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A very heavy announcement from Red today; so much information, hardware and new benchmarks that it’s hard to digest…
… Images in 6K, from a full 35mm sensor size at 100 fps.
… IMAX size sensors for 9K plates recording at 500 MB/sec.
… 28K images !
All this with modular camera gear.
More details at the Red website.
A VFX sequence for one of our feature film projects involves adding a shoreline to a live, green screen interior shoot. In our business, some might be tempted to go the full CG ocean simulation and matte painting route, but we want to develop the resourceful aspects of our studio…
Actually, we were just waiting for a reasonable opportunity to just rent a Red One camera and check out the footage. So a few weeks ago, we found a rent outlet near the seashore to grab some beach and ocean material. The weather was perfect and we got great 4K footage for all of our shots.
The plates we needed were relatively simple, nothing fancy. Setting up the gear and using the camera itself was a breeze, we will certainly do something like this again if need be. We are still testing out the material, and except for some tracking issues probably due to the rolling shutter, the images are great to work with.
As for the results… Well, coming soon to a theatre near you in 2009…
The Modus crew: Martin Pelletier, Lead look developer and Luc Julien, Lead 2D Compositer. Yes, you can work shirtless at Modus FX.
A nice thing about having a lot of space: one thing we wanted to get going at Modus was to set up a ready-to-use shooting stage. We’re trying out a permanent green screen for the moment. We have already used our studios for shooting extra FX material for one of our film projects, so we are very happy to have a dedicated setup, right in our building!
As you can see in the pictures, it’s a very simple build, drywall, plywood floor and luan sheets for those nice rounded corners. Next in the process: lighting. We do not know if we want to build a permanent fixture or go for rentals when need be.
So I’m in California for my 11th Siggraph, 4th in Los Angeles. The first thing that struck me is that housing is booming in downtown LA. What used to be a dead zone around the Convention Center is now covered with condo towers.
Got all my registration worked out at 7:30 this morning, as always the crowds at Siggraph are extremely well-behaved and the hundreds of non-registered attendees waiting patiently at the doors walked in without so much a fuss.
I attended the new Computer Animation Festival presentations in the morning, a nice addition to the regular classes. I miss the now defunct Electronic Theatre but these new sessions look great. The program on stereoscopy is particularly interesting. Two sessions this morning:
3D primer : The fundamentals of Stereoscopy
The most comprehensive 3-D tutorial I’ve seen. Very informative, both historically and technically. I particular enjoyed Peter Anderson explaining 3-D cinema with chopsticks. Interesting to see a battle forming between Real-D and Dolby 3D…
Great Failed Ideas in Production
As suggested during the session, this panel has to come back. Hearing CG masters like Dyksrta and Knoll talk about tough calls in their careers is, to say the least, comforting.
The rest of the day was a bit rushed, where I jumped around in 3 vendor sessions:
Nuke user group
Their first user group; I could not stay long but did get to see some interesting workflow for The Mummy 3 and Ocula, Foundry’s new tools for stereoscopy.
Softimage Education Summit and Research Summit
I gave a very short talk for the education partners of Softimage about what students need to know to get into VFX studios. Short answer: be pleasant to work with, period. I met new traning centers that will stay in touch. I stayed around for the start of the research summit to meet with old friends that I can only meet at Siggraph.
Autodesk User Group
A very big event, happening at the Shrine Auditorium. The show itself was quite long (just over 3 hours) but most of the presentations were good, notably the Mudbox 2009 preview and the stereoscopy recap. Still, 3 hours is a heck of a long time for marketing chit-chat.
And that’s more than enough for one day. See you all tomorrow, with the start of the exhibition.
The Visual Effects Society (VES), the entertainment industry’s only official organization representing the extended community of visual effects professionals, has published its first ever white paper, entitled “The State of Visual Effects in the Entertainment Industry.”
The paper, drawn from input from numerous sources including a VES Think Tank discussion, the VES Executive Committee and others, examines existing conditions within the visual effects industry and how these issues affect the entertainment business on a macro scale, from workflow to the interaction of personnel within various departments and the extraordinary impacts that the digital revolution has caused.
To see the white paper, click here:
http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/documents/VES_StateofVFX_3.pdf
Still on location… Not too many CG characters in this movie, but scripts can change… And after a few discussions with the director and producer, a new shot concerning CG critters set in moody lighting was added. All the other shots involved props, so matching the lighting would be easy. But with this new shot, I would definitely need a shading sphere*. Shooting starts in a couple of days. What to do?
* For the non VFX-savvy folks reading this, a shading sphere is just a flat colored sphere that is used to capture the lighting, shadows and some color bleeding on a movie set. You move it around in spaces where CG characters will be inserted later as the camera is filming, so it gives you a visual cue to start building your CG environment. In the same fashion, white spheres are also used, as well as chrome balls for highlights.
I finally got close to a Red. If you’re the least bit into digital effects or cinematography, you’ve heard about the Red, from Red Digital Cinema. For the others, the Red One camera is a new, very affordable 4K digital movie camera. Think of it as a 12 mega-pixel camera that can shoot up to 60 RAW frames per second. It’s generating quite a buzz in the industry because of its specs and low price (also because it’s a brand new toy).
Since we’re setting up our own studio, why not design our very own workspace? We had specific criteria:
Here is the result; we call them “pods”:
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