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Hi Christian,
I have it on pretty good authority that combustion4 for OSX will be out before the end of 2005.
cheers
TWPolakow,
You have a good point there. I have also seen import issues arise when the file path is ridiculously long. Make locating a file as easy as possible. It’s only software, not Sherlock Holmes 🙂 And avoiding strange characters in the file name is also valid.
cheers
TW.“When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead 7 years”
Hi Loops,
I agree about the FCP rig on location, but frankly anyone who’s shooting blue/green screen stuff on location with a DV camcorder deserves the headaches they’re creating for themselves.Choza – as I understand it, the HD output on the HDV camera is a signal prior to it hitting the HDV compression stage. So you get the full 1080 res at (probably) 4:2:2. It’s not as good as true HD-CAM imagery, but thats also due to the CCD and lenses found on HDV cameras. But it should be considerably better than the 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 DV delivers.
Another consideration is the value of a perfectly flat lit blue/green screen background. Without seriously professional lighting kits, it’s really tough to get a consistant background to pull your key from. An option might be to look at some of the “holoring” type of products out there. Basically it’s a blue/green light emitting ring that fits round the lens and your talent/actor stands in front of a reflective material which bounces the light back to the camera. I’ve seen some of these in action at shows like IBC and the results are pretty good. (It all depends on much the little lady is prepared to let you spend) 🙂TW
Down here in darkest Africa we find all kinds of weird ways to get around problems. And this one was creatively invented by one of our clients Atomic vfx in Cape Town.
They are using JVC HD-100 HDV cameras which have a HD-component output on the camera which bypasses the MPEG compression between the camera and tape.
They take this HD-component out through a AJA HD-10A convertor which converts HD component into HD-SDI and record direct to disk using FCP/blackMagic capture card.
They claim this gives them a 10bit 4:4:4 image which is remarkably clean and eliminates all the usual problems with trying to pull a key with a 25m/bit image.
Just another way to skin the digital cat 🙂regards
TW.I don’t know how valid that “one platform policy” statement is considering there are Autodesk products on Windows, IRIX, Linux and Mac platforms, and the only product they’ve “killed” in the past couple of years was edit* on Windows.
I just wonder about the direction they are heading in. It seems to me that Autodesk is trying to service all aspects of the post industry from grading, editing, animation, vfx, infrastrucutre, pipelines, collaborative workflows etc, and I think it’s a pretty brave move to try and be at the forefront of all these technologies. I think what I’m trying to say in my usual messy way is, what are the priorities for Autodesk in R & D ? More IFF features ? Developing Toxik ? Integrating max & maya toolsets ? porting IFF to Linux ? etc etc. To try and address all this R&D at the same time requires a team the size of a small army, and more importantly, a small army who are all working together to ensure seamless integration of all these products into an effective production pipeline.Ummmm ! Strange. I can suggest you make sure the sample frequency might be changing when you bring it into combustion.
For example, if the sample freq of the source .wav is 48Khz and combustion is expecting a 44.1Khz import, it will play longer. The reason: 250 frames = 10 secs of PAL “time”, 48000 samples (48Khz) = total of 480000 samples.
But if played back at 44.1Khz, or 44100 samples per sec (or 441000 over 10 seconds) you will end up with approximately 10 % more playback time. In other words, after 10 seconds, you still have 39000 samples to play back.
I hope this makes sense, I havent explained it very well 😳cheers
TWHi,
As far as I’m aware the Sony SDM-P234 (which ships with flint LX) supports the 1920 x 1154 res.
Cheers
TW.I think WIRETAP might only be in smoke v7. I can’t find any mention of it in the smoke 6.7 brochure.
cheers
TWWithout sounding too much like a salesman, you might want to look at Xstoner as a way of exporting from combusiton to the smoke stones as a background task.
cheers
TWTrue, but what happens if the “famous face” they need for this commercial is either no longer with us, or unavailable for the shoot ? (Like Saddam Hussian 🙂 ) although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in glasses !
TW
We’ve just finished doing a trade-show here in South Africa with the guys from discreet. One of the “canned” demos Grant Kay did using flint was the face replacement effect they used for the Ford Mustang/Steve McQueen commercial.
If you can get your hands on a “tutorial” that explains how they did this, it’ll point you in the right direction.
Cheers
TW.You have a valid concern about hardware changes, but discreet has always been a software comany, and there’s no reason why future releases shouldn’t run on the current hardware. (doing my discreet sales pitch here 😀 )
I have no “insider information” as to what Lustre 3.0 is going to built around so I can’t help out there, but the current config seems solid enough. For what it’s worth, our client’s Lustre is fully booked from now ’til end of March 2006 and they’ve just finished grading “Crazy Monkey” on Lustre. (The insane locally produced film for MTV, who say’s South Africans don’t have a sense of humour ?)
There have been a lot of postings on fxguide about hardware and OS’s, but ultimately it comes down to the application. If that works and enables you to deliver the goods, it’s probably not too important to worry about the “box in the back room”
Cheers
TWHi,
One of our Lustre users is a beta tester for 2.6. It uses the same hardware/software configuration as 2.5.1.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
TW