In Part 2 of our Emmy coverage we talk to award winners Stargate Digital about their winning Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King/ Battleground. Stargate, nominated a stunning three times this year, won for Oustanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special.

This week we honor winners of 2007 Emmy Awards, starting with Atmosphere Visual Effects for their amazing work on Battlestar Galactica. The work is all the more exceptional considering it is episodic television – done week in, week out. Coming up later in the week, we’ll speak to other category winners from this year’s outstanding collection of Visual Effects submissions.

New versions of flame 2008 and smoke 2008 were at IBC this weekend. The most striking thing is that the UI has been adjusted to fully take advantage of the 16:9 screen. Yes…time to give that muscle memory a bit of a shock. The smoke release has a totally reworked DVE module, inspired by the Action module, as it provides compatibility with the effects app. Read why you’ll want them….

Saturday was our first day shooting with the RED Camera. We know the community is keen to see real shots and we will publish more in coming days and weeks. For now, we aim to address the expectation of RED with the reality of filming with it. It is after all a camera – it exists to produce footage – and so that is what we did.

RED has begun shipping their RED ONE camera After many people initially questioned the project and some even called it a sham, the RED team today proudly delivered their first 25 cameras. We were there to pick up our camera number 22. In characteristic RED style it was informative, crazy and a really great place to be.

The days of work simply walking in the door are long gone and it is key that the vfx facility brings something strong to the table. In the end, if the house adds creative value to spot, it’s likely that the agency creatives will return to work with the artists again and again…like Merkely did at rhinofx when they approached them about a Mercedes spot.

With Siggraph approaching, we asked Conference Chair Joe Marks to guide us through the highlights for this week’s fxpodcast. For our online story, we also asked Paul Debevec to give us his personal ‘Picks of the Papers”, plus we highlight some of the fun and not so fun surprises in store in San Diego with the Viking Animation Lords.

For the start of Live Earth we have put together some of the latest thinking on making your production environmentally friendly. One company committed to the cause is Instant Karma – we spoke with co-founder Craig Farkas to find out what it costs to run a Carbon Neutral Shoot (and it is less than you think !)

After years of waiting for signs of life in the Autodesk package of Sapphire sparks, GenArts has resoundingly delivered with a new release. The new version includes over 45 new effects and enhancements to previous sparks. We speak with GenArts founder Karl Sims and several beta testers about the new release.

Two recent spots from Sony really caught our eye at the fxguide tech bunker. The simplicity of the ideas and the faultless execution of these commercials has become a hallmark of Sony’s advertising internationally in the last couple of years. We caught up with Dave Morley, one of the founders of FUEL international, about their work on the spots.

Picture Mill is a leading design and effects house doing title design for films such as War of the Worlds, Panic Room and logo film titles for studios such as SPYGLASS and Universal. In this podcast Mike sits down for a discussion on design issues, the role of titles and the nature of branding design with Creative Director William Lebeda.

In a global community TVC spots are now often being made ‘overseas’. This inventive spot was for the chinese market, shot in Shanghai, made in Australia for a Japanese car company.

Motion capture has forced actors to don blue lycra to provide animators with artistic interpretation of characters. But the race is on to make this process easier, faster, cheaper and less awkward for the actor. One such advance is the recent showing of markerless motion capture from Organic Motion.

With a weekend opening of over $120US million, Shrek the Third continues the box office success of the franchise. In this fxpodcast, we speak with Larry Cutler and Matt Baer from PDI/Dreamworks including their insights into how working on a series of films changes the workflow. Our online story also contains a large gallery of images.

Hatchfx is a specialist matte painting company, although as we discovered when talking to the founders, a “matte painting” is now a hard term to define. As the line between matte painting and visual effects blurs, we explored some of their work on the film and the methodology they use to tackle shots.

In this podcast we speak with Stu Maschwitz, author of The DV Rebels’ Guide. Maschwitz is one of the founders of The Orphange and has a been a huge proponent of bringing desktop tools such as After Effects to the high end post market. We also get his thoughts about the current compositing software market.

James Bond, The Queen and Hannibal Lecter have all been through Framestore CFC’s Digital Lab. We caught up with senior Colourist Asa Shoul, and Executive Producer Jan Hogevold in London to discuss the role of DI in the London film market.

Spider-man 3 delivers on its promise with three sensational CG villains and new side to the web-slinging superhero. Bill Dawes and Kelsey Brookes go behind the scenes with the Sony Pictures Imageworks VFX and animation team of what is reported to be one of the most expensive movies ever made.

MPC was given over 750 shots to kick start the sun and bring to life the mission to save the world. As the sun is a major ‘character’ of the film, it’s visual development was a key aspect of the effects work. VFX supervisor Tom Wood headed up a team that produced some of the most stunning images of the sun ever put on film.

Just two and a half weeks ago Oscar winning director Peter Jackson shot a short film shot on the RED 4K camera in NZ, which premiered this morning on the RED booth at the NAB trade show in Las Vegas.

UPDATE: Now with our second NAB podcast, a roundtable discussion of Monday at NAB 2007.

Wrap up of Sunday’s user group and our first NAB 2007 podcast, a “Live” podcast from the Autodesk Pool Party at Caesar’s Palace. Let me tease you with these words – Standard Filesystem Volume. Not enough? How about batch in Smoke… or multilayer timeline in batch?