Paul Debevec opened his talk at SIGGRAPH 2005 by showing some images created by teenager Nick Bertle who had used HDR to have his favourite Half Life characters rock up at his place and hang out. Bertle has fast become a phenomenom for his work in HDR — all before he has left high school. fxguide caught up with him to discuss HDR CGI for part 3 of our “Away from Live Action” series.

In this part 2 of our series on post away from normal live action – we look at great new spot from XYZ studios in Melbourne which exploits the most fundamental pencil drawing style to produce a dynamic and entertaining spot for Honda kids Bikes.

This is part one of a new exclusive 3 part series about projects that stay away from traditional live action and instead use animation as their primary focus. These projects range from traditional pencil animation to stop frame, CGI and even origami. We examine how they’re approached in the digital age. We start by looking at the Promax award winner for Nickelodeon’s “Misfit Monsters”. You can also download a comphensive “making of” quicktime.

After more than a year of development, Eyeon Software’s Fusion 5 began shipping over the last several weeks. The new version boasts numerous improvements, the highlight of which is a new 3D compositing environment in the procedural workflow. In this week’s fxpodcast we speak with Isaac Guenard, Senior Product Manager for Eyeon, about the new features in the software and how they have been received by the users.

This week we breakdown shots from the Bill Paxton directed period golf drama, The Greatest Game Ever Played.
“Bill wanted the camera to be another character in the film,” says Dennis Berardi, Visual Effects Supervisor for the film. “He wanted dynamic, exciting shots to put the audience right into the action.” In addition to our fxpodcast covering work by the Mr. X visual effects team, our online print story also features the inventors of Flying-Cam who p

On October 26th in Sydney, Apple begins a three-day Shake SDK seminar. The event will provide an in-depth introduction as well as detailed information on writing plugins using the SDK. In this weeks fxpodcast, we talk about Shake version 4.0 and the SDK with Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Apple’s Shake and Motion

In this week’s podcast we talk to Don Shay, the publisher of the world’s leading authority and publication of record for the visual effects industry: Cinefex.

Updated with coverage of Autodesk-Alias joint press conference

After the market close today, Autodesk announced an agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million dollars in cash. Obviously, there are a ton more questions than answers right now, but the fact that Maya is going to be a part of the same company that produces 3DS Max is quite interesting. And now maybe we’ll see Maya camera import in flame….

In this week’s fxpodcast, we discuss the recent release of Autodesk’s Smoke 7 editing product. Our two guests were beta testers for the release and are able to provide insight into the product as they have been using the product for months. We also talk about Smoke’s support for the Final Cut Pro XML standard with Stephane Labrie of Autodesk. What exactly is XML and is it simply an industry buzzword for a text file?

In this week’s fxpodcast, we take a look at Apple’s Motion 2 which brings with it a new fxPlug architecture that allows plugin developers to more easily access the GPU in order to dramatically speed up processing. We look at it from both a Motion-specific angle as well as more general in nature — such as will multi-core CPUs remove the need for GPU speedups? We also examine an offering of new sets of HD resolution Motion templates.

Marco Paolini is a compositor and president of Digital Film Tools, a company that creates production proven plugins. Noteworthy for their digital simulation of optical filter, effects and camera effects, they also include a range of compositing tools developed in the firing line of feature film production at Digital Film Works. In this week’s podcast we talk to Paolini and review online the range of treatments that DFT offer from Photoshop to Flame.

One of the most successful viral ad campaigns of recent times is Carlton Draught’s Big Ad. A spot so entertaining and effective that millions of people downloaded it or emailed it weeks before it ever appeared on air. Does this prove we just need to return to good ideas and great production values to be effective? We ask the spots visual effect supervisor Andrew Jackson, from Sydneys leading FX house Animal Logic.

In an exclusive preview, fxguide got a pre-IBC sneak peak at Furnace 3 which is being shown at the conference here in Amsterdam beginning this weekend. We examine what is coming and talk to the Foundry’s Bill Collis about some of the underlying algorithms to better understand this significant advance in image processing plugins.

In this week’s podcast, Emmy contenders discuss some of their projects and last Friday’s bakeoff.
We also allow you to see each of the Emmy nominee’s written submissions.

We’d like to thank the numerous artists who’ve purchased our fxguide LIVE’03 and LIVE’04 DVDs. Based upon the great response, we’ve stepped up the schedule to release this year’s event and get them out sooner. In the meantime, the big questions we’ve gotten are if we could extend the rebates and also wondering if the material on the two discs is still timely since they are a couple of years old now. The short answer: yes and yes. The long answer: click the

This year’s flame user gathering at IBC is getting kicked up a notch thanks to the folks at url(http://www.avp.nl/, hecticelectric) in Amsterdam. They were thinking about organizing this years flame user-meeting and to motivate people they decided to give away free food! So a flame-user BBQ it is…and fxguide is more than happy to help spread the word. Click below to read the invitation to the event and how to register.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Title Design & Special Visual Effects Peer Group will host a “Bake-Off” for the first time. This will be a combination voting event and nominee reception to showcase the final Emmy nominees for the categories of Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie or Special, Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series, and Outstanding Main Title Design.

You’re in London. Your clients are in New York. And you’re finding more and more that you need to get a full res version of your work to them as quickly as possible. London-based Sohonet has targeted the the media and film industries by providing tools and a network that can carry massive files, quickly and at very low cost. In this week’s fxpodcast, Mike Seymour gets the details from Dave Scammel, Managing Director for Sohonet.

MovieEditor is running a Linux Conference at Siggraph on the 3rd of August. Most of the major studios use Linux, including DreamWorks with more than 1,500 Linux desktops and 3,500 Linux servers. The MovieEditor Conference is an all-day event on computer-based filmmaking in downtown Los Angeles. Studio technology chiefs and other experts discuss ongoing work using Linux in feature animation and visual effects.

Massive software is well known for its epic shots in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but with the release of Massive 2.0 – we asked just how practical is it to use Massive in a ‘normal’ TV Ad spot? In this week’s podcast we talk to A52’s 3D team leader Craig Xray Halperin, about what it took for A52 to go from not even having the software to creating 10,000 agents celebrating two Clydesdale horse teams meeting in St.Louis on the 4th of July.

We test drive the wondertouch Motion plugins and ask the question – will this help unlock some of the potential of Motion? Why isnt Motion more widely used? Are the Wondertouch plugins worth it? And we ask Wondertouch President Alan Lorence how he came up with the new emitters?

In this weeks fxpodcast, we sit down with Marc Petit, Vice President Product Development and Operations. During the interview we discuss NAB, Toxik, the state of the current systems software, his thoughts about Apple’s recent move to Intel, and more.

Known for their work in such films as Flight of the Phoenix and Constantine, Mr & Mrs Smith represents the 17th feature film project for Furious FX. In our first fxPodcast, Mike Seymour chatted with Scott Dougherty and David Lingenfelser about the company’s work on the job. Check out some before and after frames while you listen to the interview. (update: fxPodcast is now live)