ASSIMILATE announces ROCKET FUEL
ASSIMILATE is announcing today at the REDucation Community Day in Los Angeles a new ROCKET FUEL bundle that includes an Nvidia Quadro FX3800 SDI board, RED’s RED Rocket card, and ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH® CINE 4K post workflow, for a price of $10,999 USD. This price is half the cost of SCRATCH CINE alone! Read the entire […]
Digital Domain expansion announcements
Last week Digital Domain announced they were adding a 20,000 square foot “visual effects outpost” in Vancouver. This facility is planned for an early 2010 opening and is expected to employ 100+ by the end of the year. This week they announced an expansion in Florida with plans for a digital production studio that “will […]
fxguidetv #69: Rob Bredow
In our new episode of fxguidetv, we catch up with Rob Bredow, chief technical officer of Sony Pictures Imageworks, and discuss several topics. We touch on their open source moves, stereoscopic and its creative and technical challenges, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”, and the business climate. Our fxphd tip of the week takes a […]
The Previsualization Society
The Previsualization Society was officially announced today to “focus on producing and publishing information and resources to promote effective previs through key activities such as promoting standards, education, workflow development and practical knowledge exchange”. Founding members of the Previsualization Society are: David Dozoretz, Founder, Director and VFX Supervisor, Persistence of Vision (POV) Previs; Chris Edwards, […]
VES Annual Meeting
This past Saturday the Visual Effects Society held their annual meeting in Hollywood. Scott Squires has written up a nice summary of the meeting on his blog. I know the words “Annual Meeting” tend to make one think of a boring affair but I think you will find the speakers brought up many of the […]
YouTube find: The Flame
Making the rounds on YouTube today is a video featuring the flame user interface as a music video. To view the video click the read more…
linear workflow discussion
In this week’s fxpodcast we discuss linear workflow. We geek out with 3D guru Master Zap of Mental Images about linear compositing workflow: separating fact from fiction, and discuss just how viable it is to set up a correct linear pipeline. Why is linear compositing valuable? Feature film compositing is nearly always ‘linear’ ironically – […]
fxguidetv: IBC 2009 Recap
Our latest fxguidetv covers news and items from IBC in Amsterdam earlier this month. We speak with the folks at Blackmagic about the daVinci acquisition, check out a tech demo of realtime Nvidia GPU processing of filters in Adobe Premiere, drop by The Foundry booth to see an interesting application of their upcoming tech in […]
Unpaid Journey Artists Update: Partially Paid
Over the last year, we have been following the story of the group of visual effects artists who worked on the film Journey to the Center of the Earth for Meteor Studios (see here and here). These artists were not paid for their months of work when Meteor Studios folded. Over the last year, the […]
fxpodcast: Posting Your Work Online
Posting work online has become such a common and crucial part of workflow and we often take it for granted. In this fxpodcast we talk with Andreas Wacker of INTERDUBS, a company that provides hosting of clips for review and approval for over eighty post production and production companies. This large client base gives Andreas […]
Back 2 back fxguidetv: Spanish & English
We have new episodes of fxguidetv English and Spanish. In fxguidetv #67, Angie and the team talk to Chris Bond and Chris Harvey of Prime Focus about GI Joe and workflow. (also see our feature written story this week) Visit the fxguidetv page for direct fxguidetv downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and […]
61st Primetime Creative Arts Emmy
Today the Primetime Creative Arts Awards were presented at a ceremony at the NOKIA Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The show, hosted by Kathy Griffin, will be televised on September 18th at 1:00 p.m (ET/PT) on E! Entertainment Television. A list of the winners for selected categories follows the read more:
fxpodcast: Taking Woodstock Acid Trip
In this week’s fxpodcast we trip out with Mr X – and their visual effects for Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock. This comedy required the visual effects team to visualize an acid trip, make the world become a rolling ocean and show the centre of the universe. In a fun and technical discussion Mike Seymour talks […]
fxguidetv: new flame/smoke 2010×1 releases
ibc begins on Friday in Amsterdam and we’ll be covering the conference via fxguidetv as we have for the last several years. To start out the show, our first episode covers the new extension releases from Autodesk for flame and smoke. We traveled up to Montreal before this week to get the scoop on the […]
More transitions – Avid acquired Max-T
Maximum Throughput was founded in 1998 and is probably best known in visual effects for their Sledgehammer line which provides storage and IO solutions to complement workstations and provide conform capability. A little over a year ago they introduced MAXedit™ which offers a scalable, multi-seat HD/SD editing solution and also has a web component that […]
Tech & Sci Oscar short list
The Scientific and Technical Awards Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that 11 scientific and technical achievements have been selected for further awards consideration.
BlackMagic Design Buys daVinci – Confirmed
Black Magic Design (BMD) has bought daVinci color grading systems. Black Magic known for it world class signal convertors and hardware boxes. daVinci, makes of Resolve and Revival, has been based out of Florida, but interestingly, software R&D for some time has been based in Singapore – also home to Black Magic’s head office.With this […]
Pixar on Stereo Production: fxguidetv
In this week’s Episode #65 of fxguidetv we speak to the team at Pixar about their latest blockbuster and stereoscopic production in general. We speak to Pete Sohn about directing his short film “Partly Cloudy” and Bob Whitehill talks about creating the Stereoscopic version of “Up” and the upcoming Stereo versions of “Toy Story 1, […]
Peter Doyle on Complex Feature Film Grading
In this week’s fxpodcast we have an amazing show – we speak in depth to Peter Doyle about his role as supervising digital colourist on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This continues our trend with the fxpodcast of digging beneath the hype and really exploring serious film making in conversations with some of the […]
MAXON Releases New Versions of Cinema4D
Maxon announced today that they are shipping a new release of their 3D software, along with a new Broadcast Edition. The software fully supports the recently released Snow Leopard, including access of up to 64GB of virtual memory. Cinema4D has become the most popular 3D package that After Effects artists are using for motion graphics […]
new fxguidetv & red centre podcasts
fxguidetv In this week’s fxguidetv we talk to Stereo Supervisor Enrique Criado on the different aspects, – both technical and narrative, of stereoscopic production. Visit the fxguidetv page for direct fxguidetv downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link. Red Centre Our Digital […]
The Foundry releases Nuke 5.2
The Foundry released the latest update to Nuke today taking it to version 5.2v1. Pre-comp tools, Python improvements, GPU support for 3D LUTs, video monitor preview support and support for reading RED R3D files are among the improvements. At IBC Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0 will be previewed, they are due for release in Q4 […]
fxguidetv en espa
We are really excited to announce the premiere episode of fxguidetv in spanish: fxguidetv en espanol.
First two Siggraph fxguidetv episodes
In addition to the daily written reports from the show we have posted the first two fxguidetv episodes from Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans. Episode #62 covers Fluid sims with Exotic Matter and we get the scoop on announcements made by Autodesk at the show. In Episode #63 we talk with Lucas Martell about his […]
Toxik RIP (sort of) + New Maya 2010
Toxik has had a bit of a tortured past. It was first announced at NAB 2002 as technologies Strata and Mezzo, code named Toxik during development, almost released as a product called mass, then debuted at NAB 2005 as Toxik. While the product has some strong features, it never really caught on, in large part […]
More Autodesk SIGGRAPH announcements
We attended the Autodesk press conference today to get the latest on their announcements at the show. We’ll be detailing what’s new and interesting in one of our fxguidetv episodes from SIGGRAPH but in the meantime here’s a brief recap in addition to the Maya 2010/Toxik news: Launched Mudbox 2010. Photoshop layer support and better […]
Pixar Announcements: New Versions, New Product, and More
With SIGGRAPH just around the corner, Pixar today announced some nice upgrades and new additions to their products with unlimited threading, RenderMan® Pro Server™ 15.0 and Tractor™1.0 RenderMan® Pro Server™ 15.0 and Tractor™1.0. Unlimited threading will enable users to have each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on multi-core platforms, unlike the […]
Sony Pictures Imageworks Open Source
Sony Pictures Imageworks has announced it is releasing five projects as open source. The five cover Open Shading Language, Database library manager, Voxel data storage library, Python string handling in C++ and Flexible camera guides for Maya. They are embarking on this in hopes of building small development communities around the code. We’re planning to […]
New Red Centre Podcast
Our Digital cinematography & production podcast red centre episode #41 is live and ready for download. This week’s podcast we talk his week, the guys talk about RED Rocket, films on RED, Scarlet, and more as Mike prepares for a SMPTE panel by interviewing Jason about his opinions on Scarlet, 5D Mk II and full […]
Final Cut Studio Updated
Apple has released the long anticipated update to Final Cut Studio which brings versions of Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro 4. Apple posted videos on their web site to show many of the new features that include new ProRes options including a 4444 […]