This week we test drive visual effects stock footage and explain what to expect and examine how useful it really can be.

Apple has just released version 1.1 of Aperture. Some would say this is not only in direct response to initial criticism to the quality of the RAW tools in version 1.0.1 but also in response to Adobe’s ‘beta’ release of Lightroom. Aperture is now available as a Universal – running up to 4 times faster and Apple have slashed the price. We compare Aperture 1.1 to Adobe Lightroom, and suggest how you can best use them in a visual effects environment.

Warren Lynch has graded on huge hollywood films such as Lord of the Rings, but with his new company he has also engineered interesting approaches to indie feature digital grading. In this week’s podcast we discuss diamonds in vodka, 2 perf, bleach by-pass, and more

Autodesk has announced a new version of Toxik – Toxik 2007. The release, expected to ship this summer, includes a new HDRI paint module, wiretap support, improved AMD optimizations, and more. We’ve got some exclusive images from the UI in addition to the Autodesk press release.

You think you’re hot ? Well check out the flame work on this Sprite spot where the talent is literally on fire. Its all thanks to some cool — you guessed it — flame work by vfx supervisor and artist Rohit Misra.

After a hugely successful three year run, we’re taking a break from doing fxguide live at NAB in order to cover the convention for all of our readers who can’t make it to Vegas. With no fxguide event at NAB this year, Autodesk took over and is holding their own style of smoke and flame master classes at NAB on April 23rd. In this week’s podcast, we speak with Jake Parker and Michael Ruzicka — two of the artists who will be presenting at this year’s event

Sooner or later everyone wants thinks about jumping ship and relocating to a new company. This week we speak to Teresa Hall, a top talent agent who places people at companies like MPC, Framestore, Pandemic Studios, and Digital Domain. We discuss how to prepare your reel, what to expect, and how companies select staff – especially staff from overseas.

In this week’s podcast, we speak with AE power user Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage about the recent release of After Effects 7. With the new 32-bit workflow in the software, its potential for use in high end compositing has been expanded greatly. Our online story has highlighted information from the interview and we’ve added new tips in our After Effects tips section about using a 32-bit linear workflow.

After the amazing response we got from our recent story on Date Movie and the stages of production, we figured we’d follow up with some more of the great work from the guys at Furious FX. As mentioned in that story the team also worked on Underworld: Evolution. So here now is a similar shot by shot break down on their work on a very different – much darker vfx film.

We track a typical visual effect sequence done by Furious FX for the film Date Movie, 2006. We follow the shots from on set to finals in the finished film.

Furious does great work, but rather than discuss the whole film, we drilled down on just one small sequence and tracked it to show exactly what happens on a typical visual effects shot on a major Hollywood film.

Software developers try to cram as many new effects as possible into their product -after all, it’s those features which lead to sales. Workflow changes and fixes which help artists get their work done often get left behind. In this week’s podcast and story, we take a look at the new release of Adobe After Effects and how they bucked this trend.

RealViz Stitcher, perhaps the best program available for patching together multiple images to produce a master high resolution wide angle master shot. We talk to RealViz Product manager Stephane Negri about Stitcher 5, and examine its relationship to Photoshop.

The ultimate student film might be Birthday Boy – Sejong Park’s film which earned an Oscar nomination last year and played at Annecy 2005. Park’s film was brilliant and it certainly pushed him onto the worldwide stage. But not everyone can get an Oscar nomination. Also at Annecy last year, a bunch of french students were invited to produce short films to be screened before each day of the festival. One such film was le Building. It is a g

fxguide has been working the Foundry regarding Furnace for some months – and this will result in an fxguide live event in LA, 2nd of March. The Foundry’s image processing tools are so hot, that they have just been incorporated into the new After Effects 7 as standard. Every copy of AE 7 ships with Kronos integrated into AE – we talk to the Foundry team, and invite you to see all of the foundry’s Furnace plugins running on MAC, PC, and Linux at a special te

It is rare the crew at fxguide is really impressed with another site, but we started to notice a site that consistently produced great stories blogging the VFX world: vfxblog.com Then we woke up one day and vfxblog had beaten us to a story on a film — a film which one of our own founders was a compositor on! We had to learn more – and this led to the site’s founder Ian Failes joining the fxguide team. We welcome him knowing he will continue to keep us o

Mark Ruff is a photographer who specialises in frozen moment multi-camera time splices. After many years with a film rig and then a digital rig, Mark has developed a near real-time system. It uses an array of digital cameras, each attached to an array of Mac Minis, feeding a master Mac G5. In seconds it produces a composited, stablized and deflickered effects sequence at full HD resolution (or up to 3K as required). We discuss the evolution of the rig and

As it is almost Christmas we figured we’d explore a different side of visual effects and talk to someone who creates the scripts and characters that we daily need to film and composite. We decided to talk to an entremely successful writer and producer. Doug Naylor is a funny guy, he writes funny comedy, but the business of writing for visual effects – especially for a tight budget, cult classic – with global appeal is a tough job. This week, Doug Naylor k

noitulovE is an amazing rush – a visual effects spectacular. William Bartlett, Visual Effects supervisor and the animation team at Framestore/CFC headed by Andy Boyd did an outstanding job of showing the entire history of evolution, – in one spot… backwards. The story also includes exclusive ‘making of’ video ipod quicktime.

Nuke 4.5 in production. In this week’s podcast we talk to Jonathan Egstad, visual effects supervisor for the Paramount release “Aeon Flux” starring Charlize Theron. For our online story we chatted to Gary Meyer, Nuke Product Specialist about the details of the 4.5 release.

In an interesting move, NUKE is released on Mac OS X.

The new 4.5 version of NUKE also includes impressive new tools such as a new Image Based Keyer, a more flexible 3D tool set and an improved workflow.

In this fxpodcast, we get an update on Toxik with product manager Chris Vienneau. He also talks about some of the image processing requirements, forming the basis of the 32-bit HDR pipeline. Our feature article examines image processing in compositing apps, with tips from our own experiences as well as from the manufacturers.

Autodesk announced yesterday that Discreet Flame was coming to the Linux platform, which was exciting news for the Flame community. Early Tuesday in Tokyo, the Autodesk Japan site posted information regarding Inferno for Linux being shown at InterBEE. In an fxpodcast exclusive, we speak with Bill Roberts of Autodesk about the recent introductions and get the real translation.

Updated Wednesday afternoon with exclusive fxPodcast