Matrox MXO2 and CompressHD support for Lion now available

Release 2.3 for Mac is now available for Matrox MXO2 Family and CompressHD.

Release 2.3 provides the following new features for Matrox MXO2 Family and CompressHD:

• Support for Mac OS X Lion v10.7.


• Added closed captioning workflow support for web deliverables (.mov) using Matrox MAX technology in Apple Compressor. When an SCC (CEA-608) closed caption file is associated with your source media file in Compressor, Matrox MAX technology now embeds the closed caption data to the encoded video file when encoding at 1:1, or when downscaling.


• Updates to address specific customer issues and to improve overall stability.

The timely release of the new driver means that you can immediately take advantage of the great new features of Lion while continuing to reap all the productivity benefits of your Matrox MXO2 devices with Final Cut Studio and many other applications.

CityEngine 2011 New Features

Check out the cool new features of CityEngine Pro, by Procedural.  Procedural was recently acquired by Esri.

In front of an audience of more than 14'000 people, Gert van Maren, 3D product manager at Esri, showed in an impressive live demo some of the new capabilities of CityEngine 2011. He demonstrated the novel drag'n'drop features allowing easy-to-use GIS data import, comfortable placement of landmark models, and simplified rule assignment. Furthermore the brand-new Style Manager has been introduced which allows for a interactive preview and selection of different rule templates. This and more can be seen in the video below:

The Foundry NUKE and NUKEX 6.3 now available.

The most anticipated release of the year is now available! The vast array of improvements and additions to NUKE and NUKEX 6.3 will blow you away.

This is our BIGGEST EVER release of NUKE, expanding the parameters of traditional compositing.

Production proven on Commercials and Episodic Television as well as Film, NUKE and NUKEX put more control into the hands of artists, ensuring they can stay in the software for longer and avoid round-trips to other departments.

Find out more and secure your copy today.

So, what's new?

3D Particles (X)
NUKEX's true 3D particle system integrates seamlessly with NUKE's 3D workspace.
Artists can create a range of particle effects quickly and effectively within the composite including breaking windows, dust, fire and rain. No need to go back and forth to an external 3D rendering package.
Planar Tracker (X)
Dramatically speed up common compositing tasks such as sign replacement, element inserts and clean plate generation, with NUKEX's Planar Tracker.
Any new element to be matched to a planar surface can easily be tracked, placed and animated.
Denoise (X)
Our Sci-Tech® Award winning research team have built on their 2007 FURNACE work to produce a completely new Wavelet-based Denoise algorithm, resulting in cleaner and more visually pleasing results with less artefacts.
Grid and Spline Warping
We've completely rewritten the Spline and Grid Warping tools in NUKE to make them more intuitive and accurate to use. The point and spline UI is shared with RotoPaint allowing the exchange of curves, attachment of spline and grid points to trackers, editing of animation in the curve editor / dope sheet and Python scripting support.
Audio Scratch Track
The Audio Scratch Track works with NUKE’s curve editor, allowing artists to match their VFX to audio cues and generate animation curves from audio waveforms.
Displacement Shader
This surface shader applies dynamic tessellation and displacement of 3D geometry at render time, resulting in quicker and higher quality 2D-3D stereoscopic conversion. This also has a similar effect on other 3D VFX compositing tasks such as virtual environment creation.
Deep Compositing
Deep Compositing allows artists to work with 'deep images' containing multiple opacity or colour samples per pixel. This allows rendering of CGI elements without predetermined holdout mattes, avoiding the need for re-renders when content changes.
And there's more..!

DaVinci Resolve 8 with NVIDIA Quadro graphics and Cubix GPU-Xpander!

 

Imagineer Systems mocha news: tutorials, training, case studies & more

Imagineer Systems mocha news bites for July. Case study Identity FX and Green Lantern

"What people don't realize is, it's most often the simplest of scenes thatare the most complex to recreate in 3D space. In Green Lantern, recreating the kitchen scene was much more difficult than the action shots because the challenge wasn't to make things pop out of the screen, but to create a truly immersive experience, like the viewer is in the kitchen. mocha is huge component of what we do on shots like this." - Leo Vezzali, Identity FXread more New video tutorial Face tracking & mochaImport from MamoWorld In this tutorial, Mathias Moehl shows how he used mocha for face tracking and his After Effects script mochaImport to assist in this "monster-face" distortion technique. If you have never watched Mathias' tutorials, they are well done and offer useful tips, tricks and a bit of political humor. Make sure to visit MamoWorld for more tutorials and information on Mathias' excellent AE scripts. watch now New course from CGS Workshops Rotoscoping with mocha taught by Steve Wright Computer Graphics Society invites you to join Steve Wright, senior visual effects compositor and master trainer for a 4 week course on rotoscoping with mocha. Beyond how to rotoscope and track, students will also learn core rotoscoping skills that can be ported to any rotoscoping program - keyframing strategies, shape breakdowns, how to inspect your own roto work, and much more.  Starts August 8, 2011.learn more

Autodesk Smoke: Conforming Timelines from Adobe Premiere Pro

Grant Kay put up an excellent video showing the workflow from Adobe Premiere to Smoke on his blog located at The Area.  You can go to his blog to see other videos about smoke here.

Below is an excerpt:

Adobe Premiere Pro has a variety of options for exporting media and metadata such as EDLs, AAFs and XMLs. But which one would you use with Autodesk Smoke?

While EDLs will give you an edit with tape-names and timecode, using an AAFs will give you all that plus the ability to link to the same media you’ve already been working with in Premiere.

Check out this video for the workflow!



It is very simple and easy to export an AAF and conform it in Autodesk Smoke.

Please check the on-line Wiki database to see what is supported when conforming an Adobe Premiere Pro AAF in Autodesk Smoke. To my knowledge you should be able to look at the Avid AAF Conforming notes on the Autodesk Wiki that will tell you which features are supported when conforming from AAF.

And just so you’ll have them all in one place, here are links to my previous blogs showing conform in Smoke from Final Cut Pro 7 and Avid Media Composer. Remember, no matter what application you’re using to edit, if it exports an EDL, XML or AAF, you can conform it in Smoke.

Coming very soon… A new videos series giving a high level overview of Smoke for Final Cut Pro 7 editors presented by myself and Final Cut Pro Editor, Rick Young (www.macvideo.tv)

Thanks for all the feedback and comments. Please keep them coming in.

Please take care where ever you are!

Signing off
Grant

AJA New Updates Available for FCP 7 and FCP X

AJA announced software and driver updates early this week and continues development with another update today.

AJA have just released a new 9.0.3 software release for KONA, Io Express and Io HD users that solves a possible Kernel Panic problem for Final Cut Pro 7 users with OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), in addition to other improvements.

For FCP X users AJA have released an updated KONA X Beta software version for KONA 3G, KONA 3, KONA LHi and KONA LHe.

You can find the new AJA Mac and Windows software, plug-ins, and release notes at: http://www.aja.com/support/index.php