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

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.