Training: Visual Effects for Directors

The past decade has seen visual effects pervade film and television production to the extent that it is rare to see a television commercial with no visual effects, even documentary-style dramatic programs are sweetened and cleaned up via compositing, and films outside the big-budget action movie genre often have vfx shot counts in the dozens or even hundred.

This changing of the guard has not been without its difficulties; principle among these are the veteran directors and art directors who learned how to craft compelling images and stories before the computer became a routine part of the process. Good visual effects shooting is all about planning, but effective planning requires experience.

Visual Effects for Directors, a 7 DVD set released by Hollywood Camera Work, is inspiring for how thoroughly and patiently it visually explains how to shoot ordinary, bread-and-butter visual effects shots. Far from the mystifyingly complex techniques used to push the entire medium forward in, say, the latest recipient of the Visual Effects Oscar, the approaches shown on these seven videos are in the realm of what should be common knowledge among effects professionals.

VLC Goes 1.0

VLC, possibly the most versatile desktop video player in the world, was announced as version 1.0.0 (aka “GoldenEye” if you prefer Ian Fleming style nicknames). Its features are widespread, but among the most significant is that it is the only major alternative to QuickTime Player that allows you to step frame by frame through a video file, a limitation which has frankly stymied professional use of Windows Media, Real and other closed-source players.

But that’s not all. With VLC 1.0.0 you can also:

• record live video
• play dozens of file formats on Mac, Windows or Linux, many of them otherwise unsupported (including QuickTime on Linux, apparently)
• play DVDs from any region
• play damaged or partially downloaded files otherwise considered “unplayable”
• view full screen (and even pipe audio out to AirTunes)
• since some readers are already using VLC 1.0.0, I encourage you to add other favorites in the comments!

The feature list is quite long and - due to the intense rush to download VLC - the forum and wiki, major sources of information, are disabled today and perhaps for some time.

If there were one feature I would hope they would add for version 1.5, it would be playback of image sequences. A nerd can dream.

Is Nuke the new Shake?

A series of press releases from The Foundry since NAB have marked major steps forward for Nuke as the emerging software leader for visual effects compositing. The latest of these is this morning’s news that Weta Digital has invested in a Nuke site license, less than a month after ILM announced the same. During that time the Nuke founder/developers managed to reacquire ownership of the software in what may have appeared from the outside like a confusing flip-flop of assets between Digital Domain and Foundry. The bottom line seems to be that the people who make Nuke have secured control of its destiny for the forseeable future, and major studios have responded by investing in that future.

Page 1 of 1 pages