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.

Today, in a move that will shape the next few years in high end compositing SGi announces a whole new set of workstation and supercomputer products completely replacing Octane and Onyx3 with Tezro and Onyx4. Fxguide has in-depth analysis of of the platforms and what it means to you, the professional compositing community. In part one, we have an overview with exclusive interviews with key staff both managerial and technical in both SGI and Discreet. In th

In Part 2, we have a detailed hardware module by module analysis of the new products, exclusively for fxguide by industry legend Jean-Francois Panisset. Some of his findings will surprise you, as he compares Octane and Onyx3 with Tezro and Onyx4. Now at one of the world’s leading visual effects houses, Panisset is widely known for his former work at Discreet where for 8 years he lead much of Discreet’s SGI hardware analysis team. Panisset (or JF as he is

Simon Scott, a veteran Flame Artist and Visual Effects Supervisor recently formed Process, a new Visual Effects company. For the inaugural project Process, collaborated with Directing duo, Arni and Kinski of Mars Media/HSI Productions on a music video for Dave Gahan and the track “I need you”. Working out of Gorilla Post the team including freelance CGI Artist Steward Burris completed a series of complex shots in just 6 days.

Here’s a quick look at a couple of the new features of shake, including Photoshop image import, the new MultiLayer compositing node, and the OSX Qmaster rendering feature.

2D3 announces Steadymove bundle with Adobe Premier Pro
SteadyMove, a New Plug-In From 2d3, Provides Adobe Premiere Users With
Automated Camera Stabilization.

The Foundry, the leading effects plug-in developer, will be beginning the beta program of Furnace on Discreet. This was one of the more interesting products which was shown at NAB in April The site list includes The Mill and Rushes both in London, Digital Pictures in Australia and Riot Pictures in Santa Monica, USA amongst others. Furnace on Discreet is scheduled for release early September.

With Apple releasing Final Cut Pro version 4 today, the next anticipated offering from the pro applications group is Shake version 3. The fxguide crew had a chance to chat with Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Manager for Pro Applications, about Apple’s new offering due to be released this month…..

Frantic Films, founded in 1997, has recently completed both pre-visualization and effects work on Fox ’s spring blockbuster X2.

The Pixel Farm, a new company focused on innovation in the field of high-end digital post-production, announces today that it is to release a student and academic licensing scheme for future Pixel Farm products.

Times are hard for telecine manufacturers.
Acterna Corporation (formerly Dynatech Corporation) parent of da Vinci Systems, Inc, along with all of its other subsidiary companies, filed a voluntary petition for relief under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code in the US Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York on May 6th. Cintel has announced another batch of reductions, including the highly respected Peter Swinson, known widely throughout the

What is the average pattern in a facility doing high-end work? Increasingly, it involves moving the images into data from either film or tape and then having the images remain as data until output. Tape is a linear interchange format. From TVC to Feature films the desire is to scan or telecine the footage into data and never use video tape. This is being accelerated by such products as lustre – Discreet’s new advanced workstation grading system, and by the

FXguide caught up with one of our favourite Mac (and PC) software companies, Realviz. makers of Stitcher, Imagemodeller, ReTimer and others. Fxguide tracked down Luc Robert, one of the founders of the company and asked about their new Matchmover Pro or ‘Corsica’ and the future of the innovative line of image processing products.

Gangs of New York is a masterpiece,… but tonight you’re just not in the mood for the film’s graphic gore, no matter how artistically director Martin Scorsese presents it. So you and the kids opt to see a frothy romantic comedy instead. The lights go down and, predictably, and the Gangs of New York trailer appears. No need to hid the kid’s eyes, however:
You won’t find so much as a spot of blood on Leonardo DiCaprio’s determined visage.

Thanks Outpost

The second demo of the afternoon at the 2003 Discreet users group was a technology demonstration of new stuff being prepped for the next release of flame and inferno. Not everything that was shown at the show will make it into the software — potentially the features will never make it in — but it was an impressive showing nonetheless. The software engineers, who just wrapped up the 5/8 release and maintenance releases, pulled out all the stops to show s

The standout events at the discreet users group meeting are always the previews of upcoming software releases. As usual, these were “technology demos”, and not promised features that will be part of the mix when the release is final. Long time users know this — the promised 3D tracker took several years to see the light of day. We’ll first look at the upcoming Fire/Smoke release and in our next article take a look at the effects software.