The Fire/Smoke part of the NAB users group showed a lot of cool new features. Similar in flow to the effects demonstration, the editing part of the show was hosted by Discreet’s Stephane Labrie and Brian Reid from TOYBOX Toronto. Find out what’s coming up in the next releases of the discreet editing products.

At fxguide live2 in Las Vegas this year, we announced the first half winners of the Tips and Tricks Giveway. Congratulations to the three winners, as well as a big thank you to the many users who have submitted tips. There is still a month left to submit your tips to be eligible for the second half giveaway. For the list of winners and official contest rules, read o

The Sunday before NAB was a busy one, with fxguide live2 starting out early in the afternoon and followed up by the discreet users group meeting. The fxguide live event was once again a big success and based upon what was shown afterwards at the discreet event, fxguide live3 will be packed with new features to cover. A special thanks goes out to discreet and sgi, who kindly sponsored the event. Without their support, the event would not have been possible.

The Visual Effects Society (VES) will present VES 2004, its sixth annual Festival of Visual Effects, June 18-20 in San Rafael, California…

Maximum Throughput Inc, in an exclusive interview with fxguide, confirm that they have just bought Xstoner. Both Xstoner and Max-T are companies we follow closely at fxguide, for their outstanding high end products, so we sat down and talked to Mike Hughes at Max-T, and asked what this means for both Max-T and Xstoner customers, and what this will opens up for the future.

Following last years highly successful Live training session in Las Vegas, fxguide will again be hosting advanced user training at NAB, – just prior to the discreet users group meeting.
Sponsored by discreet and sgi

12.30 – 3.30 Sunday, April 18th at the Venetian Hotel

Registration is now closed due to space considerations — all slots have been taken.

Winner of 2004 Academy Award for Visual Effects Joe Letteri sat down to talk to Fxguide just prior to heading over from NZ to this year’s Oscars, to discuss his work on Lord of the Rings.

FXGuide recently road tested the latest major release of Combustion on the Mac. Peter Webb a Melbourne visual effects supervisor put Combustions new features through their paces, and examined each in depth.

Fxguide was started as way to bring together professional visual effects artists and designers in an online community. One of the main reasons Jeff, Mike and I started the site was to serve as a clearinghouse for cool tips and tricks for artists to share with other artists. For this reason, we’re starting our 2004 Tips and Tricks drive with a giveway for those artists whose tips are accepted for publication. Thanks to the generous support of Digital Fusion

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Receives Top Prize.
Complete list of winners…

Deb Ristic is a Flame designer & storyboard artist at Modern Digital in Seattle, Washington. She joinned from BB&J, Los Angeles, where she was working on visual effects for such television series as Third Watch. Ristic works extensively with both Painter software for concept art and storyboarding, and follows projects through to Flame compositing.

Gen Arts have just released a version of their famous Sapphire plugins for Combustion. FXGuide managed to get a late Beta to road test over several weeks. Feature Film Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Webb road tested the new Sapphire Sparks for Combustion. Peter is a highly award features effects artist at Iloura, in Melbourne – who uses both Combustion on Location and Flame in the suite. Peter compares not only functionality but performance of the Sapphi

Sapphire Plug-Ins from GenArts is one of the most popular plug-in sets for inferno, fire, and Shake. Now they’re available for Adobe After Effects as well. Along with After Effects, they are also usable in applications which can use AE plug-ins such as Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro, Discreet combustion, eyeon Software Digital Fusion, Quantel generationQTM, and Media 100 844/X.

combustion 3 update for windows available now combustion 3 for Mac began shipping last week. With the cleaner booth at MacWorld as big as ever and cleaner XL for Windows as popular as ever…what’s up with the desktop? Mark Twain couldn’t have said it any better — the reports of cleaner’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The 2003 Visual Effects Oscar Nominees are…

We are sad to report that Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Donen has passed away…

Nominees were announced for the Visual Effects Awards…

HD is a rapidly growing format for post-production and capture.
For a summary of the growth in HD production Fxguide spoke to the team at Fletcher Chicago. Fletcher specialises in high-end High Definition capture and is a Sony USA Nationwide CineAlta Select supplier focused on renting and selling quality field acquisition equipment.

As we first reported last year, discreet has introduced combustion 3 for Apple Macintosh. The release includes new expressions, an editing operator, and flash output among other advances.

Sections of the industry were stunned this week when neither of the two Matrix sequels Reloaded or Revolutions were short listed for the official Bake Off. Fxguide was able to watch a lengthy visual effects breakdown session at the AEAF conference the week before, in which two of the visual effects supervisors Dan Glass and John ‘DJ’ Desjardin broke down numerous sequences from the films. If the packed Sydney audience response was any gauge, the Bake off

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the seven films being considered for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 76th Academy Awards®.

ISM is quite simply the hottest and perhaps coolest 2D visual effects team in Korea.
ISM started as Submarine and recently revamped as ISM. Fxguide recently visited ISM in Seoul, South Korea to check out this creative boutique, and explore the growing Korean post-production market.

It seems the industry has been waiting for a widely used – lower cost – better HD tape format. Will SR serve that role? Will SR solve the HD generation problem?

Fxguide spoke to Maurice Patel, Discreet’s systems product marketing manager, following last week’s annoucement that Discreet will be supporting Sony’s new SR HD format.

dvMatte pro 1.5 is a plug-in keyer for Final Cut Pro (FCP). The keyer is designed to solve the tricky problem of keying mini-dv footage. FXG took the dvMatte for a road test, and we were impressed with the results.

Xstoner is a client-server software that allows PCs and Macs to directly connect and transfer files with a discreet system such as Flame/Inferno or Fire etc.

We took a system for a test drive and put it to the test. We were provided with a Mac OSX software and ran it connected to an Onyx 2 Inferno system. We tested using the latest Mac OS X Panther software, which caused more than a few interesting effects.

Alex Lindsay is an extraordinary figure, an exILM Rebel Mac Unit visual effects artist who has set us a global training organisation, dvGarage. dvGarage believe that your ability to communicate your vision is just as important as math, reading and science. And they are building a network to bring that vision to the world. What is so extraordinary is that while many companies’ ‘vision statements’ may sprout such nobel ideals, dvGarage actualy does it, – not

Alan Edward Bell started as an editor in the film industry some 17 years ago. His visual effects career grew out of his extensive editing background. Alan explains: “I began as an apprentice editor and then worked my way up to be a first assistant, and then, eventually as a full fledge editor. I mainly work as an editor cutting feature films. My visual effects career grew out of that editing. So far,  I’ve managed to do both jobs and still s