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1984 being right in there with a movie you could shoot with one camera and no computer to be seen.

Except if you make it look like 2016 New York people won't buy it because it's present day and they know that the present day isn't exactly like the film. It will look like their known universe while existing in a future or alternate universe.

So unless you set your entire film in-doors with slightly different fashion or you have a massive budget to build a slightly alternate reality technology/architecture/fashion world for them to visit outside it's going to feel claustrophobic. CG will make your film better. CG made Children of Men *better*. You could tell the whole story of a near-future without CG but imagine children of men without his drive through London--but-not-London-as-you-know-it.

For instance take a look at this shot from Children of Men where they added a video sign to the bus. Sure they could film in London, but why bother, the end result is perfect and it is substantially cheaper. Or you could cut the 'gag' but you miss out on a nice subtle homage to children of Men's encouragement of suicide which enriches the immersion into the world.
https://www.fxguide.com/wp-con...

The animation studios are all in Bangalore.

There certainly are Indian and South Korean animation studios.

Transformers 4 was mostly done by Industrial Lights & Magic, although now that I take a close look it was actually co-produced by Paramount and China Movie Channel. It was also mostly shot with Canadian IMAX cameras.

Regarding Bollywood, Dhoom 3 did $8 million and Chennai Express did $5 million in US box-office. I think that Bollywood movies are still a bit too cheesy for US audiences, although clearly Indian producers could make US-targetted movies if they wanted to.

Visual Effects Artists, arguably the workers directly responsible for the highest grossing films of all time, are not organized.

They're in a very similar position to game developers- short term projects followed by firings, no health care, OT scheduling shenanigans, etc etc.

But all that looks like it might change soon- recent abuses and popularity of VFX movies is making more artists aware that they're getting the raw deal in the movie industry.

http://www.fxguide.com/qt/2187/open-letter-and-animation-guild-updates

You're kidding me. You honestly couldn't manage to go to cinepaint's web page and figure out "click the download button, and double click the file that downloads"?

I did that. And when I launched CinePaint after installation all I got was a CinePaint titlebar, nothing else. I tried to open a photo with it, by ctrl clicking the photo and choosing CinePaint in the Open With dialogue. But it did not open.

Of note btw, while cinepaint is shiny (and easy to install), there's actually better software to do that kind of thing on Macs -- pixelmator for example.

Does pixelmator work with at least 16 bit colour channels, depths? I googled it, and oh surprise a license cost $60. Looking at a comparison between it and Photoshop Elements it looks like PE does more, and I got PE with the scanner I bought. However that comparison doesn't say what it's colour depth is, let's look more. Oh, here we go: "It should be noted that 16 bit raw files when saved out are reduced to 8 bits of color depth so using Pixelmator for JPGs would be fine but if you want to shoot raw I suggest using either the pro-level tools or the software that came with the camera." It only saves 8 bit colour channels? Not that good, at least CinePaint saves at least 16 bit depths. Now let me go over to photo.net and see what people there say about it... Not much, out of thousands of posts it's mentioned only 3 tymes though none of them say how well it works. One does say though that "the screenshots for Pixelmator are apparently created in PhotoShop" and provides a link. CinePaint works well enough to use on a number of movies including "Last Samurai", "Harry Potter", and "Lord of the Rings". And you think pixelmator is better?

Falcon

Absolutely there are companies that focus on opening and ending credits. An opening sequence is a lot more motion graphics intensive than most Visual Effects houses deal with on a day to day basis, as well as sometimes requiring a lot more practical element photography than a lot of effects houses use. While it wouldn't be unusual for a mainly film VFX house to do opening or closing titles, there exist many companies that focus exclusively on producing awesome title sequences. Here are a few examples:

PIC agency (http://www.picagency.com/) (The Kingdom opening credits) Article on their opening credits for the Kingdom: http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=435

Picture Mill (http://www.picturemill.com/) Article on Picture Mill: http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=435

These are just two of many. Hope this helps.

Absolutely there are companies that focus on opening and ending credits. An opening sequence is a lot more motion graphics intensive than most Visual Effects houses deal with on a day to day basis, as well as sometimes requiring a lot more practical element photography than a lot of effects houses use. While it wouldn't be unusual for a mainly film VFX house to do opening or closing titles, there exist many companies that focus exclusively on producing awesome title sequences. Here are a few examples:

PIC agency (http://www.picagency.com/) (The Kingdom opening credits) Article on their opening credits for the Kingdom: http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=435

Picture Mill (http://www.picturemill.com/) Article on Picture Mill: http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=435

These are just two of many. Hope this helps.

I remember when X-Men 3 came out, there was an article showing the "anti-aging" effects applied to Professor X and Magneto (A quick googling shows this: http://www.fxguide.com/article357.html). I'm not sure why this should make headlines. Yes, special effects can alter what you see on the screen. That's the point of special effects. Computers are powerful things, and they can make the old young, the nervous calm, and the fat skinny. As long as it's not being passed off as a non-fiction documentary, the movie's director can do as he sees fit to actualize his vision.

In X-Men 3, they developed a computer effects algorithm that made Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart look very young. In fact, it was so well done that I reckoned them able to go in and make a new original cast Star Trek film. (With the surviving members anyway, may the fallen RIP.) I also reckoned they could make Ian McKellen (Glandolf) and Ian Holm (Bilbo) look younger in The Hobbit with this technique. (Has anyone seen Sam Lowry?)

Here's a site with side-by-side pictures from x3: http://www.fxguide.com/article357.html

This is what they ended up doing for X-Men 3 on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen for their 20+ year prior shot. It's actually pretty impressive what they were able to accomplish digitally, check it out: http://www.fxguide.com/article357.html . A little bit different if you had to do it for an entire movie, but the technology is getting there.

And they're working on a new version. Yeah, it may not be just a typical upgrade, but it's not being discontinued. I'm guessing it will be Intel only for the speed.

Listen to Dion's podcast, http://www.fxguide.com/article359.html. Shake as we know it will cease to exist. Support is already ending (note they're not transferring existing support contracts to this "shake replacement"). The new product (rumored to be called "phenomena") will be a "shake replacement" but nobody has any clue how shake-like it will be (node tree? "pull" architecture? scriptable? Command-line renderer?) One can guess that it won't take existing shake scripts or plugins or macros, it will take fxPlug, and it'll look a lot more Mac-like, but beyond that it's pretty much all speculation.

As for Intel-only vs. universal, Intel-only's no faster, just smaller. Universal is just two builds (Intel and PPC) packaged up in one file. See the man page for lipo.

4.1 is the end of the line for Shake. The huge price drop to $499 reflects that. All support contracts are being bought out and not renewed. Large customers have a source-escrow option available.

They are rumored to be starting work on a new compositing app which may or may not be shake-like, but which will certainly take some time to develop. Some of the shake support people have been laid off, but AFAIK the developers are moving over to the new shake-replacement project.

See http://www.fxguide.com/article359.html (podcast with Dion Scoppettuolo of Apple), http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showforu m=19, or http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2006/06/the-uncer tain-future-of-shake/, and so on.

Show me one working, paid graphic arts professional who is using the Gimp versus Photoshop in their daily life and I'll eat every word I'm typing. That user does not exist.

LinuxJournal Article

fxguide.com Article

I hope they taste good.

can be found here. Written by the former hardware guru for discreet, it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors. I'm no hardware guy, but it made decent sense to me. have at it!

"Even with all its popularity and success for far, some people are still surprised to hear that the current software release of CinePaint is still a pre release version ! Rowe points out the project is far from finished, "The GUI is the main thing holding us back now. The goal for 2003 is to make the GUI in CinePaint better than that in Photoshop. I've been itching to work on the CinePaint interface from day one, but infrastructure, stability, and cross-platform have had to come first."

No, it is actually in the 12 minute Digital Grading section of the special edition DVD. Director Peter Jackson and DP Andrew Lesnie were actively involved in the color grading decisions of the movie. You may not like the result, but as you know, Lesnie did receive the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the Fellowship.

The color grading was done at The Posthouse in New Zealand, under the supervision of Peter Doyle, and using software developed by a Hungarian company Colorfront. The software was later introduced to the general market by London based 5D Solutions as 5D Colossus. 5D later went into liquidation in October 2002. Colorfront has since signed an agreement with Montreal based Discreet, who will introduce their digital film grading system in Las Vegas at NAB 2003 in April. Colorfront software has been used to digitally color grade more than a dozen features including We Were Soldiers, Frida, Blue Crush, Stuart Little 2, xXx, Daredevil and Finding Nemo.

The Posthouse has just started work on the digital color grading of The Return of the King.