vfx news

2009-07-02
Categories : Uncategorized

from creative cow forums…

2009-04-28

Making a 3D LUT for Final Touch using cineSpace
by Jean-Luc Gason on Aug 16, 2006 at 12:02:15 am
Well, I’ll begin this post by a disclaimer :

I’m in not way affiliated with Rising Sun Research, and I won’t get a penny if you buy cineSpace.
I’m just an happy cineSpace user, and cineSpace saved my ass on a lot of occasions.

That being said, let’s begin this “tutorial”.

cineSpace is in fact a suite of small applications :

cineProfiler
equalEyes
cineCube

are the 3 most important.

probeServer and the shake/nuke/fusion plugins are not going to be covered here.

Step one : getting a profile of your monitor

You first need a monitor probe. I personally use the Gretag MacBeth Eye1 Display 2. But you can find a list of supported probes here : http://cinespace.risingsunresearch.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79

Disable all your screensavers and power management sytems that might turn your monitor off.

Launch cineProfiler. You’ll be asked which monitor type you want to profile.

Always choose the “Normal” profile length. The quick one is good for compositing or matte painting, but for color grading we need the most accurate profile we can get.
Click “Start”, then click “Detect Probe”.
Move the white square windows on the monitor you want to calibrate and follow the instruction to calibrate your probe. For the Gretag MacBeth Eye1 stick it on the white patch, click “Calibrate”

Follow the monitor preparation instruction.

On the bottom left, under the start button, you have 2 small buttons :

“Use default profile” or “Select profile”.

Here is what Rising Sun recommend :

If you are profiling for general HD/video/multimedia use we recommend using our default profile as your optimisation target. Otherwise check the Select profile radio button and choose the output profile you will be working with as your optimisation target. Your choice will depend upon the target you intend working with on the profiled monitor

Then click on “Start”.

Follow the instructions and put your contrast to 100% and dim you brightness until ou only see 3 bars, click on “Continue”

Be sure to uncheck the “Have Bias Control” option if you don’t have bias control over the monitor you are profiling.
And if you don’t have separated RGB gain conlor either, you better skip the entire optimization process as it will be useless and click on “Skip Optimization”.

Else, click on “Start Optimization”, the game here is trying to get all the sliders on 0, or the nearest possible value if you can’t make it.

Once you have a satisfying result click on Start Profiling, wait until the profile is done and save it.

Step two : generate a LUT for Final Touch

Once you have your monitor profile, cineSpace can use that profile in addition to a target profile to match a precise color space.

First you can use equalEyes, which is a good little tools but only work as a 1D LUT. Giving you a “near but not perfect” idea of what your images will look in the target color space. Useful when reviewing an image with Graphic Converter, or looking at a quicktime in quicktime player.

Then you have cineCube, which will generate you a 3D LUT for the target software, in our case Final Touch.

cineCube is a command line only software, so you have to open a terminal, go to the /Applications/CineSpace/ directory, launch cineCube with about 2 lines of parameters and so…

A typical cineCube line looks like :

./cineCube -target /Applications/CineSpace/target-profile/kodak_2383.xml -monitor /Applications/CineSpace/monitor-profile/mymonitor.xml -bits 5 -type finaltouch > /Users/MyUser/Library/FinalTouch Items/bin/LUT/kodak_2383.mga

Sounds boring doesn’t it?

Well, as I had to generate 4 or 5 LUT in a row every 14 days (you’ll better profile your monitor each 14 days for accuracy purpose), I’ve written a little GUI for cineCube. you can find it at :

http://www.10bitlog.com/files/cineCubeGUI.zip

The only thing you have to do for it to work is copying the licence file Rising Sun sent you in your hard disk root (just double click on your hard disk on the desktop and copy the .lic file here), because I tryed to use the environment variable to find the license where is is located but couldn’t make it. Be careful, I said COPY not MOVE.

Also, when saving your output LUT in the GUI, don’t forget to add the .MGA extension or Final Touch won’t see the generated LUT.

This was written in AppleScript using XCode, so if anyone is whishing to take a look at the source to improve it, just send me an email at jluc@10bitlog.com

The GUI is not Universal Binary yet, but who care it’s light and performances are not an issue. I’ll compile an Universal Binary once I take the time to installe XCode 2.4

Best regards,

Jean-Luc Gason

http://www.10bitlog.com

original URL:

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/223/137

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Motionographer

2009-04-22
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Watchmen weekend

2009-03-09

I’m seeing a lot of articles about how Watchmen did not outperform 300 this weekend and I have to point out that 300 had a running time of 1 hour and 57 minutes, while Watchmen clocks in at 2 hours and 43 minutes, and I’m not sure if this includes credits or not. Since there are only so many times you can play Watchmen in a day it’s no wonder it came in just slightly under 300! No one is pointing this fact out!

Also I wanted to address all the bad reviews, if you read the majority of negative reviews it’s from people who really didn’t give a lot of thought to the material nor did they really pay attention like this guy from rotten tomatoes:

” Watchmen left me looking at the exit far more often than at the screen.”

Well maybe if you watched the screen and paid attention you might have noticed that the story was actually complex and required your intellect to be tuned in in order to process all the information presented. Watchmen is NOT a story that you can watch once and soak up everything the first viewing! It’s much more complex and you really need to pay attention and see it a few times before you can even begin to appreciate all the work that went into making this multi layered complex story!

I think Zack did an excellent job and I am very happy about the changes! Especially the ending! It was way more believable and made a lot more sense then the graphic novel! I fucking HATED the squid, it was so left field and out of no where that it made me wonder if Alan Moore simply got bored or tired and just wanted to end the novel, the end seemed always rushed to me and the whole conversation between Manhattan and Ozzy didn’t make ANY sense. Zack actually managed to clean up the loose ends and I loved that Laurie and Manhattan had one last moment before he is exiled. That was brilliant and it made so much more sense. I also liked the change in dialog between Adrian and Night Owl 2, Why would Rorschach warn Adrian anyway, it never made sense to me.

I have already seen the movie twice and on each viewing I catch some new nuance and detail I missed the first time around and I look forward to the BluRay version. I’m also very happy to see that the story was treated with respect and did not dumb down or try to explain to the audience too much, instead the film left many questions and fewer answers which at least to me, was a breath of fresh air.

Also, I wish Bubastis was cut from the film completely, only in the graphic novel did his presence make sense and I never cared for that fur ball anyway! He was more of a distraction and had no reason at all to be in the film, other then for the fanboys.

Categories : Uncategorized

Dark eye galaxy

2009-01-19
Dark Eye Galaxy (m64)

Dark Eye Galaxy (m64)

A collision of two galaxies has left a merged star system with an unusual appearance as well as bizarre internal motions. Messier 64 (M64) has a spectacular dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy’s bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the “Black Eye” or “Evil Eye” galaxy.

Categories : Uncategorized

AMD’s Supercomputer cloud

2009-01-10

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605374/amd-plans-supercomputer-with-1000-gpus.html

Over 1,000 Radeon HD 4870s to be chained together to make online supercomputer, allowing games to be played using online processing power.

Categories : Uncategorized

Academy Bake-off List Announced

2009-01-06

“Australia”
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“The Dark Knight”
“Hellboy II: The Golden Army”
“Iron Man”
“Journey to the Center of the Earth”
“The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”

My money is on CCBB, it is by far the most painstaking and meticulous VFX work done to date. Think iron/metal is hard to raytrace? Try human skin, eyeballs, and believable emotional performances by a synthetic character. I would be very surprised if anything beat CCBB this year.

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The best car ad ever!

2008-12-16
The best car ad ever!

The best car ad ever!

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VOTE TODAY!!!

2008-11-04

Vote for change! GO OUT AND VOTE NOW!

to find out where check these sites:

Find your states information

Project Vote Smart

Rock the Vote

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Photoshop CS4 3d paint tools!

2008-10-30

Well, I was wondering how long it would take for photoshop to have 3D support and it looks like it’s finally here!

photoshop 3D paint article

The 3D paint tools however do not support 32 bit paint mode, which means all your textures must be 8 bit since the render engine does not support float, oh well, while this might be OK for games it is not sufficient for film quality.

Some cool new features are content aware scaling, great for resizing images and building textures.

File formats which are currently supported are:

.3ds 3d studio

collada DAE

Google Earth KMZ

U3D

OBJ

So, it looks like 3ds, DAE and obj files are the only way to get data in and out of maya. Thin on the file format support for 3d and still not clear on how UV is supported, I’m assuming Photoshop reads the data from the obj file.

Zooms and pans are now smooth and updated in real time, GL support thanks to the 3D paint tools I bet, which means you should have some type of gpu graphics card installed to get the benefit. Documents can now be tabbed like in a web browser…

Also, Photoshop now comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, so if your OS can support 64 bit you can finally use all that extra ram! Although, I wonder if all the tools take advantage of the 64 bit architecture….

Categories : Uncategorized