Stu Maschwitz
Nothing about cinema is real. It’s all gloriously, magically fake. Acting is fake. Lighting is fake. Sets, concepts, levels of attractiveness and charisma, ease of parking, thematic relevance of small details, amount of lipstick on the leading man’s face after a kiss—all fake.
No wonder it's hard.
Apples core professional community has always consisted of artists. By that I mean folks that take pixels and make something amazing out of them on a daily bases. This might be photos, editing or simulations in Houdini or compositing in Nuke. Apple has always served the artist. In the nineties SGI was the king of doing this. Image compute speed and disk I/O at all costs. Matador and Cineon are some of the fastest image processors I have ever seen. The interactivity was great. These only run on IRIX boxes. The Foundry wishes its paint is as fast and interactive as Matadors was.
In 1997 SGI released the Octane. This machine was built for speed more importantly graphics speed. There was no 5.25 inch disk bay( they were all the rage). No CD-ROM drive. There were 2 full length PCI slots and 1 half length one. You didn't check Facebook on a Octane. There was a reason Sony Imageworks had stations for artists to use the internet. These machines were fast and even faster for drawing images.
In 2013 Apple released a new MacPro. This machine had SGI written all over it. Small, the GPU is fast. Fast disk I/O. The MacPro is pretty, but behind the design is a cooler core that can run faster longer. This means more power for a longer time from the CPU. Get what ever is in your head out on the screen no waiting. The Octanes GPU was a designated card from SGI. Sound familiar, it should the GPUs in the MacPro are also designated by Apple. They will also need the software developers to support OpenCL. From what I have read OpenCL is the the next step but it's happening slowly. Even Nvidia now supports OpenCL. No Optical drive is also similar. ThunderBolt is the new PCI slots and the internal drives bays.
The amazing thing about the new MacPro unlike like the Octanes is it can also email clients, make Quicktimes for clients, word processing and web browsing as well. A far step from the Octane. Sure you could check websites and send email on an Octane but nothing like how the new MacPro handles those tasks.
This isn't a machine for people who just want the fastest Mac for no other reason than being the fastest Mac. This is about solving image related problems and getting them done as fast and as precise as possible. The new MacPro isn't about text or fonts, it's not about Retina or your iPhone. It's not even about playing games. The new MacPro is about image compute speed which is really important to Apples core community.
Frank Rueter:
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that we all need to be a bit more accountable as to the rate we aim for.
You can do a lot of damage to yourself and to others.
Nuke 8 has been out for sometime here are some observations.
The camera tracker can now scale your scene based on real world measurements. No more objects that are -456.890 in scale. The stills solver works if you take your photos with the number 3 in mind. Nuke needs 3 points to calculate x,y,z axis, make sure the images you give it reflect that. The editGeo will prove to be a time saver. Model builder is getting better, far from perfect but like all good features making forward progress. Watch out for co-planar faces and vertices. Both the camera tracker and model builder has made progress in both how they work and how to make them work. That is very important.
Match grade is some what of a disappointment. The workflow for me and for most vendors the QuickTime you deliver to the client must match the dailies the editor and director have been staring at for months. Match grade failed pretty bad. I wouldn't go as far as writing it off but as for making dailies for editorial didn't get easier or faster. Whatever the mojo is I haven't found it.
Paint seems fine and the full frame rendering is amazing. Having your playback not break when you zoom in is a game changer. Your supers are going to love it.
The new color controls are cool but small. Option+command will bring up the old pop up window(it's hard to argue with 1993).
The new QuickTime settings in the writes and reads seem to help the age long color space problems with QuickTime movies. This is nice.
Nothing seems to be broken or acting differently. Only the new nodes and features seem to have bugs. Which brings me to the new submit your cash report dialog. We might get a better Nuke because of it. I almost never sent that info to the The Foundry. Shame on me.
I have been pushing Nuke 8 pretty far, 2d compositing, paint and 3d are in my mind very strong. A good release.
Project Yosemite:
A 200+ mile backpacking experience through Yosemite National Park captured by Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill. This project was filmed over the course of 10 months. We spent a combined 45 days in the park capturing the images in this video.
When a company changes something in software that has been the same since 1993, you might just get into a discussion as to which way is better.
There is always Option+Command Click on the color wheel.
As usual a novel to read but great infomation. Now that Nuke can output Deep from the scanline render, things can get even more interesting.
It has been 1 year. I don't know one person that makes movies for the money. Their are people who happen to be really good at it. Turns out they need our help.
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By Jeff Heusser:
The Oscars are this weekend and by all rights should be dominating the news cycle. This week is different with multiple important visual effects business related stories hitting in a one day span.
I can't believe its been a year and almost nothing has changed. Not from lack of trying, I guess we just keep going hoping for change. We are a very smart group who loves what we do. I hope we can change the ideas that the non visual effects professional have. We need to edjucate not laugh when they say "CGI".
Ian Failes:
ILM is no stranger to the SciTech Awards; numerous innovations crafted by its artists and engineers have been recognized with prestigious Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The studio’s latest two SciTech honors were awarded recently for ILM’s GPU-based simulation and volume renderer Plume and the Zeno application framework. fxguide spoke to key members of ILM’s team about these in-house visual effects tools.