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

Combustion 3 software is now shipping on the Windows platform (Mac users will have to wait until early 2004.) The release includes a free morphing plug in and there will be release parties in NY and LA. Read more for details…

IBC turned out to be whirlwind 7-hour tour for me this year, due to the fact that I needed to get back to the states for my day job. The second annual fxguide gathering on Sunday night was fun…a great chance to meet other artists and discreet folks. We covered discreet’s annoucements last week, so before I hop on the plane here are some quick notes about Digital Fusion, The Foundry, Apple, and more. Read on….

Rumour over the last several months was that discreet was considering the future of combustion for the Macintosh. Today we can officially confirm that Combustion 3 will be available for the G5 under the next planned Mac OSX release, Panther (10.3).

Fxguide sat down this week with Discreet’s Maurice Patel to discuss the latest developments regarding the company’s editing products. Smoke has now overtaken Fire as the most visibly successful editing tool in the family. It is well priced and with both the new IBM Linux version and Tezro dual HD realtime configuration, the range of hardware platforms is expanding. The announcement last week of Smoke version 6.0 shows that the product has greatly expanded

IBC is Discreet’s biggest trade show in Europe and over the coming days we will be publishing a series of stories covering new developments in Smoke, Flame, Lustre and Combustion, leading up to our live coverage of IBC from the show floor. IBC attendance is predicted to be down to 40,000 people from the record highs of 2000 which saw 45,000 attendees but perhaps no worse than last year. Certainly, Discreet has a raft of new announcements, across all the sy

One of the more interesting products floating around the show floor at NAB was the Furnace plug-ins, a set of extremely useful tools developed by The Foundry. Longtime discreet users are probably well familiar with Tinder, an outstanding set of tools that are currently available as plugins for Shake. The Furnace tools provide some “automagic” cleanup of some common tasks effects artists have to deal with in the course of our jobs, as well as some outstandi

Distributed rendering for the discreet effects products was first demonstrated at the NAB Discreet Users Group meeting several years ago. It has taken a couple of years, but version 1.0 of burn running on Red Hat 8.0 has been released. Burn gives artists the ability to render flint, flame, and inferno batch setups (including action within batch) on network-connected systems running Linux Red Hat 8.0.

This week at SIGGRAPH, Discreet announced the newest version of its acclaimed 3D modeling, animation, and rendering solution-3ds max® 6. It includes a number of new features, such as integrated mental ray®, new dynamics, and new particle features. Click below to read the press release from Discreet…..

With many issues facing discreet, and many questions we have recently wanted answers about, Fxguide sat down for breakfast and 20 questions with the Executive Vice President, Discreet Divison, General Manager Paul Lypaczewski.