Millimeter February 2006
By Michael Goldman
While most of the attention paid to James Longley's documentary film Iraq in Fragments understandably revolves around the project's political nature and critical acclaim (the film won three Sundance Film Festival awards in the Independent Film and Documentary competitions), the technical hurdles the project grappled with are also significant. Longley directed, co-edited, co-produced, scored, shot, and recorded all audio for the documentary....
At Sundance, I sat across the table from an earnest young cinematographer who was having the best, and worst, day of his life. His first feature film...
By Michael Goldman
In late December and early January, some of the top names in the visual effects industry engaged once again in an annual ritual — preparing highlight reels for presentation at the Visual Effects Award Nominating Bake-Off...
By Blair Jackson
Next month's DVD release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire gives audio professionals a chance to take a closer look...
By Ellen Wolff
In the Warner Bros. release Syriana, writer-director Stephen Gaghan dramatizes Middle East energy politics by staging confrontations for maximum intrigue....
By Michael Mallory
Two cars collide at high speed, but at the moment of impact, they morph into thousands of airborne pieces. Each tiny fragment halts in midair, then falls...
By Gary Eskow
This year, for its 31st season, Saturday Night Live added full 5.1 surround sound as it started broadcasting in HD, precipitating several changes in how...
By Michael Goldman
The visual effects chain for Disney's The Shaggy Dog a remake of the 1959 film about a man who turns into a dog relied heavily on techniques designed...
By Dan Ochiva
Got Flash? Well, Adobe does. Last month, the company finished its $3.4 billion acquisition of once archrival Macromedia, gaining access to that company's...
By Adam Hawkey iO Film
Although I'm a senior digital colorist at iO Film, I think it's important to have a lot of different production experience...
By Jim Hardy HTV
High Technology Video (HTV) specializes in feature film mastering, high-end standards conversions, duplication for the domestic and international markets...
By Dan Ochiva
Improved Cleaner
With a growing variety of formats brought about by new Internet, DVD, and even cell phone uses, your desktop encoding software better keep up to date. So check out the latest versions of Autodesk Cleaner: Autodesk Cleaner 6.5 for Macintosh......
By Dan Ochiva
GridIron's breakthrough X-Factor for After Effects opened low-cost, grid-style computing to the masses, speeding up previews and rendering.
Now, GridIron Nucleo software for AE brings that snappy response to standalone workstations running the new generation of dual-core CPUs....
By Dan Ochiva
As a mature capture medium, film just doesn't get much better. Until it does, of course. Kodak, for example, keeps at it, upgrading its remarkable......
By Dan Ochiva
Until Apple's move last fall to the PCI Express, Mac workstations were in danger of slipping further behind Windows gear, which moved to the new bus architecture earlier in the year....
By Dan Ochiva
According to the Montreal-based company, with the turnkey Reality console, production staff will save editors untold hours by encoding for video proxies and logging content descriptions in realtime as the action unfolds....
The majority of hardware and software encoding products do a pretty good job of creating DVDs from today's standard video formats. But what about the high data rates needed for handling HD in formats such as Blu-ray and HD DVD, or encoding for uses such as video on demand?...
By Dan Ochiva
While cranking out a few CDs or DVDs at a time isn't a big deal, it becomes a time-consuming bore beyond those first 10 discs. Thankfully, Disc Makers has a solution that doesn't cost all that much. ...
By Dan Ochiva
It's not a particularly flashy technology. But AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) is catching on as another metadata type — MXF, a subtype of AAF — gains acceptance in production...
By Dan Ochiva
With today's more powerful hardware, added functionality comes via new software. Digital Rapids' CarbonHD 1.0 software, for example, runs on the company's DRC-5500 capture hardware......
By Dan Ochiva
Keying out a particular subject is among the most common chores necessary to prep an image for compositing.
But in working with the individual color channels to “pull” the key, traditional keyers use algorithms that lock the channels together. Tweak one channel to make a cleaner key......
By Dan Ochiva
Going over to the Windows side...
By Darroch Greer
The more you get to know the new Doug, says Rupert Murray, director and editor of Unknown White Male, the more the old Doug is kind of erased. That person...
|
One-man Pipeline
Best Effects
Magical Sounds
Step by Step: 
Fade to Black: