The Making of RED SAND

The UAT Digital Video team has put together 4 behind-the-scenes documentaries about the making of our epic Mass Effect prequel fan film, RED SAND! The videos give a great look into the creative process, the nuts and bolts of VFX-heavy filmmaking, and the community of UATDV students. It's 22 minutes of behind the scenes awesomeness. Check it out!

fxguide: The Art of Destruction

The fine folks over at fxguide.com have compiled a stellar and comprehensive run-down of the state of the art when it comes to "blowing crap up" Hollywood-style.

Destruction pipelines today are key aspects of any major visual effects pipeline. Many current pipelines are based on Rigid Body Simulations (RBS) or otherwise referred to as Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD), but a new solution – Finite Element Analysis (FEA) – is beginning to emerge. In this ‘Art Of’ article, we talk to some of the major visual effects studios – ILM, Imageworks, MPC, Double Negative and Framestore – about how they approach their destruction toolsets.

Read the whole article - featuring looks at Harry Potter, X-Men: First Class, 2012, and more - here!

fxguide: 'The Art of Roto: 2011'

fxguide recently published this outstanding roundup of state-of-the-art rotoscoping tools and techniques - which all beginning visual effects artists need to be familiar with.

Rotoscoping is the process of manually altering film or video footage one frame at a time. The frames can be painted on arbitrarily to create custom animated effects like lightning or lightsabres, or traced to create realistic traditional style animation or to produce hold-out mattes for compositing elements in a scene and, more recently, to produce depth maps for stereo conversion.

As a VFX artist, you are primarily creating motion graphics or visual effects. A thorough knowledge of rotoscoping and roto tools is vital to solving a vast amount of problem solving in VFX: rig removal, stereo conversion, greenscreen compositing, hold out mattes, split screens, and even object or feature-based color grading. It is perhaps one of the widely used tools in visual effects.

It's a lengthy read, but well worth it. Bookmark it for future reference, too!

FALLOUT Trailer now online!

The trailer for UAT Digital Video's epic sci-fi action thriller "FALLOUT" is now online. You can check it out on our YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo pages, or watch the embedded version right here!

FALLOUT Short Film Trailer from UAT Digital Video on Vimeo.

RED ROCKET - Now That's FAST!

Check out this video of the RED ROCKET in action as it transcodes 20 seconds worth of 4k frames in just 19 seconds! (In other words, faster than real time.)

Red Rocket from Ted Schilowitz on Vimeo.

The ROCKET is RED's new accelerator board for decoding, transcoding, de-Bayering and playback of files shot with the RED ONE camera. What is "de-Bayering?" I'm glad you asked!

The simple explanation is that digital video camcorders and digital cinema cameras such as the RED ONE employ a Bayer filter to optimize image capture and compression and emulate the way the human eye perceives chrominance and luminance. The result is that images shot using this filtering process end up with twice as many green pixels as blue or red pixels, and a "de-Bayer" process is required to ensure proper color balance on playback. What's noteworthy about the RED ROCKET is that it does all of that (and more) at breakneck speeds, for not a lot of money. This bodes well for 4K-capable desktop editing machines at even high performance benchmarks with lower costs in the near future.

Cool Tool: Footage Calculator

Digital Rebellion has made available this fantastic tool for calculating the size in gigabytes of any length of any digital video codec and format. There are some other neat tools for depth of field, lens angle, pixel aspect and more - but I think the footage calculator is far and away the most useful. Bookmark it!

90+ Basic Avid Media Composer Tutorials

Here's a great resource I found on the Avid Community bulletin boards:

90+ Tutorials on Basic MC tips

One of the board's moderators has been producing short video tutorials on a number of Media Composer-related topics, and has now aggregated them all in one handy list. If you're struggling with Avid or just need a refresher, be sure to check them out.

(Just a word of warning, some of the tutorials are specifically about transitioning from Avid Liquid to Media Composer. If you've never used Liquid, these might be a tad confusing and are probably best skipped.)

Avid upgrades Media Composer

In yesterday's edition of the Studio Daily Blog, Scott Simmons writes that Avid is now "dongle free in 2009." That's right, the little purple dangly thing is going away for good. And while current UAT students might not realize that Avid even has a dongle (the dongles are locked inside the PCs in our Avid lab), students from just a few years ago will surely remember the nightmare of having to check a dongle out of the Library every time they wanted to use the Avid software. What a mess! But thankfully, that is all behind us now.

What's more, Avid Media Composer 3.5 features new, revolutionary tools for handling tapeless media like XDCAM and P2, adds stereoscopic (3D) support, and a host of other upgrades big and small. Check out Avid's press release for more info.

And... last and probably best for the Digital Video student... Media Composer is also available as a free, fully-functional, 14-day trial... here.

Behind the VFX of Benjamin Button

Here's a great TED talk about the Oscar-winning visual effects created for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Now I am not a big fan of the overall film, but I was certainly wowed by the visual effects. Here, Ed Ulbrich from Digital Domain takes us step-by-step through the creation of the film's most dazzling effect - a photorealistic human head.

Why Avid?

I get that question all the time... "Why Avid? Why don't you teach Final Cut?"

Here's why.

All five of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture were created using Avid products. In fact, Avid products account for a whopping EIGHTY Oscar nominations this year.

If that's not a resounding testimonial to the power of our chosen editing software, I don't know what is!

The Freesound Project

Here's a website I came across when I was in L.A. taking an editing class towards my Master's Degree. It was highly recommended to me by one of my classmates as a great source for free sounds for film and video projects.

Check it out here: The Freesound Project