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A couple of items of interest displayed at Siggraph this year as well which I think have potential.

Microsoft's come up with a way of painting objects onto an object extracted from a video, then reinserted to the video that remains accurate when the camera angle's changed. Their research paper's called Unwrap Mosaics, and you can see a video on Youtube here (higher quality video on the reseach page).

A company called Image Metrics have made a video with actress Emily O'Brien, using Light Stage technology from USC's Institute of Creative Technologies (an example of this is on a Google presentation called New Techniques for Rendering Human Performances) to create a realistic animated virtual face, that has convinced an editor on VFXWorld that they've passed the uncanny valley. Article is here.

I've been thinking that it was only a matter of time until editing video would become similar to editing photos, I just though it would take a lot more time, but everything is already here. They can even create realistic hair based on photos, just think what technology we'll have in the next decade, this could be in our homes by then.

Yes...a fuel cell is harmless compared to a V8.

Lucasfilm CTO Cliff Plumer Talks Technology

Given the [b]opening of the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio, the new home of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts,[/b] along with subsequent announcements such as HP becoming Lucasfilm's preferred technology provider and ZBrush being added to the ILM pipeline, VFXWorld invited Barbara Robertson to dig a little deeper with Lucasfilm cto Cliff Plumer.

[...]

BR: Does everyone get new machines at the Presidio?
CP: They're transitioning. [b]Our three key vendors for the desktop are HP for workstations, AMD for processors and NVIDIA for graphics. Everyone is moving toward 64-bit workstations.[/b] Most have dual heads [monitors] today. They will all have dual processors. We're working closely with AMD, our processor vendor on dual core processors. We'll get to the stage over the next year where artists will have a dual core dual processor -- two processors on one chip; like four CPUs. Plus, two graphics cards. We're looking at a workstation equivalent on the desktop that's more powerful that what we used to have with a fully blown SGI Onyx, something ILM once paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Our render farm [Angstrom Microsystems(TM)] has about 3,000 processors and we have a proprietary tool that lets unused desktops become part of the render pool at night, so we can scale up to over 4,000 processors.

http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=7086b920&atype=ar ticles&id=2608

Lucasfilm Selects HP Technology
ASIA PACIFIC, Singapore, September 13, 2005 - HP and Lucasfilm Ltd., the leader in visual effects and sound engineering for feature films, today announced a global, three-year, multi-million dollar technology and marketing agreement.

Lucasfilm will use HP Adaptive Enterprise solutions to generate new video games, visual effects and animation. The HP technology, also being used to store and manage LucasFilm's business applications, will be deployed at Lucasfilm's new Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco and at the company's Singapore operations.

Lucasfilm will roll out up to 1,000 high-performance HP workstations powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors for the production of its visual effects and video games. The HP xw9300 Workstation environment at Lucasfilm will run both Linux and Windows XP operating environments in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, with in-house software applications for creation and editing.
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=2553

21 avril 2004: Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) selects Angstrom Microsystems(TM) as provider of next generation server render farm [Opteron]
http://www.angstrom.com/about/press20040421.htm

18 avril 2005 : At NAB today, AMD and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. announced a three-year strategic alliance naming AMD the Preferred Processor Provider for DreamWorks Animation and enabling the company to experience significant advantages in their computer-generated ("CG") filmmaking process.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543~96831,00.html

From some reading I did earlier this week, IIRC, the series was mostly Lightwave, but they transitioned their assets to a Maya/Mental Ray environment due to having to render at 4k resolution and staffing issues. Most feature Maya pipelines that I know of currently use Shake as the compositing tool.

There's a rather nice article detailing all of the behind the scenes stuff here however, reg is required and I can't be bothered to dig out my password to confirm the previous paragraph.

I believe I remember seeing a big Avid logo in the credits, but then again I know Joss is a Mac guy, so it could have been Final Cut Pro -- really anything works just fine for offline edits. I'm sure lots of different platforms were used depending on the stage in production.

The VFX branch nominates films not only on innovation but on execution as well. Thatr's why films with a great quantity of invisible VFX can get nominated (for example Gladiator).

For MC, real ocean plates were used along with CG water. For more details on the VFX of the film check this:

The Effects Mastery of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World