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.