With great sadness we report that Mill Film in the UK shut its doors today. Mill film has been a truely great contributor of visual effects shots, most noticeable Gladiator, for which they won the Academy Award and many others such as Black Hawk Down.

Traktor directed this title track for the much awaited Bond film – Die Another Day – by arguably the biggest artist in the world, Madonna. The promo was posted at MPC, who also created visual effects for key sequences in the Bond film.

Eyeon Software says that the latest version of their 2D compositing and special effects solution, Digital Fusion 4, will ship October 28, 2002. Digital Fusion 4 is eyeon’s 9th major release and incorporates hundreds of enhancements and new features, including real-time RAM caching, floating point image processing, macro tools, advanced tracking, grid warping and integrated scripting.

REALVIZ, ImageModeler software was used to create 3D images from photographs, by View Studio in their work on the visual effects in the Tom Cruise / Steven Spielberg movie ‘Minority Report’.

Increasingly Previz is being used in Features, Commericals and Film Clips.

Perhaps the 3 best previz artists in the world are David Dozoretz, Ron Frankel and Colin Gree, at JAK, Proof and PLF respectively. We spoke to them recently about the state of the art in Previz and some of their films such as Fight Club, Minority Report, Panic Room, Star Wars and at their current films such as Peter Pan, The Matrix Revolutions and Cat in the Hat.

Discreet has announced it is shipping Discreet Cleaner 6 video encoding software for the Macintosh.

FXGuide caught up with the developers and had a chat with John Worthington of Discreet about the new release, the new features, and just why we need to encode New Orleans’ hurricane videos for our cel phones!!!

Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design Supervisor and Creative director Vico Sharabani, created a full character animation rig within Inferno, and used it to produce an x-ray effect for Fox Sports Net.

The underlying technology of 5D Colossus was licensed from a company called Colorfront. In the wake of the news of 5D closing, the CEO of Colorfront has given us a statement on the future of this technology…

Updated to include official company statement

It’s sadly come to our attention from multiple sources inside and outside the company that 5D Solutions, Ltd., makers of the high-end compositor Cyborg and color corrector Colossus, has closed their doors……

Only Independent U.S. Training Center to Offer Courses on Discreet flint, flame and smoke

We don’t normally parrot Press releases, but this one follows up on a story we broke back in July that is currently the second most read story on fxguide. Digital Domain has formed D2 to provide high-end digital production software for Windows®, Linux and IRIX Platforms.

At FXGuide we don’t normally do book reviews, but we have had the pleasure of reviewing arguably the best book on visual effects we’ve seen this year, The Invisible Art, The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. It is not over stating it to say this is the best book ever published on matte painting and a must have for anyone who works in compositing and digital matte painting today. Written by Mark Cotta Vaz, well known to the fx community as a senior contribut

In a surprise announcement, Discreet has introduced a world-wide aggressive price package for the software bundle of Combustion v2 with Cleaner (available for both MAC and PC platforms.)

5D made several announcements today from IBC regarding the introduction of new products as well as improvements and updates to existing ones. Without having actually gotten to the booth yet, here’s a preliminary look at their announcements…

burn is Discreet’s new Linux-based network rendering solution for inferno, flame and flint systems. burn allows you to render Batch setups in the background using low-cost PC workstations while simultaneously freeing your online suite for more creative tasks.

The fxguide crew has had the good fortune to have an up-close look at the new 5.0/8.0 effects software which discreet is releasing later this year. It is a substantial update to the software, with the biggest change being resolution independence within a project. We’ve also obtained a couple of exclusive screen captures from the new batch and action. If you have any questions, please feel free to post your comments at the end of the article and we’ll try

London, L.A. & Miami, September 9th, 2002 — Post-production solutions developer 5D today announced that it has signed resellers in major post production centres across the US to reinforce the sales, training, installation and technical support of its products – 5D Cyborg visual effects compositor, 5D Colossus creative digital colour timing and grading, and 5D Commander data portal and review system for digital dailies.

VES 2002
This year the Visual Effects Society conference was held in San Rafael Film Center instead of the usual LA base, to allow tap into the wealth of Northern Californian talent at places such as ILM and PIXAR, both of whom where heavily involved in this years conference. Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Webb ( Phenomena VFX, Australia) reports for FXguide on this years sessions including Spiderman, a review of Ridley Scott’s Classic “Blader

FXGuide caught up with Andreas Wacker of Method Studios in Santa Monica.

Famous for its award winning commercials and music clips for directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and artists such as Madonna and many more. Method’s visual effects artists, and much of their signature styles on-screen, is supported by proprietary code developed by Method Studios team of engineers, headed by Andreas. Method Software provides such things as speedchange sof

Normally, we’re not big on simply regurgitating press releases from manufacturers. But based upon our looks in the past on Digital Grading, this is fairly impressive news for 5D.

News Announcement: July 15, 2002 – Impule Inc. spins off Illusion Software: New Owner and New Name officially announced.

Digital Fusion has just shown at Siggraph a new version of their compositing software

The new version has a great new UI, a new warper, improved tracking and some complex transform concetenation code to speed up compositing, all warped in a new infarstructure that supports floating point in every module.

Side Effects announced two new offerings at Siggraph. A stand alone compositing package called Houdini Halo and a dedicated program for modeling and character work called Houdini Escape…

At Siggraph in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, RealViz have released their latest version of Match Mover: version 2.5.

Matchmover was recently used on the feature film Harts War.

In the film MatchMover was used for tracking and calibrating in 3D live-action camera and location data by Pixel Magic. By using the Matchmover software, Pixel Magic was able to create visually credible interaction between practica

Idruna Software to Launch Photogenics HDR, the First 32 bit per channel High Dynamic Range Paint Package, at Siggraph 2002, July 23rd