“Theatres are closing around the world… No one knows when projectors will be fired up again… Chinese theatres shuttered when the virus hit. In mid-March, an attempt to tentatively start opening cinemas again after the easing of the lockdown saw distributors refuse to release new films and audiences stay at home.”
“Compounding the misery for cinema owners is the fact that film studios have responded by putting films only very recently released in cinemas online.”
“The consequence of all this is that studios may wonder why they’re sharing revenue with exhibitors if they can get a bigger cut by going straight to homes. Indeed, while cinemas are on their knees, streaming platforms are profiting.”
“A century ago, there was even the worry, as there is now, that cinemas would be permanently shut down by a virus. From 1918 to 1920, the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ took the lives of 50 million people worldwide”
“[But] The British government saw cinema as an essential tool for public well-being. “Cinema was the major leisure activity – it kept people occupied, and it helped keep them calm. It also kept them out of the pubs!” says [film historian Lawrence] Napper. The British government saw cinema as an essential tool for public well-being.”
“[all this] should give us cheer to note that while the film industry in America was certainly impacted, it did not suffer overall but rather changed shape – and in fact flourished even further.”
“Film writer Richard Brody recently noted ….Many smaller companies went out of business, and the resulting shakeout led to a consolidation that made the big ones bigger, creating the studios that became the masters of production, distribution, and exhibition together; the flu, combined with the end of the war, gave rise to the mega-Hollywood that’s being duplicated again today.”
“World War Two was also, against the odds, a time in which cinema prospered. Many countries, including Britain, saw the cinema as a propaganda tool: a place to give information and boost morale”
“Pre-pandemic, there were already signs that the culture of cinemagoing was starting to crack under this {streaming culture] pressure”
“However in the new Coronavirus-afflicted world, the battle with streaming platforms seems like relatively small fry.”
“The effect of the virus has already been to make things that seemed unimaginable a month ago a reality. Hollywood studios have joined Netflix in breaking the theatrical window. ”
“And given that blockbusters rely on huge marketing campaigns, it’s unlikely that studios will want to take an immediate risk with their bigger titles when cinemas do eventually re-open – before they are sure if audiences are ready to embrace cinema again.”
“But for all the sense of impending doom, history suggests that cinema will adapt and bounce back. Crowds flocked to the cinema after the 1918 pandemic, and videos only made people more interested in cinema, not less. After several weeks or, more likely, months cooped up indoors, watching films on our television sets and computer, the experience of seeing a film in cinemas the way they were meant to be seen will be all the more magical”
LightIt is a script for Maya and Arnold that will help you and improve your lighting workflow.
Thanks to preset studio lighting components (lights, backdrop…), high quality studio scenes and HDRI library manager.
Three new as-yet-untitled Star Wars films will release on the pre-Christmas weekend every other year beginning in 2022 — December 16, 2022, December 20, 2024 and December 18, 2026.
Four forthcoming Avatar films will release on the pre-Christmas weekend every other year beginning with in 2021 – the first, originally scheduled to debut December 18, 2020, has been pushed to December 17, 2021.
“Estimate the cost of animation projects for different mediums, styles, quality and duration using our interactive instant animation price calculator. Use this price guide to calculate a ballpark figure for your next animation project.”
An open, Interactive 3D Design Collaboration Platform for Multi-Tool Workflows to simplify studio workflows for real-time graphics.
It supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects and rendering across multiple applications.
It also supports NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.
With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time.
For example an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application.
A number of problems in computer vision and related fields would be mitigated if camera spectral sensitivities were known. As consumer cameras are not designed for high-precision visual tasks, manufacturers do not disclose spectral sensitivities. Their estimation requires a costly optical setup, which triggered researchers to come up with numerous indirect methods that aim to lower cost and complexity by using color targets. However, the use of color targets gives rise to new complications that make the estimation more difficult, and consequently, there currently exists no simple, low-cost, robust go-to method for spectral sensitivity estimation that non-specialized research labs can adopt. Furthermore, even if not limited by hardware or cost, researchers frequently work with imagery from multiple cameras that they do not have in their possession.
To provide a practical solution to this problem, we propose a framework for spectral sensitivity estimation that not only does not require any hardware (including a color target), but also does not require physical access to the camera itself. Similar to other work, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes a two-term objective function: a camera-specific term from a system of equations, and a universal term that bounds the solution space.
Different than other work, we utilize publicly available high-quality calibration data to construct both terms. We use the colorimetric mapping matrices provided by the Adobe DNG Converter to formulate the camera-specific system of equations, and constrain the solutions using an autoencoder trained on a database of ground-truth curves. On average, we achieve reconstruction errors as low as those that can arise due to manufacturing imperfections between two copies of the same camera. We provide predicted sensitivities for more than 1,000 cameras that the Adobe DNG Converter currently supports, and discuss which tasks can become trivial when camera responses are available.
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Hitachi-Microdrive-x64.zip
