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!

Why You Need to Use SCENECHRONIZE Now!

So I'm sure many of you are familiar with Celtx - an online preproduction site. Some of you may be aware of Base Camp - an online project management tool. And the vast majority of pros in this industry are familiar with Entertainment Partners' "Movie Magic" line of software for budgeting and scheduling.

Now - how about a service that combines the functionality of all three. Scenechronize provides industry-standard tools such as Final Draft script imports (via PDF), Script Breakdown, Stripboard, Day-out-of-Days, and more, combined with an online collaborative environment that allows cast and crew to have one central point of contact for all information related to a project.

Import the PDF of your script and get right to the Breakdown. Scenechronize identifies characters and starts filling in the details for you. To add items to the Breakdown, simply highlight text in the script and then choose the category it belongs to. Before you know it, your Breakdown is totally populated with every element you need to make your film.

Once the Breakdown is complete, you can start building your Stripboard and your Schedule. Auto-sort tools allow you to sort your Stripboard by character, location, slugline, and more, plus you can then manually sort by simply dragging and dropping.

Once you enter a start date into the Stripboard, then you can generate your DooD (Day-out-of-Days) for EVERY element in the film. Need to know when a particular actor starts work? It's all there.

Plus, you can upload any kind of document, like pictures of your cast, costumes, props, your storyboards, anything that goes into your creative process. Documents can be linked to particular scenes or simply made available to the crew and cast members you select. You can generate any kind of report you might need, plus Call Sheets, daily Sides, and more.

Scenechronize offers a variety of packages, some of which even fit a student budget - FREE. Check it out and start using it today. I'm using it on my MFA thesis film and I can't imagine doing this project without it!

New DV Equipment Reservation System

New for this semester! The DV Reservation Book in the Library has been replaced with a new online spreadsheet. Check it out here, and watch this tutorial video:

DV Equipment Reservation System Tutorial from UAT Digital Video on Vimeo.

Free Concrete Textures

Here's another collection from Best Design Options - 110 Free Concrete Textures, Volume I. This one is PERFECT for all you 3D modelers in need of some photorealistic textures to wrap around your models. Bookmark this one or just download 'em all.

100 Websites and Blogs Where You Can Download Free Vector Graphics

The title says it all... Best Design Options has compiled this great list of resources where you can find free vector graphics - great elements for any motion graphics you might be working on. Bookmark this one!

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!

Free HD Greenscreen Plates

The fine folks at Hollywood Camera Work, makers of the excellent DVD series "Visual Effects for Directors," have posted some of the greenscreen plates and other VFX elements used in that series for educational use. Most are in 720p or 1080p HD and are available for you to experiment with techniques such as basic keying, 2D tracking, 3D matchmoving, and advanced keying with transparencies. Check them out here and get to work!

588 Free Film Contracts and Forms

This one comes to us from our good friends at L.A. Shorts Fest - Filmmaker IQ has compiled a great list of free film contracts and forms from all over the 'Net.
Upon examination of the list, it seems that a lot of the contracts came from another site, FilmContracts.net - another great resource you ought to bookmark.

30+ High Quality Metallic Texture, Pattern, Brushes and Photoshop Tutorials

This one is for you 3D modelers, texture artists, and Photoshop fanatics. Hongkiat.com has published this list of textures, brushes, and tutorials all having to do with metal.

VFX artists might also find it of use, particularly for elements such as bullet holes and the various metallic grunge textures.

Check it out here.

Innovation: Slumdog Millionaire's unique Silicon Imaging 2K camera rigs

Silicon Imaging, a leader in digital imaging and one of the companies on the forefront of the digital cinema revolution, has issued a press release detailing the unique SI-2K Digital Cinema Camera rigs created for Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire.

A customized camera support and recording package had to be built to meet the unique form factor demands of the Slumdog shoot. They enlisted Pille Film, of Wiesbaden Germany, to create a custom solution which included a gyro stabilizer for the base of the SI-2K Mini. Instead of using the traditional film-style camera body, they elected to use Apple Mac book Pro notebook, running Windows XP, for the recorders, and built them into ruggedized backpacks, to be worn inconspicuously. Stefan Ciupek, the show’s technical supervisor and additional camera operator, coordinated the design and modifications of the camera system with Wolfgang Damm of Pille, whose team worked around the clock to get the 2K Mini rigs built.

Read the complete press release here.

Great Idea for a Senior Innovation Project

If you're a UAT student searching for a concept for your SIP (Senior Innovation Project), how about this one, posited by none other than our DVA101 textbook author, Stu Maschwitz?

http://prolost.com/blog/2009/3/17/this-now-please.html

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

202 DIY Filmmaking Tutorials

Here's a great list of do-it-yourself tutorials for building dollies, steadicams, and all sorts of cool gadgets for your films.

http://filmmakeriq.com/general/featured/202-diy-filmmaking-tutorials.html

Just FYI, I found this link on one of my favorite sites, www.freshdv.com/

Enjoy!