Dailies

Jack Binks:

After being involved in the enjoyable project of figuring out the colour correction/grading improvement specs for Bison, aka Nuke 8 (notably the new in panel colour wheels, scopes, maintain luminance, etc as well some of the other bits that didn't make it in time for the release - thanks to Frank R, Jeremy S and other notable luminaries in our world who put aside some time up early on to chat to me), I've been punished with involvement in the project of sorting out colour shifts in our Quicktime handling.

It works pretty darn well.

Source: http://major-kong.blogspot.com/2013/12/the...

Nuke Studio on the Nuke List →

There is some good disscussion going on, on the Nuke list about Nuke Studio. Just throwing it out there if you need to kill some render time.

Everest →

The Onion:

“Sometimes a little script tinkering is needed to work in the fact that everyone’s wearing oxygen tanks and 50 pounds of climbing gear, but given the incredible savings it’s nothing you can’t smooth out in post.”

What could go wrong?

Via:John Montgomery

Ops

There have been a lot of searching for J_Ops. I will assume it's to see if there will be a Nuke 8 version soon. I have no official word but it is being worked on.

Remember we are all very busy and sometimes that means other projects take a backburner.

I am also looking forward to a full Nuke 8 version.

Have a good weekend.

GPU Confrence Day 1 →

John Montgomery writing for Fxguide:

In Pascal, the solution is to move the memory and stack multiple memory chips it on top of the GPU on a silicon substrate (a slice of silicon). They then cut through the memory, directly connecting the memory to the GPU. This will solve having to get memory off the actual GPU chip and onto the surrounding board.

Seems simple enough.

The Frame's the Thing →

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.

MacPro

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.