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Op-Eds |
The Indian Exodus |
There is much concern in the VFX industry about our jobs being outsourced to India, and even China. Indeed, India is rapidly booting up a visual effects industry and has a vast pool of low cost artists to staff it with. Since I have been to India five times to conduct VFX training (the most recent being a two-month visit to two different facilities) I am often asked about the “lay of the land” there. While India has much potential, they do have some systemic problems to overcome. Read more... |
World Goes 3D |
One of the most startling trends I observed at the April NAB in Las Vegas is how rapidly the whole world has gone 3D. Everywhere you looked - editing systems, compositing programs, color timing systems, display systems - the 3D production workflow was being supported. There are now “3D ready” television sets being offered to the consumer by Samsung and even a 3D video camera from Panasonic is in the offing. Read more... |
NukeX-traordinary |
At the end of January The Foundry released NukeX, their enhanced version of Nuke. What NukeX adds is a very capable camera tracker, the lens distortion tools you need to go along with it, plus a core set of Furnace plug-ins that are an absolute must for camera tracking. I have been exploring NukeX for nearly a month now and I must say it is truly awesome. Read more... |
The Lighter/Compositor |
Heads up visual effects compositors, our world is about to change again. Just when you got your head around 3D compositing here comes 3D lighting. The official handwriting is on the wall. The Foundry (Nuke) and Sony Picture Imageworks (SPI) announced in early November that SPI’s proprietary Katana 3D lighting software will soon be integrated into Nuke. This will have a profound effect on the visual effects pipeline affecting both 3D and 2D artists. You only have about one year to prepare. Read more... |
Fan Films |
Fan films embrace a startlingly large sub-culture of producers, writers, cinematographers, directors, editors, and visual effects artists that create movie shorts inspired by popular feature films. Many are cheesy and poorly done with handy cams and look like high school skits, but some are very serious and superbly done. These serious fan films offer a tremendous opportunity for aspiring digital artists to finally solve the age-old conundrum - how can I build a job-getting demo reel? Read more… |
2D Goes 3D |
There is a paradigm shift under way in the world of compositing visual effects. More and more of the shot finishing is being pushed from the 3D department into the 2D department. The reason being, of course, costs and schedules. Revisions can be made much faster in the 2D department, so both time and money are saved by migrating the work into it. This change has introduced two major innovations, multi-pass cgi compositing and 3D compositing. Read more... |
From Flat to 3D |
3D (stereoscopic) movies are exploding in popularity but it may come as a shock that many of them are not actually filmed in stereo. Even some cgi films that are already 3D productions are filmed flat then later converted to 3D. Shooting live action in stereo is fraught with so many problems and additional expenses that many film makers avoid it like the plague. The answer is increasingly to shoot the movie flat then convert it to 3D in post-production. Read more… |
Shake the Undead |
Apple’s recent announcement that they are no longer selling Shake rekindled another round of the “Shake is dead” pronouncements. The first round occurred in April of 2006 when Apple announced that it was no longer supporting Shake.In stark contrast to all this, I am here to pronounce that Shake is alive and well with several more years of life left in it. Read more… |
Legacy Software |
ILM has recently joined Weta Digital and Intelligent Creatures, all visual effects powerhouses, to obtain a Nuke site license. The interesting thing here is that ILM already has very sophisticated compositing software developed in-house over many years, yet felt the need to purchase Nuke. ILM is finally starting to confront the legacy software conundrum. Read more... |
nuke vids |
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| Keylight parts 1-3 |
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| primatte parts 1-3 |
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shake vids |
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articles |
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What's So Hot About Nuke? |
Nuke has emerged as the compositing software of choice for VFX facilities that want to move up to the next level in their compositing departments for both visual quality and production efficiency. Its unique management of floating point colorspace coupled with its novel multi-channel architecture and superb 3D support make it the most effective compositing tool for any CGI production pipeline. Any digital artist that wants to stay on the leading edge of VFX compositing needs to learn Nuke. Download a PDF of the article What's So Hot About Nuke? |
Commercials: How They Changed Film Production Forever! |
While digital compositing is what I do, I started out as a CGI artist working on television commercials. For me, it all started on Super Bowl Sunday, 1984— “Super Sunday,” the showcase for all cool new commercials. A spot came on with a sexy robot pitching the virtues of packaging food in cans for the Canned Food Information Council (a spot entitled “Brilliance,” created by Ketcham Advertising). It blew me away! Download a PDF of the article Commercials: How They Changed Film Production Forever! |
Digital Intermediate: The Wave of the Present |
Student Filmmakers magazine (www.studentfilmmakers.com) publishes articles on filmmaking for the students of universities and film schools to prepare them for their new role as rising stars in the movie making business. One of the major paradigm shifts in modern filmmaking is the Digital Intermediate (DI) process where the entire movie is digitized and color corrected on a computer system. This article gives an eye-opening tour of the DI process and all its amazing capabilities and man-traps from scanning the film to delivery of the 24P master video. Download a PDF of the article Digital Intermediate: The Wave of the Present. |
Jill Bogdanowicz: The Colorful Colorist |
A profile of Jill Bogdanowicz, a winsome colorist with impeccable credentials such as Blade 3, Ray, and She Hate Me. A fine arts major and a physics minor at University of New York at Geneseo, she grew up in her father's lab, a color scientist for Kodak. Entering the trade at a the very tender age of 18, she landed an internship position at Kodak as a telecine assist. The article goes on to explore Jill's fascination with color science and how her expertise in it helps with color timing features digitally. Read more about Jill Bogdanowicz: The Colorful Colorist. |
The Autoconform Process: The Agony and the Ecstasy |
A description of the autoconform process is and the virtues and complexity doing it in the Digital Intermediate process. It has the advantages of not cutting up the precious and irreplaceable camera negative and provides unlimited freedom for revisions. However, it is also very much more complicated for the DI facility to execute and requires extremely close coordination with the production company's editorial department. Read more about The Autoconform Process: The Agony and the Ecstasy! |
The Power & The Glory: The Scope of Creative Control in the DI Process |
The Digital Intermediate process is very new and very technical so there is much confusion and curiosity about what can be done in a Digital Intermediate suite and how it works. This article attempts to de-mystify the DI process to make it understandable to non-computer experts. It describes the various color correction tools that are available plus new advanced image processing tools such as degrain and scratch repair that can now be applied to improve the overall quality of a feature film. Read more about The Power & The Glory: The Scope of Creative Control in the DI Process. |
Digital Intermediate: |
This article actually
started out as a recorded interview of Steve by Charlie
White to collect background for an article. When the
one hour phone interview was over Charlie had so much
material that he decided to just transcribe the entire
conversation as one huge article. It is a wide ranging
conversation on the current state of Digital Effects
and the Digital Intermediate industry with some crystal
ball gazing of future trends. Read more about Digital
Intermediate: The Inner Workings an
interview with Steve Wright by Charlie White. |
