INTHEMOD colour palette app

A neat little cheap app that come in 3 different editions but has great functionality for quickly establishing colour palettes.


http://www.inthemod.com/

Happy New Year!

It's now 2009. A brand new year in the visual effects industry, and a new year to look forward to new projects and exciting cinema releases. As far as heavy VFX laden films go, I'm assuming the major one to look for will be the next Transformers movie.

There was a new Transformers Poster, But it died... NO!!!

Stay posted as I'm sure they'll have a teaser trailer out in a month or so. Let's hope the posts come thick and fast from all the authors on this blog. If anyone has any suggestions on where we want to take things, post a comment!

Adobe's new Image manipulation software

Adobe's new Image manipulation software


HERE

Blog Updates!

As you can plainly see, the blog has been adjusted slightly, leaving a cleaner and streamlined theme. I've tried other more complex themes, but things just end up becoming messy, and I'm no HTML master, so I've only been able to implement a few code tricks, like the amazing off white anti-aliased corners to the posts background. I've also opened up the restrictive post areas so photos etc now can fit. Good times.

Now get posting again everyone.

The Brains Trust Administrator Of Love.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer and the Art of 'Photo Anime'




Bill Desowitz goes deeper into Speed Racer's 'Photo Anime' look with Digital Domain's Compositing Supervisor Darren Poe and Digital Effects Supervisor Jake Morrison.

The Informer

is not the latest Autobot.

It is a work flow spark which may be worth a look as covered by FXguide.com from NAB 2008.

Their introduction video explanation should give you a good idea of how handy it might be in term of footage management in between Flame operator, artists, producers and clients.

Roadside Romeo

Looks like Disney are testing the waters with this new animated feature due for release in Oct.. After the vfx work the Indians did on The Golden Compass Disney have signed Bollywood for four feature length animated movies by 2010, the indians did 60% of the work on Roadside Romeo which looks like it is mainly focused on the Indian market.
Over the last three years all the major studios in the US have poured around $1.5billion in total to tap into Bollywood and also the Indian TV market.

http://www.yashrajfilms.com/Movies/MovieIndividual.aspx?MovieID=3e2da32a-a555-49fa-8394-3c76ec4f50ed

The Sky Crawlers

Below is the new trailer for Mamoru Oshii's latest film 'The Sky Crawlers,' based on the Japanese Manga series. Oshii's previous film 'Ghost In The Shell: Innocence' was a unique blend of high end 3D with traditional cell animation, and 'The Sky Crawlers' utilises the same blend as well. Should be one to keep an eye out for...

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1214128517/bctid1519727057

Mogul Video podcast from NAB 2008

NAB podcasts

Look out for NAB 2008 - Imagineer Systems Mogul VFX Video podcast in its playlist
Also this link covered other features showcase in NAB 2008

eyeon Generation

I was interested in seeing what this bit of software was all about. It may be a good way to manage a job as it appears you can do a conform then reference the clips back to that conform. So avoiding bouncing back and forth between software packages.

Have a read!
VFX Guide

Imagineering Autodesk and Quantel

At the last hour of athe last day of NAB Imagineer was demonstrating mogul to Autodesk and Quantel representatives. The sheer amount of questions from them makes yo uthink that Imagineer may just well be onto something here.

Ciinafilm InfiniFrame

The second product that struck me came from a new company Cinnafilm could be revolutionary (and I hate to even use that word). Ciinafilm was started by former aerospace engineer Lance Maurer and has as its technical advisor Brad Carvey, who won a technical Emmy as part of the team that developed the Video Toaster. The Cinnafilm HD1 is a black box that provides realtime film look to video. Since more and more peopel are shooting on video and not going out to film, providing a film look in realtime at a fractuion of the cost should be extremely appealing. Users will be able to selct from a menu of common film stocks or can start from scratch and create an entirely unique “stock” from a plethora of controls.

The system will be leased for $10,000 a month, and there will be more on the pricing to be relased soon so that the cost goes down over time.) Seeing is believing as starting in May Cinnafilm will accept 30-seecond video clips which they will apply a look to and send if back to you as proof of what they can add to your film. Cinnafilm has its own studio in Albuquerque New Mexico for film finishing.

But that alone is not the revolutionary part. Soon after the June release of HD1 Cinnafilm will be adding the InfiniFRame and InfiniPlane mudules to the systems. Infiniframe allows you to create an infinite number of frames bewten regual 24-frame footage, the the new slow-mo footage plays back absolutely smooth with no artifacting. Tehy’d told me about this over the phone before NAB but seeing is believing. And infinitei, means infinite. During the demor they played back a 6 second clip that took 20 minutes to play back. InfiniFrame will allow used to create depth-of-field: going into a shot where a lot of the image is in focus, selecting the point to remain in focus and then throwing everything else out of focus in a natural gradual manner. Again not a bad tool to have for HD production and it is all realtime.
Combining these modules Cinnafilm will be developing a third module which will allow for simple 2D to 3D creation. They are working with Los Alamos National Laboratories, which worked on a little thing called the Manhattan Project, on this and also to accurately access their color replication and processor response.
www.cinnafilm.com

Imagineer teams with the Foundry for VFX workflow

Imagineer Systems has teamed up with The Foundry to provide visual effects artists with a streamlined, efficient solution to move planar tracking data between mocha and recently-announced Nuke 5.

As a result of this collaboration, VFX artists can now seamlessly export all tracking data from mocha, directly into Nuke 5. This development is significant for any VFX artist who requires effortless movement between applications as part of their VFX workflow, such as Shake users who enjoy the mocha export capability and who can now include Nuke 5 as part of this seamless workflow.

The two companies have entered into a marketing partnership agreement, in which The Foundry will offer a specially priced bundled version of Nuke 5 with mocha. With this bundle deal, all customers who purchase Nuke 5 will receive Imagineer's mocha at a 30% discount.

“We're delighted that Imagineer has added the functionality to allow tracking data from their renowned planar tracking system to be exported directly into Nuke 5,” said Bill Collis, chief executive officer, The Foundry.

“This new development will give Nuke users the ability to experience the power and ease of creating pristine tracks created with mocha and effortlessly export them to Nuke. This arrangement is a tremendous win for our customers.”

Racetrack Memory

Not exactly VFX related, but cool geekery nonetheless - IBM are pioneering a new type of NAND flash memory called Racetrack. This memory will have vastly more (tenfold apparently) storage than traditional flash memory.

Check out the writeup here.

Greenlayers

Greenlayers.com profess to be the largest stock library of greenscreen actors on the web and are set to exhibit at NAB.

Here's a link to a press release - would have linked to their website, but it's coming up with a warning that their may be corrupted material on it at the moment! Not a great start, but could be a handy resource for crowd duplication etc in the future.

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080413/20080413005056.html?.v=1

Photoshop Express

Adobe have released their web based app, Photoshop Express with a variety of interesting features, and some seemingly large limitations, at least in a professional environment, as identified by a review on fxguide.

Adobe Photoshop Express website


Fxguide review

Digital Grunt

How did this artist find time to create this video !!! Pretty entertaining to watch ! Enjoy and drink up your 103rd coffee of the day !

NAB Newswire

The Nab conference starts in Vegas in the coming days, so we can expect quite a few announcements from developers and effects houses. To keep up to date, there is a section of the website for breaking news... Worth keeping an eye on!

http://virtualpressoffice.com/media/show/display.jsp?showId=1181060943676

RedboX

The Redbox is Pixellexis’s brand new parallel processing unit, designed for cutting down intensive render cycle times. Whether it be for post-production, visual effects, and compression or decompression, the Redbox is being billed as a greener, more eco-friendly render solution, drawing less than 900 watts, water-cooled, and with built-in temperature sensing controllers. It boasts render cycle completions that are 1/10th of the current time.
A production version of Redbox will be unveiled at NAB 2008

http://www.pixellexis.com/

VFX Breakdowns clips

Came across this site filled with really good visual effect breakdowns of various blockbuster movies such as Happy Feet, I am the Legend, Bourne Ultimatum and the Golden Compass.

VFX Breakdowns from AWN

THIS IS SPARTA VFX !!! - 300 vfx breakdown

Enjoy !!!!