After just finishing the second installment of Lord of the Rings and on the eve of that film LOTR:The Two Towers being released December 18, Fxguide caught up with Jim Rygiel, Visual effects supervisor and Randy Cook, to discuss Weta, the LOTR trilogy, the 5 disc DVD and some of the technology behind this amazing achievement

Many people know him as one of the creators of SHAKE, and author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, but Ron Brinkman is also a writer and director of a new short film “Hope”.

FXGuide caught up with Ron via Damian Allen, himself an experienced Shake compositor, Damian asked him about Hope, Shake and what he’s researching into next.

Did you ever wonder how FXguide got started, – or which are the best tips on the site? Ever wonder who you are, when you visit, or where you live ?

Starting in December we have a huge range of new things coming and we are keen to connect with you about what’s coming and where we are right now.

With great sadness we report that Mill Film in the UK shut its doors today. Mill film has been a truely great contributor of visual effects shots, most noticeable Gladiator, for which they won the Academy Award and many others such as Black Hawk Down.

Traktor directed this title track for the much awaited Bond film – Die Another Day – by arguably the biggest artist in the world, Madonna. The promo was posted at MPC, who also created visual effects for key sequences in the Bond film.

Eyeon Software says that the latest version of their 2D compositing and special effects solution, Digital Fusion 4, will ship October 28, 2002. Digital Fusion 4 is eyeon’s 9th major release and incorporates hundreds of enhancements and new features, including real-time RAM caching, floating point image processing, macro tools, advanced tracking, grid warping and integrated scripting.

REALVIZ, ImageModeler software was used to create 3D images from photographs, by View Studio in their work on the visual effects in the Tom Cruise / Steven Spielberg movie ‘Minority Report’.

Increasingly Previz is being used in Features, Commericals and Film Clips.

Perhaps the 3 best previz artists in the world are David Dozoretz, Ron Frankel and Colin Gree, at JAK, Proof and PLF respectively. We spoke to them recently about the state of the art in Previz and some of their films such as Fight Club, Minority Report, Panic Room, Star Wars and at their current films such as Peter Pan, The Matrix Revolutions and Cat in the Hat.

Discreet has announced it is shipping Discreet Cleaner 6 video encoding software for the Macintosh.

FXGuide caught up with the developers and had a chat with John Worthington of Discreet about the new release, the new features, and just why we need to encode New Orleans’ hurricane videos for our cel phones!!!

Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design Supervisor and Creative director Vico Sharabani, created a full character animation rig within Inferno, and used it to produce an x-ray effect for Fox Sports Net.

The underlying technology of 5D Colossus was licensed from a company called Colorfront. In the wake of the news of 5D closing, the CEO of Colorfront has given us a statement on the future of this technology…

Updated to include official company statement

It’s sadly come to our attention from multiple sources inside and outside the company that 5D Solutions, Ltd., makers of the high-end compositor Cyborg and color corrector Colossus, has closed their doors……

Only Independent U.S. Training Center to Offer Courses on Discreet flint, flame and smoke

We don’t normally parrot Press releases, but this one follows up on a story we broke back in July that is currently the second most read story on fxguide. Digital Domain has formed D2 to provide high-end digital production software for Windows®, Linux and IRIX Platforms.

At FXGuide we don’t normally do book reviews, but we have had the pleasure of reviewing arguably the best book on visual effects we’ve seen this year, The Invisible Art, The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. It is not over stating it to say this is the best book ever published on matte painting and a must have for anyone who works in compositing and digital matte painting today. Written by Mark Cotta Vaz, well known to the fx community as a senior contribut

In a surprise announcement, Discreet has introduced a world-wide aggressive price package for the software bundle of Combustion v2 with Cleaner (available for both MAC and PC platforms.)

5D made several announcements today from IBC regarding the introduction of new products as well as improvements and updates to existing ones. Without having actually gotten to the booth yet, here’s a preliminary look at their announcements…