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Netflix Animation’s management reboot and cancellations
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/netflix-animation-erased-executives-fired-220251819.html
Phil Rynda, whose official title is Netflix’s Director of Creative Leadership and Development for Original Animation, was let go this week, along with several of his staff, TheWrap can exclusively report and Netflix has confirmed.
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MARCEL PICHERT – 12 Nuke Toolsets for a smarter and faster comp workflow
https://www.marcelpichert.com/post/12-toolsets-for-a-smarter-and-faster-comp-workflow
http://www.nukepedia.com/miscellaneous/m_toolsets
Efficient-Workflow Toolsets:
– degrain
– prerender
– concatenation
Keying Toolsets:
– IBK stacker
– Keying Setup Basic
– Keying Setup Plus
Projection Toolsets:
– uv project
– project warp
– project shadow
Mini Toolsets:
– rotate normals
– clamp saturation
– check comp
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Netflix shares loss may trigger a free, ad-supported streaming
Announcing its Q1 2022 results, the streaming leader revealed that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the quarter, prompting an investor sell-off that lopped off more than a third of the SVOD’s value in after-hours trading.
Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings then revealed in an earnings call that the streamer would roll out cheaper ad-supported versions of its service, with plans being explored “over the next year or two.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61173561
Squeezed consumers are cutting back on streaming services to save money, while some feel there is too much content to choose from amid an avalanche of competition from rivals such as Disney and Amazon.
“Netflix’s wider problem, along with the rest of the sector is that consumers don’t have unlimited funds, and that one or two subscriptions is usually enough,” said Michael Hewson, an analyst at CMC Markets.
Netflix remains the world’s leading streaming service with more than 220 million subscribers. It is increasingly producing its own content and shows such as the Crown, Bridgerton and Squid Game have been global hits.
The firm had enjoyed uninterrupted quarterly growth in subscribers since October 2011 but on Tuesday it admitted it was losing customers to rivals, while struggling to expand due to password sharing.
It also said a decision to raise prices in key markets had cost it 600,000 subscribers in North America alone, while its exit from Russia over Ukraine lost it 700,000.
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OpenVDB and NanoVDB in Unreal Engine
NanoVDB, is NVIDIA’s version of the OpenVDB library. This solution offers one significant advantage over OpenVDB, namely GPU support. It accelerates processes such as filtering, volume rendering, collision detection, ray tracing, etc., and allows you to generate and load complex special effects, all in real time.
Nevertheless, the NanoVDB structure does not significantly compress volume size. Therefore, it’s not so commonly applied in game development.
github.com/eidosmontreal/unreal-vdb
Example file: https://lnkd.in/gMqmFwCj
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Rez – python friendly industry standard cross-platform package, environment and versions manager
https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez
Rez is a cross-platform package manager with a difference. Using Rez you can create standalone environments configured for a given set of packages. However, unlike many other package managers, packages are not installed into these standalone environments. Instead, all package versions are installed into a central repository, and standalone environments reference these existing packages. This means that configured environments are lightweight, and very fast to create, often taking just a few seconds to configure despite containing hundreds of packages.
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Shutter Speed and Rolling Shutter
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-rolling-stutter
Rendering rolling shutter in Arnold
Rolling_shutter is used to simulate the type of rolling shutter effect seen in footage shot with digital cameras that use CMOS-based sensors such as Blackmagics, Alexas, REDs, and even iPhones. This method is implemented by rolling (moving) the shutter across the camera area instead of the entire image area all at the same time.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_cameras_html
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Disney’s Moana Island Scene – Free data set
https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene/
This data set contains everything necessary to render a version of the Motunui island featured in the 2016 film Moana.
FEATURED POSTS
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HDR and Color
https://www.soundandvision.com/content/nits-and-bits-hdr-and-color
In HD we often refer to the range of available colors as a color gamut. Such a color gamut is typically plotted on a two-dimensional diagram, called a CIE chart, as shown in at the top of this blog. Each color is characterized by its x/y coordinates.
Good enough for government work, perhaps. But for HDR, with its higher luminance levels and wider color, the gamut becomes three-dimensional.
For HDR the color gamut therefore becomes a characteristic we now call the color volume. It isn’t easy to show color volume on a two-dimensional medium like the printed page or a computer screen, but one method is shown below. As the luminance becomes higher, the picture eventually turns to white. As it becomes darker, it fades to black. The traditional color gamut shown on the CIE chart is simply a slice through this color volume at a selected luminance level, such as 50%.
Three different color volumes—we still refer to them as color gamuts though their third dimension is important—are currently the most significant. The first is BT.709 (sometimes referred to as Rec.709), the color gamut used for pre-UHD/HDR formats, including standard HD.
The largest is known as BT.2020; it encompasses (roughly) the range of colors visible to the human eye (though ET might find it insufficient!).
Between these two is the color gamut used in digital cinema, known as DCI-P3.
sRGB
D65
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Outpost VFX lighting tips
www.outpost-vfx.com/en/news/18-pro-tips-and-tricks-for-lighting
Get as much information regarding your plate lighting as possible
- Always use a reference
- Replicate what is happening in real life
- Invest into a solid HDRI
- Start Simple
- Observe real world lighting, photography and cinematography
- Don’t neglect the theory
- Learn the difference between realism and photo-realism.
- Keep your scenes organised