BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season
“The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Amazon will spend roughly NZ$650 million — $465 million in U.S. dollars — for just the first season of the show.”
“Amazon’s spending will trigger a tax rebate of NZ$160 million ($114 million U.S). This is somewhat controversial in New Zealand as the government could end up on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to help subsidize Amazon’s elves-and-hobbits drama series. Stuff reported that the country’s treasury has labeled the show a “significant fiscal risk” given there is no capped upside to how much Amazon — and therefore the government — might spend. ”
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Academy Software Foundation Siggraph 2022 – New Developments in MaterialX and OSL
https://www.materialx.org/assets/ASWF_OSD2022_MaterialX_OSL_Final.pdf
Local copy:
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StableDiffusion text-to-image applied to videos
#stablediffusion text-to-image checkpoints are now available for research purposes upon request at https://t.co/7SFUVKoUdl
Working on a more permissive release & inpainting checkpoints.
Soon™ coming to @runwayml for text-to-video-editing pic.twitter.com/7XVKydxTeD
— Patrick Esser (@pess_r) August 11, 2022
stablediffusion text-to-image checkpoints are now available for research purposes upon request at https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
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Amazon makes AWS Thinkbox software available free
http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/08/amazon-makes-all-aws-thinkbox-software-available-free/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its AWS Thinkbox software products – Deadline, Draft, Krakatoa, Frost, XMesh, Sequoia and Stoke – available for free.
Anyone with a free AWS account can download the software, with 50,000 one-year licences available for each. Users of Deadline and Krakatoa can also obtain Usage-Based Licensing (UBL) render time for free.
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‘Bullying is a problem’: visual effects artists speak out against Marvel
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/03/marvel-disney-visual-effects-artists-speak-out
“The visual effects industry is filled with terrific people with lots of goodwill who really care but, at the end of the day, there’s nothing in place when their backs are up against the wall and Disney is making crazy demands,”
https://www.thegamer.com/marvel-mcu-vfx-artists-deadlines-crunch-stress/
“VFX artists are speaking out against Marvel, with many refusing to ever work with the entertainment giant again. This comes as artists share accounts of unworkable deadlines and immense pressure leading to stress and unsatisfactory final products. Many have requested to never be put on a Marvel project again, saying that the studio has the “worst VFX management out there”.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/she-hulk-cgi-marvel-vfx-artists-1235332644
“Maslany, Gao and Coiro had been asked by a journalist about their experiences with the “She-Hulk” VFX artists and “how you feel about the finished product,” noting that “there have been numerous accounts lately that VFX houses … they are feeling incredibly crushed by the studios in general and Marvel keeps getting called out.”
https://www.slashfilm.com/941931/why-so-many-vfx-artists-are-fed-up-with-marvel/
“The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, there’s a very high chance you’re not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy. […] One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.”
https://gizmodo.com/disney-marvel-movies-vfx-industry-nightmare-1849385834
“There’s a joke in the visual effects industry that goes like this: Someone hears you work on films, so they ask you, “What movie made you cry?” The artist will respond, “In theaters or in the office?””
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Will Artificial Intelligence End Human Creativity? The Future of Immersive Computing
Autodesk – Brian Pene
FEATURED POSTS
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Mastering Camera Shots and Angles: A Guide for Filmmakers
https://website.ltx.studio/blog/mastering-camera-shots-and-angles
1. Extreme Wide Shot
2. Wide Shot
3. Medium Shot
4. Close Up
5. Extreme Close Up
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Vahan Sosoyan MakeHDR – an OpenFX open source plug-in for merging multiple LDR images into a single HDRI
https://github.com/Sosoyan/make-hdr
Feature notes
- Merge up to 16 inputs with 8, 10 or 12 bit depth processing
- User friendly logarithmic Tone Mapping controls within the tool
- Advanced controls such as Sampling rate and Smoothness
Available at cross platform on Linux, MacOS and Windows Works consistent in compositing applications like Nuke, Fusion, Natron.
NOTE: The goal is to clean the initial individual brackets before or at merging time as much as possible.
This means:- keeping original shooting metadata
- de-fringing
- removing aberration (through camera lens data or automatically)
- at 32 bit
- in ACEScg (or ACES) wherever possible
