hi
i work on it since several month and… no way, i don’t find how to export xml from final cut and load them in nuke.
it’s certainly possible, i’ve see some people have working on it to on the forum.
please can someone know how to do this ?
i work on my own movie and… damn 582 shot to send to nuke !
I’ve been working on a side project to learn stereoscopic composition, and I got to thinking; what would be the best way to show that a shot is stereoscopic on your reel? Does anyone have any 3d shots on their reel?
This shot isn’t going to get put on my reel, but maybe my next one might be.
The Visual Effects is presenting its second annual Entertainment Industry Production Summit on October 23rd at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. More info is available here.
Am’Skray is a rapidly growing 3d animations and Visual effects studio based in chennai and is looking for compositors/roto/re-touch artists
with 1 to 2 years experience as a part of its expansion process.
This is an 100% growth oriented performance-based company with many creative projects on hand.
Utmost Job satisfaction for the employees is the company’s strength and part of our vision statement.
Artist created the female superhero using 3ds Max and ZBrush. Giving the important project insight, which helps in your projectdiv class=”feedflare”
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Materialwerk today released BRIX, the next generation procedural textures plugin with material library for Autodesk 3D Studio Max.div class=”feedflare”
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Eileen and Frank is a novel luxury-class modular shelf system designed for AANDRES by Andy Andresen.div class=”feedflare”
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I think at this point, it’s fair to say that OK Go has yet to disappoint us with their videos. The last one for “This too shall pass” proved just how painstakingly involved the band works with artists and directors alike. For such high demand concepts, it’s really amazing that they have yet to fail.
We caught up with Directors/Choreographers Eric Gunther & Jeff Lieberman for their newest stop motion / timelapse video for the track End Love. Eric was in Switzerland and Jeff in Berlin, both setting up installations. But they were kind enough to share some insight on the music video.
From the looks of the video it has one continual shot, how long did this take?
Technically one continual ‘take’ (some people get fussy over specific vocabulary) – we had to use three different cameras to deal with the enormous range of time scales, more on that below. All three cameras shot at overlapping times [so they could be combined] but the action did happen continuously, over a roughly 18 hour period; starting right before sunset and ending around 11am.
How many attempts did it take you guys?
We ran the thing twice, although the first one was basically a strong rehearsal – we didn’t get enough of it working by then to have used the take (we had to plan, choreograph, and shoot the whole thing in ten days).
How did you sync the singing in stop motion?
This was the toughest part! It came down to a combination of techniques. In the first section we go from real-time into 4x (meaning every 4 seconds recorded becomes 1 second of playback)… at speeds like 4x you can play the music at quarter speed, and have the singing lip synced just by listening to it and singing slowly… this starts to fail around 8x where the audio starts to become unintelligible.
At this and slower speeds we used a variety of techniques – when it’s around 16-32x (where one minute recorded equals ~2 seconds of playback), we could take the rhythms of the singing and notate when each syllable should start – Eric was continually megaphoning out the cues to all the members, eg “five…. six… ok on eight damian begins saying ‘love’… seven… eight” – all this while also yelling out all the choreography cues! (Eric and I split duties during shooting where basically I managed camera and he managed choreography… was pretty crucial to be able to split those roles, too much going on).
At the slowest speeds even listening to a count becomes almost impossible – the sleeping bag scene is filmed at 512x, meaning every roughly 8 minutes becomes a second. A single line of singing took usually 45 minutes. To do this reasonably well, we filmed each of the band members singing their lines, and then slowed down the recordings to 1/512x. While they sat/slept (yes they really did sleep) in the sleeping bags, we played back the roughly 2 hours of film on a laptop in the park, where they could see where they should be with their mouths.
What software did you use, hardware/camera did you use… and how did you achieve playback?
We used a combination of three cameras. Most is filmed with the Sony EX3 which has hot-swappable data cards, so you can continuously record the entire 18 hours without stopping [hot swappable power as well].. this covers from real-time to 512x (and you can adjust the frame rate of recording as well to deal with excessive data). We used a Phantom high speed camera to do both of the high speed shots, the first at 500 frames per second, the second at 1500. (We used these on my show often so I was comfortable with them over some other options). Finally, the last shot pans off to the sunset, where we mounted a dSLR shooting one frame every few minutes for about a week…
Post processing was interesting! We cut the whole thing in Final Cut, using Motion for image stabilization since speeding things up like this tends to create an enormous amount of jitter (just as slow motion tends to smooth out shots). First we changed playback speeds, then worked on all the camera cutting to get everything in its proper speed, then camera work (we shot everything at 1080p to be cut down to 720p after image stabilization).
One of the aspects we were most interested in was making sure that pretty much anyone could do this at home, if they did the proper planning and spent the time. Besides the high speed camera, you can do all of this relatively easy – you just need to do some planning!
Any sort of technical issues you can share with us? framerates, shutter speeds, etc?
We went all over the place. Off the top of my head I think I can go through the framerates we covered (I’ll express them in ‘relative to normal 30fps, ie 1x is real-time, 4x means the recording is sped up 4x for playback, etc)..
Opening is 1x, suddenly into 4x for first verse – then slow motion (about 1/16x) for the lean, into 8x for the second verse, and 16x for the first chorus. Standing at sunset is roughly 10000x (about three hours in a few seconds), the candle scene is at 60x, the sunrise is similarly ~10000x, running around the park is 64x, the slow motion jump is about 50x, next verse 16x, chorus 1 out is 32x, chorus 2 out is 64x, and the out shot of the sun setting and rising accelerated from 64x to a max of about 170,000x (where a full 24 hours takes about 1/2 sec). In general, we were all over the place!
Thanks guys, and last comments for our reader?
You might want to see an earlier video where Eric and I first explored this idea, kind of an etude. All at 4x but let us explore the terrain and Eric (the subject) is a pretty sick dancer, in any time scale!
Directors: OK Go, Eric Gunther, and Jeff Lieberman
Producer: Shirley Moyers
Specializing in feature film visual effects and animation for international and local producers, Toronto based digital studio, Mr. X Inc. is comprised of a unique and gifted team of artists, filmmakers and programmers devoted to the art, craft and technology of visual story telling. Our talented staff, committed to quality above all else, has achieved some of the most original and photo-realistic visual effects and animation seen on film to date. If you have the imagination, talent and drive, then Mr. X is looking for you. We invite you to visit our website at www.mrxfx.com.
Mr X is looking to hire a Render Wrangler to join the Systems Dept, and work closely with Technical Directors associated with rendering.
Render Wranglers (RW’s) are responsible for providing 24×7 support of the studio’s rendering efforts. RW’s monitor and load balance the render farm, assist with crashed and errored jobs, and participate in the day-to-day management of render farm hosts. RW’s provide rendering support for all departments and divisions, including: Previz, Animation, Lighting and VFX.
RW’s can also assist monitoring data transfers across various file system hierarchies and initiate data moves to balance disk utilization. Other responsibilities include answering the Render Desk hotline, escalating urgent studio support issues after hours and responding to all Support tickets assigned to the department.
Responsibilities:
Render Farm Management:
Detect and troubleshoot failed jobs
Follow-up crashed jobs and jobs killed because they were hung
Monitor, diagnose and resolve/escalate malfunctioning farm hosts
Keep the render farm running at maximum capacity
Monitor file systems for space availability
Monitor render farm I/O utilization
Request changes in storage volume sizes as needed
Identify and report trends and potential problems
Monitor render blade local disk caches and clear caches
where necessary
Monitor software license utilization on render farm
Render Queue Management:
Monitor the XRender render queue
Monitor the XRender Dispatcher operation
Update and maintain the XRender job priorities according to Production
Assist artists with (python) job submissions and job errors
Respond to all render-related Support Request Tickets
Work with production to forecast render resource needs
Render Pipeline Management:
Update shot directories, libraries and servers
Run Linux and Perl scripts to convert proprietary script files into images, movie and video files
Render, inspect and fix frames for multiple concurrent productions
Provide render time estimates to producers, directors and animators
for dailies and film out
Studio Support:
Monitor studio infrastructure servers and escalate problems
Answer and escalate Studio Help Desk calls after hours and on weekends
After hours and weekend render farm support
Qualifications:
Good verbal and writing skills, good organizational skills
Able to handle a fast paced, high pressure environment
Can work well with a group or independently
Able to work very flexible hours on weekend evenings or nights. The shift will be from approximately 6pm-3am.
Please send your cover letter and resume to recruiting@mrxfx.com with the subject line Render Wrangler.
Several days ago, we received the latest from MAKE: a knock down, drag out homage to film noir style crime dramas of old Hollywood, called Palm Springs. The piece was created for the Palm Springs International ShortFest, which runs from June 22nd – June 28th. Rather than opining on the merits of the work, we asked MAKE’s Director and Lead Animator for the opener, Andrew Chesworth, to summarize how the team of artists executed the piece, in detail:
“Palm Springs was created using primarily traditional animation drawn directly into Photoshop with Wacom Cintiq tablets. The idea was to achieve the aesthetic of classical animation but to do it in a completely paperless fashion. The creative workflow was near identical to that of traditional analog animation – starting with rough layouts buried in construction lines, and gradually working toward more finished scenes through a layering process of drawing. In several scenes, assistants in-betweened and touched up the drawings of key animators, and finished animation was passed on to the colorists who painted each frame of animation with the dry-brush styling.
3D animation was employed for a handful of inorganic subjects, such as the vehicles in the car chase, the ceiling fan in the office, and the movie projector. The modeling, animation, and rendering was all done in Maya. Mental Ray’s contour shader was employed to achieve the outlines on the objects, and the models were built very specifically to accommodate the line work to match the drawn designs. Hard shadow render passes, animated texture overlays, and a great deal of rotoscoped hand-drawn effects were composited onto the 3D elements to mesh them within the hand-drawn world as much as possible.
Compositing was all done in After Effects, where additional treatments were placed over the drawn elements to achieve a more analog aesthetic. Subtle texture overlays, diffusion filters, and in many cases film grain and noise were added to conform the elements.”
For more, check out the Q&A and behind-the-scenes artwork that went into creating the opener here.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A. during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.