fxguide is excited to be a partner for the 9th annual Conference on Visual Media Production, to be held in London on December 5th and 6th. For a limited time, early bird tickets are available for £250 — that’s £100 off the full price.

fxguide is once again the official podcast of SIGGRAPH Asia, this year taking place at the Singapore EXPO from November 28th to December 1st. Here’s our preview of the courses, tech papers, speakers and other events at the conference.

This Academy Museum, to be located at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), will be the first major U.S. museum dedicated exclusively to the history and ongoing development of motion pictures. This museum could showcase Visual Effects work in new ways.

We speak directly to Dneg about the layoffs and clear the air of mis-information.

Pixar has released both RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 and RenderMan Studio 4.0. The company says that Pro Server 17.0 includes object instancing, photon mapping enhancements and volume-rendering optimizations, while Studio 4.0 features include a new physically plausible shader library.

In a sign of good news for the visual effects community, Sydney-based Animal Logic has bought Fuel VFX, which had been in voluntary administration.

The Visual Effects Society has opened registration for the 2012 VES Summit to be held October 13th at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey.

We preview the GRAPHIC 2012 festival at the Sydney Opera House in November, which includes talks from Pixar’s Lee Unkrich and Animal Logic.

John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in Indiana Jones, talks to us about the Indy blu-ray release. Plus we check out some other blu-ray and DVDs with effects-heavy featurettes.

An open letter to Variety’s David Cohen, who has suggested VFX today are boring.

What is the future of creativity in advertising? It may well be walking away from the 30 sec ad format and starting over with a whole new approach focusing instead on behavioral change. At the forefront of this is Naked Communications. Mike spoke in Sydney to co-founder Adam Ferrier.

The Foundry today formally announced Hiero 1.5, Hieroplayer and Nuke 7.

NVIDIA announced today that it will be releasing a new Kepler Quadro K5000 card for Mac later this year. Running up to two times faster than the current gen Quadro 4000, it’s good to see a higher level card make it to the Mac platform.

Recently sold to private backers, Cinesite has moved sans-Kodak into a difficult visual effects climate. So where is the company at the moment, and what does the future hold? We sat down with Cinesite VFX supe Simon Stanley-Clamp to find out.

A quick look at the tech behind LAIKA’s latest 3D stop-motion animated film ParaNorman and a timelapse video of the animators at work.

Autodesk effectively bought the heart and soul of Exotic Matter (EM) but not the company. It purchased the rights to the technology, leaving the product Naiad completely dead. It will not be developed, supported or individually developed past the current version.