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.