[John Montgomery]

You need to do a publish for Lustre within smoke…..

This creates a single layer timeline essentially, with all effects and timewarps commited. Dissolves and cuts are still present. An EDL is generated and the media is published to a centeralized server (wherever you tell it to publish) so that Lustre can read it. Heads/Tails are included.

raj_reddy wrote:

Hi 2 everyone,

i have a question,

can we open smoke timeline in lustre, if yes how?

[John Montgomery]

Jonas wrote:

Allthough Combustion and Toxik and FFI is all from autodesk – they’re very diffrent, if you know one – you don’t have advanteges to learn the other. So it dosen’t matter – the most important is also to be familiar to compositing techniques and from there its easier to learn other.

I agree with the fact that it is best to be familiar with compositing techniques — technique and art are applicable across software applications and in the end the most important thing to pay attention to.

There is *some* cross-tool pollenation across the Autodesk product lines. Certain things like the tracker, keyers, and color correctors operate in much the same way. Not totally identical, but very similar in nature. So there is a bit of overlap in learning the autodesk software and systems products.

We have an interview with week with Isaac Guenard of eyeon Software — they just released Fusion 5 which has some pretty major improvements.

[John Montgomery]

At Blackmagic, there’s only one PCI Express version of the cards right now for mac — Deck Link Extreme PCIe and that has SD support only. Hopefully there will be an HD version in the future.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/sd/

Regarding the new dual core mac — I’ve got one on order, but hoping the GeForce 7800GT is available before mac is scheduled to ship in a month. Seems like excellent performance for the price when compared with the FX4500.

eltopo wrote:

The FX4500 supports 2 dualink DVI and one stereo connector for stereoscopic visualization.

If you want HDMI support you need a blackmagic deckling or an AJA Kona Card

[John Montgomery]

Interesting discussion about the similarities between the iPod ad and a Lugz ad:

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2005/10/is_eminemapple_.html

[John Montgomery]

Hey…we’re just artists….what do we know? Our engineer sets it up and we’re good to go. 🙂

Seriously….all I know is that it was a Tezro with one of the HDTV splitters out of it — into a Barco projector. Sorry can’t be of more help.

CTproductions wrote:

Just out of curiosity, what was the hardware setup like for the discreet system at fxguide live 2005? Specifically the projection method. Were you using sdi to go into the projector, or did you guys somehow rig a split off of the UI 13w3??

thanks in advance john or jeff or mike!

[John Montgomery]

Why don’t you guys take your discussion about forming your own website off of ours. I mean…c’mon…..we’ve got a combustion forum and tips area…its pretty rude to be talking about doing another webite.

A little common courtesy would be nice.

dreggsy wrote:

I was/am im progress of creating my own website dealing mainly with some self written tutorials, especially dealing with everyday problems,
and also integration with 3DsMax.
ill send yo a sample when i get it all collected,
I’d be more than happy to give my 2cents worth if needed.

[John Montgomery]

No — not at this point, Paul. That 2 gig limit is a limitation of the old version of Quicktime which is part of the sgi system software.

I hope that with the next version of the software releases + the new wiretap, that we’ll see CleanerXL import added to the new export functionality. I’ve really been happy with the speed and workflow of using backburner to distsribute Quicktime exports to Cleaner.

paul_round wrote:

Is there a limit on the size of an AVI file that Inferno/Flame can import? seems to be a 2G limit, any way around this?

Paul
Peerless

[John Montgomery]

I got this back from someone at Panasonic….I’d suggest doing some tests with the camera — I imagine it will be the only way to know for sure.

From Panasonic:

“As far as I know the camera always starts the beginning of each shot at the AA frame. If there is a time code break because of review and not enough time at the end for the camera to lock up when going back into record, then there will be a break in video sync as well.”

[John Montgomery]

hyrlvlrec wrote:

yeah, this stuff was shot 24P (not advanced) ….. and im pretty sure that the cadence is restarted everytime theres a start/stop

I’m checking on that for you with a contact at Panasonic. I do know that as long as the camera is left in standby and not rewound back to review — the timecode and pulldown will be consistent. But how often is that gonna be the case. 😉

I know on the D5 machine, you set a timecode value at which the AA frame occurs and this reference is kept through timecode breaks (though this was a software update feature that was added after a while).

Defnitely make sure you tell them to roll preroll for at least 10 seconds before starting action in a scene….and roll for 10 afterwards. This will help with tape queing — and asking for 10 secs may actually get you 5 in situations where time on set is at a premium.

[John Montgomery]

jonhollis wrote:

i stopped using history on 9.2, because it slowed everything up so much. so i must try it again. paint in batch is great, importing quicktimes (when it works) is good. everything seems faster ( i had to upgrade the ram). do you have the master keyer in version 8, thats really good.

The app is much more stable with 64 bits and more RAM, especially in batch.

And I’ll say that history stability and robustness should be much improved. I spent a good deal of time helping them test this (since I had problems in the previous release). I know that there were many things that were found and fixed which should help things out.

As a first step in trying history again, how about trying to use history with the “Keep None” option…this will track your setups and what you did to a clip, but not keep any of the source clips or intermediate clips which you used. You’ll still need to keep track of clips manually, but it is a good first step in getting used to history.

[John Montgomery]

Simple answer: there’s not a direct way to accomplish what you want.

Expanded version: Which version are you running? The reason is that while not ideal, there are new logic ops modes which allow you to unpremultiply the foreground. if you have Sapphire sparks, you can also do this.

Quite honestly, most apps should be able to handle a premultiplied output…there really aren’t many that don’t. I know avid, fcp, ae, combustion, shake, df, etc can all deal with this. I’m sure *you* know this….but like you I’ve run into non-effects types who don’t know how to deal with such imagery.

Good luck…

[John Montgomery]

As far as the news of the combustion team joining the Motion team — that was some time ago before Motion even came out….when development moved from the west side (of LA) to Montreal.

[John Montgomery]

jonhollis wrote:

Hi all, i cant find this one in the manual, sometimes when i recall a batch setup some of the clips have their title in blue and an (E) is after it, i think this means it is edited in some way, but they arenet, the only way to make it go away is to delete that clip and reload it. Anyway know what this is and how to avoid it! thanks.

The “E” does, as you assumed, mean that the clips have been changed in some way. Maybe they haven’t been specifically “Edited”, but they have been adjusted. When this happens a clip is automagically created and placed in the _Edited library (check out your clip library). The clip you have in your batch setup no longer references this clip on your desktop or in its original library, but instead accesses the clip in _Edited.

The best way of getting this clip back to your desktop is to use the “Clips to Reel” button found in the batch Setup menu. This button will bring all clips which have an “E” to the desktop….changing all clips with an “E” back to a regular gray clip.

[John Montgomery]

Yes, please free to post your work here on the site. imho, it doesn’t matter what software you use. 🙂

I did move the topic to a different forum, but please (anyone) feel free to post any work regardless of the software you use.

BKM wrote:

Nice work…

Perhaps a better forum for feedback would be…

http://www.mograph.net

Since this is largely a Discreet arena and you used:

Adobe After Effects
Adobe photoshop
Motion
Adobe Illustrator

But thanks for sharing.

BKM

[John Montgomery]

paul_round wrote:

I also agree that there are too many good tools in Inferno to not try and put them in V1, I could live without paint, but not without a decent keyer.

I’m so with you on the tools…Autodesk has a ton of robust tools in-house and i really hope we’ll see them ported to Toxik sooner rather than later. The database and collaboration is a solid foundation upon which to build — but tools are what artists need in the end. Without them…well…..

Toxik 1.1 was being shown at siggraph with OFX support and test versions of plugins from The Foundry were demoed. So at least there will be some third party regrain/degrain tools available as well as Keylight. I actually think the Foundry regrain tools are great, as the Autodesk ones in flame/inferno are showing their age….though they’re admittedly technologcially different beasts.

I think the database/collaboration structure will take a bit of time to catch on and I hope it does. I think there is a ton to be gained by working in this manner. Yes, people will have to change their ways at least in some ways. I remember days when commercial effects editors said they could never work on a system that renders…just takes too long, etc. 😉 Facilities and users will have no trouble changing in the long run if the benefits of doing so are there.

Autodesk also maintains that a standalone version of Toxik *will* be available. I’m not sure if this is an install with an integrated database or an app which doesn’t rely on the database. I’m also unsure of a target date for release. Sorry…more questions than answers I guess.

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