After our recent article about Max-T, we received quite a few questions and comments from readers. We passed the questions on to Mike Hughes, V.P. Business Development at Max-T, who took a moment to respond. In this evolving world of shared storage in the post production environment, comparisons between various solutions can quickly become complex. Mike Seymour takes a closer look in this Q&A session…..

Photoshop has made major gains in reproducing brushes, and it is the cornerstone of most digi-matte departments. Does Painter still have role to play? Is Painter just a weekend app, or can it reposition itself?

Corel has moved to make Painter a more professionally focused tool for concept art, matte paintings and illustration work, in so doing they are moving away from the “Santa Fe” casual artist. Fxguide took version IX for a road test and spoke to

“It was clear from the look on their faces – that they weren’t joking… we knew we had a global problem, that’s when we hit the panic button”. Just three hours after a major support call from Paris, plus eight and a half years after an MIT graduate in Boston decided to generate a unique ID for any frame in any discreet system using a 28 bit number, Bill Roberts (Director of Product Management – Systems) realized that Discreet had a serious problem. Ever

Discreet has identified an issue that affects ALL users of inferno,flame, flint, fire, smoke, backdraft, and frost that MUST be addressed BEFORE OCT 2ND or your system WILL NOT FUNCTION!



Updated Again: Oct 1st

IBC: This month Maximum Throughput showed the new GUI for their MAX T Sledgehammer. Networked storage and content management is starting to breakthrough as the benefits and data wrangling options can make such a huge difference to a medium to large scale problem.

Motion is a great new product but there appears a lot of confusion in various internet forums over how Motion works, a lot of people seem to believe that the realtime graphics preview is lower quality than what you get when you export frames and that Motion uses software rendering for final output. Our motion expert Roger Bolton spoke to Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Marketing Manager Professional Applications at Apple to clear up some of these common

I was looking forward to being far away from all the election turmoil in the states but I was hit straightaway with a reminder on the walk to my hotel. It seems here, though, there is maybe a bit more concentration on the real issues in the campaign and a bit less on the bluster. Enough said. Time to worry about such things as why espresso is so much better in Europe. And at IBC there were many interesting things to see….here’s a brief recap (in alphabet

The Foundry has been a long time plug-in favorite, and recently broke with other vendors and started offering free burn support (see fxguide story here). With the release of Furnace 2.0 they are offering new tools that offer that “sizzle” we all seek to solve creative problems and make our clients take notice. Mike Seymour has a review posted from IBC.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) awarded the 2003-2004 Creative Arts Primetime Emmys for programs and individual achievements at the 56th Annual Emmy Awards presentation at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday, September 12, 2004. Here are the winners in the visual effects categories.

Apple Computer’s new Motion software was a big hit at NAB earlier this year, winning the 2004 Editor’s Choice award in the Content Creation category. The release is now shipping and making waves here at IBC in Amsterdam. Guest reviewer Roger Bolton, a freelance flame/shake artist based in Sydney, takes a look at what he found to be an impressive software package.

With our 5th anniversary, our 5 millionth page view, and IBC in Amsterdam, we thought there was no time like the present to debut our new look. The best thing is that the cost of the upgrade is free. We hope you like the new cleaner and more easily-navigatable site. The new version has been tested in most browsers (Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, Opera, and Firefox) on the Mac, PC, and Linux and we feel pretty good about its compatibility. Please Read

In significant move, The Foundry have announced that all new purchases of Furnace, Tinder, and Anivil for discreet will include free site licenses for Burn. Burn will most likely be opened up to even more facilities, with burn support in Fire shown as a technology demo at NAB. This may help many facilities in their decision about the software, since adding sparks to burn nodes can quickly add up…making the purchase of burn a fairly expensive proposition.

Discreet announced new versions of their effects last week — inferno 6, flame 9, and flint 9. The technology demo at NAB this year gave a preview of some of the possible features and now the final ones have been locked in. The number one feature request for years — Clip History — is now a reality and forms the basis of a strong new offering from Discreet. Click below to get the full story….

Discreet introducted new versions of its inferno, flame, and effects software today. The software is planned for a fall release and brings to reality many of the new features seen at the technology demo at NAB 2004. Fxguide will be taking an up-close look at the software in the coming days, but for now, here’s the Discreet press release…..

With deadlines for the films worldwide release looming, I, Robot visual effects supervisor John Nelson spoke to Fxguide on a busy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. We also caught up with lead visual effects house’s Digital Domains Andy Jones & Erik Nash, and WETA’s Joe Letteri, on the push to finish one of the summers biggest effects films.