, Visual Effects supervisor and the animation team at Framestore/CFC headed by Andy Boyd did an outstanding job of showing the entire history of evolution, – in one spot… backwards. The story also includes exclusive ‘making of’ video ipod quicktime.

Nuke 4.5 in production. In this week’s podcast we talk to Jonathan Egstad, visual effects supervisor for the Paramount release “Aeon Flux” starring Charlize Theron. For our online story we chatted to Gary Meyer, Nuke Product Specialist about the details of the 4.5 release.

In an interesting move, NUKE is released on Mac OS X.

The new 4.5 version of NUKE also includes impressive new tools such as a new Image Based Keyer, a more flexible 3D tool set and an improved workflow.

In this fxpodcast, we get an update on Toxik with product manager Chris Vienneau. He also talks about some of the image processing requirements, forming the basis of the 32-bit HDR pipeline. Our feature article examines image processing in compositing apps, with tips from our own experiences as well as from the manufacturers.

Autodesk announced yesterday that Discreet Flame was coming to the Linux platform, which was exciting news for the Flame community. Early Tuesday in Tokyo, the Autodesk Japan site posted information regarding Inferno for Linux being shown at InterBEE. In an fxpodcast exclusive, we speak with Bill Roberts of Autodesk about the recent introductions and get the real translation.

Updated Wednesday afternoon with exclusive fxPodcast

Paul Debevec opened his talk at SIGGRAPH 2005 by showing some images created by teenager Nick Bertle who had used HDR to have his favourite Half Life characters rock up at his place and hang out. Bertle has fast become a phenomenom for his work in HDR — all before he has left high school. fxguide caught up with him to discuss HDR CGI for part 3 of our “Away from Live Action” series.

In this part 2 of our series on post away from normal live action – we look at great new spot from XYZ studios in Melbourne which exploits the most fundamental pencil drawing style to produce a dynamic and entertaining spot for Honda kids Bikes.

This is part one of a new exclusive 3 part series about projects that stay away from traditional live action and instead use animation as their primary focus. These projects range from traditional pencil animation to stop frame, CGI and even origami. We examine how they’re approached in the digital age. We start by looking at the Promax award winner for Nickelodeon’s “Misfit Monsters”. You can also download a comphensive “making of” quicktime.

After more than a year of development, Eyeon Software’s Fusion 5 began shipping over the last several weeks. The new version boasts numerous improvements, the highlight of which is a new 3D compositing environment in the procedural workflow. In this week’s fxpodcast we speak with Isaac Guenard, Senior Product Manager for Eyeon, about the new features in the software and how they have been received by the users.

This week we breakdown shots from the Bill Paxton directed period golf drama, The Greatest Game Ever Played.
“Bill wanted the camera to be another character in the film,” says Dennis Berardi, Visual Effects Supervisor for the film. “He wanted dynamic, exciting shots to put the audience right into the action.” In addition to our fxpodcast covering work by the Mr. X visual effects team, our online print story also features the inventors of Flying-Cam who p

On October 26th in Sydney, Apple begins a three-day Shake SDK seminar. The event will provide an in-depth introduction as well as detailed information on writing plugins using the SDK. In this weeks fxpodcast, we talk about Shake version 4.0 and the SDK with Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Apple’s Shake and Motion

In this week’s podcast we talk to Don Shay, the publisher of the world’s leading authority and publication of record for the visual effects industry: Cinefex.

Updated with coverage of Autodesk-Alias joint press conference

After the market close today, Autodesk announced an agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million dollars in cash. Obviously, there are a ton more questions than answers right now, but the fact that Maya is going to be a part of the same company that produces 3DS Max is quite interesting. And now maybe we’ll see Maya camera import in flame….

In this week’s fxpodcast, we discuss the recent release of Autodesk’s Smoke 7 editing product. Our two guests were beta testers for the release and are able to provide insight into the product as they have been using the product for months. We also talk about Smoke’s support for the Final Cut Pro XML standard with Stephane Labrie of Autodesk. What exactly is XML and is it simply an industry buzzword for a text file?

In this week’s fxpodcast, we take a look at Apple’s Motion 2 which brings with it a new fxPlug architecture that allows plugin developers to more easily access the GPU in order to dramatically speed up processing. We look at it from both a Motion-specific angle as well as more general in nature — such as will multi-core CPUs remove the need for GPU speedups? We also examine an offering of new sets of HD resolution Motion templates.

Marco Paolini is a compositor and president of Digital Film Tools, a company that creates production proven plugins. Noteworthy for their digital simulation of optical filter, effects and camera effects, they also include a range of compositing tools developed in the firing line of feature film production at Digital Film Works. In this week’s podcast we talk to Paolini and review online the range of treatments that DFT offer from Photoshop to Flame.

One of the most successful viral ad campaigns of recent times is Carlton Draught’s Big Ad. A spot so entertaining and effective that millions of people downloaded it or emailed it weeks before it ever appeared on air. Does this prove we just need to return to good ideas and great production values to be effective? We ask the spots visual effect supervisor Andrew Jackson, from Sydneys leading FX house Animal Logic.

In an exclusive preview, fxguide got a pre-IBC sneak peak at Furnace 3 which is being shown at the conference here in Amsterdam beginning this weekend. We examine what is coming and talk to the Foundry’s Bill Collis about some of the underlying algorithms to better understand this significant advance in image processing plugins.

In this week’s podcast, Emmy contenders discuss some of their projects and last Friday’s bakeoff.
We also allow you to see each of the Emmy nominee’s written submissions.

We’d like to thank the numerous artists who’ve purchased our fxguide LIVE’03 and LIVE’04 DVDs. Based upon the great response, we’ve stepped up the schedule to release this year’s event and get them out sooner. In the meantime, the big questions we’ve gotten are if we could extend the rebates and also wondering if the material on the two discs is still timely since they are a couple of years old now. The short answer: yes and yes. The long answer: click the