Modo is one of the most unique and interesting 3D creation applications available. It has clearly taken its own development path. The team that developed it, lead by Brad Peebler, were originally at NewTek developing LightWave. I often complained in the early days that LightWave was like an old farm house, put together helter-skelter with a lot of old code underneath and an interface that begged for improvement. I also wrote that the the program needed to be rewritten from the ground up with serious interface and performance improvements. Apparently some of the lead engineers at LightWave were thinking in the same direction because in 2001, they had the testicular integrity to leave LightWave en masse to form Luxology. They were brave and I salute them. They’d had years of feedback from users and they knew what users wanted, even if upper management didn’t. With their years of experience they also had a few ideas of their own—great ideas. Read More »
I’ve mentioned a few Kickstarter campaigns on this blog over the years. Kickstarter is such a cool idea and I’ve been enjoying products that have resulted from Kickstater myself. A new one caught my eye today for Filmtoys. It’s a modular “camera support and protection system” that looks like it’s tailor-made for DSLRs but could probably have other uses as well. It looks quite adaptable with its Erector Set-style construction. Filmtoys isn’t only a Kickstarter campaign; the company has a website and YouTube channel as well. Apparently the company is local to where I am, in Nashville, but the Filmtoys founder is also a founder of Filmtools, a place where you can get just about anything camera related. I’m not a dedicated camera guy, so I can’t really compare the Filmtoys rig to the other mounds of support gear out there; I’ll leave that to somebody else. As a 7D owner, however, I do like the look the rig’s adaptability. Read More »
When news broke that Eastman Kodak had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it seemed like just another signpost on the road marking the long, slow decline of 35mm film acquisition and exhibition. But I didn’t think it was any cause to ring the alarms. Despite some reports to the contrary (here’s one that erroneously says studios aren’t shooting movies on film anymore), film has some life left in it. Right?
Well, I missed the kerfuffle that arose last November, when Twentieth Century Fox sent out a “Dear Exhibitor” letter urging exhibitors to convert their screens to digital. It reads, in part:
The date is fast approaching when Twentieth Century Fox and Fox Searchlight will adopt the digital format as the only format in which it will theatrically distribute its films. We currently expect that this date will be within the next year or two …. In short, the time is now for digital conversion.
Some exhibitors found the tone of the letter vaguely threatening — “You got a nice theater here. Shame if something were to, you know, happen to it.” But, divorced from the emotions that surround rapid (and expensive) change, it’s good advice, and you could say it’s thoughtful of Fox to issue a warning before ramping down celluloid production, not to mention terminating the virtual-print fee (VPF) system through which studios have shouldered some of the costs of digital conversion.
Here’s an interesting color correction plug-in for Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Pro 7 and Motion users: Tonalizer|VFX. Released last year by the Danish company Irudis, Tonalizer stands apart from all the other color correction plug-ins out there with its nuanced approach to the task. Plus, it can do some things that a lot of other FCPX plug-ins can’t. For starters, it doesn’t try to hit you over the head with canned presets and it doesn’t encourage extreme corrections. Instead, it makes much more subtle changes and attempts to take “into account the technical limitation of the original data, which are often highly compressed and thus delicate and easily prone to revealing posterization, noise and related compression-induced artifacts.” I’m not sure how it can tell a blown-out 7D shot from a blown-out Alexa shot but I’ve gotten some really nice, subtle looks on the 7D footage I used to test it. Read More »
Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr.
Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.
If you’re going to jump in then it’s worth reading over the important notes on the Lightroom Journal blog, which discuss how the beta version will interact with existing Lightroom installs and catalogs. I’ve used other Lightroom betas in the past and haven’t had any issues with them damaging any existing Lightroom data. Scroll down on that Lightroom blog page for even more bullet-point detail of what’s new in the various modules.
One very interesting change to Lightroom 4 is much better support for video. DSLR video is now supported right in the application. You can playback video, trim the in-and-out points, easily export a still frame and—this is the biggie—do some actual color correction on video using some of Lightroom’s tools. It doesn’t look like it’s a full-blown color grading application (Adobe has Speedgrade for that now!) but it looks like a quick way to make a color correction and export that to a new video file or send it to a supported service like Facebook or Flickr.
Founder John Walker is a very interesting guy. He, like Riddle (read more about him in my previous post), is a brilliant programmer and by some accounts a bit of a wacko—not my words. (PC Week columnist Jesse Berst once described Walker as “the most brilliant and the most bizarre person I’ve ever met.”) Where Riddle was nearly obsessed with efficient code and architecture, Walker, though less disciplined with his code, had a better view of the big picture. Both men are brilliant, but in very different ways. Walker not only could write code, he could manage other programmers in a manner of speaking…they were a headstrong bunch. Riddle found Walker a bit too controlling, but then how else do you manage 18 coders, all very expressive, with their own ideas about how things should be done? Read More »
Now this is a surprise: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher has vaulted past Steven Spielberg in the eyes of the Directors Guild of America. Spielberg’s family-friendly World War I melodrama War Horse is widely expected to secure him an Oscar nomination as Best Director, but the DGA has instead chosen to recognize Fincher’s very adult, R-rated work.
The other names on the list are the usual suspects — Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris, Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), and Martin Scorsese (Hugo).
Fincher’s appearance on the DGA’s list finishes a kind of trifecta for Dragon Tattoo — after being passed over for recognition by most of the major critics’ groups (and SAG), the film has now made the shortlists of industry peers in the Producers Guild, the Writers Guild, and the DGA. As we recalibrate our Oscar-ometers, it may be time to consider Dragon Tattoo a serious awards contender.
Autodesk has been around since the early 80s when John Walker and some of his programmer friends founded it as a small company based on their original product, AutoCAD, an early Computer Aided Design program acquired from programmer Michael Riddle. It’s Riddle’s early innovations that set the ball rolling, and it’s worth a look back to see how it all began.
Riddle, seen in his lab in Arizona, above (photo courtesy of the DigiBarn Museum), developed his first CAD program in the 70s. He didn’t like it, so he started over. He worked on a 16-bit processor with 64k of addressable space. The operating system took up 48K. Think about that kind of genius for a moment: he was able to write his own high-level language compiler (SPL: System’s Programing Language) when existing ones didn’t suit his needs. Read More »
2011 saw the introduction of the next great thing in high-speed-data port connections with Apple’s Thunderbolt. It really is a cool technology that could very well make the multi-cable peripheral-connection spaghetti-mess a thing of the past. The kind of speed that Thunderbolt is capable of delivering would be most at home on the digital professional’s desktop, so it’s video and photography folks who will most likely be adopting this technology first. Here we are at the beginning of 2012 with Thunderbolt existing on all of Apple’s machines except for the Mac Pro. Thunderbolt’s promise has also been hampered by the lack of more Thunderbolt products. So will the technology be a hit in 2012 or likely fizzle out into an expensive and specialty connection? It depends on whom you ask. Read More »
You can follow lots of filmmakers on Twitter. @BradBirdA113 just joined. It seems like @ThatKevinSmith has been there forever. But few directors have taken to Twitter and the Internet with the uncensored abandon and combative glee exhibited by @JosephKahn.
Kahn (left) is a Grammy- and MTV VMA-winning music-video and commercial director (and film-school drop-out) who jumped into features with 2004′s Torque, followed by the self-financed horror comedy Detention, which was picked up by Sony last year. He’s also a big proponent of digital cameras from RED and elsewhere, and routinely proselytizes for digital shooting formats. You may remember his highly irreverent How to Be a Director blog post, which our own Scott Simmons linked up back in 2010.
Following a late-December “film-versus-video tweet fight” with film critics about whether digital cinematography can match “the film look,” it hasn’t taken long for Kahn to get back in fighting form for the new year. Following are the top 10 Joseph Kahn tweets of 2012 … to date. (Click the image to see a bigger version.) Read More »
Here’s an interesting color correction plug-in for Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Pro 7 and Motion users: 
2011 saw the introduction of the next great thing in high-speed-data port connections with 
You can follow lots of filmmakers on Twitter. 
