fxguide returns to NAB in Las Vegas this year on Sunday, April 17th, thanks to popular demand and the generous support of Discreet and SGI. For the first time at NAB there will be both a flint/flame/inferno and a fire/smoke fxguide live session. The seminars will cover the recently released effects 6/9 and editing 6.5 versions, sharing tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the software. Find out more about the event which one artist says “

Seven films went to the Bake-off last week. Today the three films nominated for the 2004 Visual Effects Oscar were announced…

The Visual Effects Society (VES) announced their nominees this week for their awards honoring oustanding visual effects in 19 categories of film, television, commercials, music videos and games. On January 22nd, VES will hold their “Big Reveal” — an oustanding event where VES members and the general public can hear about the work first-hand from the artists….

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the seven films being considered for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 77th Academy Awards.

UPDATED:1/6/05

Since 1994, if a post house wanted to install the fastest most powerful finishing room it meant a discreet Onyx. After ten years, sgi is discontinuing the Oynx line meaning the end of Inferno and Fire as we know them on Onyx.

“My first job in the post production industry was as render wrangler on Farscape series 1 in 1998-99. New to 3D and VFX compositing it was very exciting to be involved. Series 1 proved to be a huge success, the quality of the FX shots helped Australia gain respect in the industry on the world stage. Five years later having some shots in the final mini series return to us was a great thrill, we wanted to do as much as we could to go out with a bang and do

China is an amazing country – with massive potential and an extremely determined visual effects community. Last month Fxguide was Live in Shangahi, for 3 days of compositing lecturing and training with the help and sponsorship of ChinaDV, which is China’s leading visual effects community internet company. We spoke to some of the talented artists in Shanghai and explored a community facing massive cracked software issues. Of course it is not only the visua

After our recent article about Max-T, we received quite a few questions and comments from readers. We passed the questions on to Mike Hughes, V.P. Business Development at Max-T, who took a moment to respond. In this evolving world of shared storage in the post production environment, comparisons between various solutions can quickly become complex. Mike Seymour takes a closer look in this Q&A session…..

Photoshop has made major gains in reproducing brushes, and it is the cornerstone of most digi-matte departments. Does Painter still have role to play? Is Painter just a weekend app, or can it reposition itself?

Corel has moved to make Painter a more professionally focused tool for concept art, matte paintings and illustration work, in so doing they are moving away from the “Santa Fe” casual artist. Fxguide took version IX for a road test and spoke to

“It was clear from the look on their faces – that they weren’t joking… we knew we had a global problem, that’s when we hit the panic button”. Just three hours after a major support call from Paris, plus eight and a half years after an MIT graduate in Boston decided to generate a unique ID for any frame in any discreet system using a 28 bit number, Bill Roberts (Director of Product Management – Systems) realized that Discreet had a serious problem. Ever

Discreet has identified an issue that affects ALL users of inferno,flame, flint, fire, smoke, backdraft, and frost that MUST be addressed BEFORE OCT 2ND or your system WILL NOT FUNCTION!



Updated Again: Oct 1st

IBC: This month Maximum Throughput showed the new GUI for their MAX T Sledgehammer. Networked storage and content management is starting to breakthrough as the benefits and data wrangling options can make such a huge difference to a medium to large scale problem.

Motion is a great new product but there appears a lot of confusion in various internet forums over how Motion works, a lot of people seem to believe that the realtime graphics preview is lower quality than what you get when you export frames and that Motion uses software rendering for final output. Our motion expert Roger Bolton spoke to Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Marketing Manager Professional Applications at Apple to clear up some of these common

I was looking forward to being far away from all the election turmoil in the states but I was hit straightaway with a reminder on the walk to my hotel. It seems here, though, there is maybe a bit more concentration on the real issues in the campaign and a bit less on the bluster. Enough said. Time to worry about such things as why espresso is so much better in Europe. And at IBC there were many interesting things to see….here’s a brief recap (in alphabet

The Foundry has been a long time plug-in favorite, and recently broke with other vendors and started offering free burn support (see fxguide story here). With the release of Furnace 2.0 they are offering new tools that offer that “sizzle” we all seek to solve creative problems and make our clients take notice. Mike Seymour has a review posted from IBC.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) awarded the 2003-2004 Creative Arts Primetime Emmys for programs and individual achievements at the 56th Annual Emmy Awards presentation at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday, September 12, 2004. Here are the winners in the visual effects categories.

Apple Computer’s new Motion software was a big hit at NAB earlier this year, winning the 2004 Editor’s Choice award in the Content Creation category. The release is now shipping and making waves here at IBC in Amsterdam. Guest reviewer Roger Bolton, a freelance flame/shake artist based in Sydney, takes a look at what he found to be an impressive software package.

With our 5th anniversary, our 5 millionth page view, and IBC in Amsterdam, we thought there was no time like the present to debut our new look. The best thing is that the cost of the upgrade is free. We hope you like the new cleaner and more easily-navigatable site. The new version has been tested in most browsers (Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, Opera, and Firefox) on the Mac, PC, and Linux and we feel pretty good about its compatibility. Please Read the Article

In significant move, The Foundry have announced that all new purchases of Furnace, Tinder, and Anivil for discreet will include free site licenses for Burn. Burn will most likely be opened up to even more facilities, with burn support in Fire shown as a technology demo at NAB. This may help many facilities in their decision about the software, since adding sparks to burn nodes can quickly add up…making the purchase of burn a fairly expensive proposition.

Discreet announced new versions of their effects last week — inferno 6, flame 9, and flint 9. The technology demo at NAB this year gave a preview of some of the possible features and now the final ones have been locked in. The number one feature request for years — Clip History — is now a reality and forms the basis of a strong new offering from Discreet. Click below to get the full story….

Discreet introducted new versions of its inferno, flame, and effects software today. The software is planned for a fall release and brings to reality many of the new features seen at the technology demo at NAB 2004. Fxguide will be taking an up-close look at the software in the coming days, but for now, here’s the Discreet press release…..

With deadlines for the films worldwide release looming, I, Robot visual effects supervisor John Nelson spoke to Fxguide on a busy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. We also caught up with lead visual effects house’s Digital Domains Andy Jones & Erik Nash, and WETA’s Joe Letteri, on the push to finish one of the summers biggest effects films.

They were 18 people, trapped against the odds, with little or no hope of reinforcement. For five months they laboured, with minimal resources, and that’s just the visual effects team! FXG caught up with Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Leven about the new Starship Troopers 2.

We are sad to report that Donald Trumbull, a true pioneer and visual effects legend has passed away.

Cars don’t tend to be small enough to race around the inside of watch faces, but Jonathan Dearing puts them there anyway. Dearing is a visual effects artist at Digital Pictures Sydney, and he recently road tested boujou bullet.

While fxguide is primarily aimed at practicing VFX professionals, even the most senior supervisor occassionally wants to get up to speed with another piece of software. As most of us never have time to read the manual, Fxguide has selected 4 of the best training sources for DVDs, CD_ROMs and quicktimes covering Shake, Painter, Concept Art/photoshop, Digital Fusion

Van Helsing, directed by Stephen Sommers, spins an amazing tale of adventure and suspense. With help from Vicon motion capture, ILM delivers a stunning set of familiar horror figures and a universe of rich, imaginative visuals including Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.