Juice releases Toxic Templates for Adobe After Effects
LAKE MARY, Fla.–Digital Juice, developer of digital content for video and motion graphics artists, is releasing Toxic Templates for Adobe After Effects, Collection 6: Anticipation. Toxic Templates are unique premium quality animated template graphics that provide After Effects users with a variety of professional finished looks, and feature multiple photo, video and editable text zones per segment. Toxic Templates can be used for everything from movie trailers, opens, segues and video montages to photo galleries and broadcast commercial spots.
“The templates in this new collection offer a colorful, innovative blend of designs that are both stylish and trendy and perfect for building anticipation and excitement for your content,” said David Hebel, CEO of Digital Juice. “These sophisticated template sets are also completely customizable, unique in both style and flow while providing a freeform framework of animated segments that can be mixed, matched, customized and extended to your heart’s content. While visually these sets may appear complex, with most containing multiple video or photo drop zones, this complexity does not make them difficult to use, and in fact, allows them to be extended and customized much more easily.”
The Toxic Templates product line offers a twist on the customizable template genre. “Much like the ready2go Projects & Template Collections, if you want the exact look of a Toxic Template, just add your own videos, photos and text in the placeholder areas of the template,” said Hebel. “But, as with ready2go, these projects are also supremely customizable when you need them to be. You can change colors and backgrounds, turn off layers, mix segments, extend timing, add your own new elements or change the font used on the animated type–all depending on how you need to alter the look to suit your particular project.”
In Toxic Templates for Adobe After Effects Collection 6: Anticipation, you will find more than 70 fully-customizable After Effects project files ranging from a series of transitioning celluloid filmstrips that instantly communicate “a life in pictures,” to an urban city scene with highrise buildings that seemingly construct themselves–to name just a few of the creative looks in this package. “You have complete access to the projects just as our top animators have designed them,” said Hebel. “Nothing is hidden or impossible to get at. You can even learn something new and improve your skills by analyzing how these one-of-a-kind projects are set up before customizing them.”
WRN Broadcast gains Edge via Grass Valley
HILLSBORO, Ore.–WRN Broadcast, the UK-based global managed services company, has installed Grass Valley’s GV Edge integrated playout system with K2 Edge playout nodes to effectively deliver and manage content from CSC Media Group, one of the largest UK-based satellite television channel providers. WRN Broadcast has migrated 20 CSC Media Group channels, including Buzmuzik, True Drama, True Movies and Pop on Sky, using the GV Edge system.
“WRN Broadcast prides itself on working closely with both our clients and technology partners to make sure of a first-class service performance and this contract with CSC Media is a perfect example of this,” said Dave Travis, chief technology officer, WRN Broadcast. “Integration with Grass Valley’s GV Edge was seamless as CSC Media Group were already operating Grass Valley’s equipment, although we particularly liked the integrated architecture of GV Edge, which allows us to scale up and launch new channels in the most flexible and efficient manner. We look forward to working together with Grass Valley as CSC Media continues its success and looks to roll out more channels internationally.”
WRN Broadcast is using GV Edge to enable centralized control over its operations by combining all the necessary functions of integrated playout—media playout, sophisticated channel graphics, and asset management into one integrated system. The robust and purpose-built solution offers mission-critical 24/7 playout applications, making it a highly reliable and high-performance playout platform. Using a single K2 Edge playout node for every channel, multichannel systems can be created in a simple, resilient, and scalable way.
The Foundry launches Nuke 8
LONDON–Software developer The Foundry has released the new version of its powerful node based compositor, NUKE. NUKE 8 includes countless exciting features and updates for artists working across multiple industries. The product was launched at a live streaming digital event hosted in London’s West End.
Guest speakers from high profile facilities took to the stage to showcase their use of NUKE 8 features in television, commercials and film VFX workflows. Speakers included Stephan Fleet, Creative director at Encore Hollywood, Russell Dodgson, head of NUKE worldwide at Framestore, and Mike Maloney, compositing supervisor at Digital Domain.
They were also joined live onstage for a Q&A by Hugo Guerra, head of NUKE at The Mill, and Paul Simpson, founder and creative director at Realise.
The list of NUKE 8 features includes the new Dope Sheet, allowing artists see and move keys around in the context of a timeline style view, and a brand new Text node letting artists compose, edit and animate directly in the viewer.
There are big updates to NUKE’s grading and color correction tools with a new intuitive in-panel colour wheel to control hue, saturation and value as well as Scope tools to help users analyze the picture like Waveform, Vectorscope and Histogram viewers and a pixel analyser. There’s also a new Match Grade node enhancing NUKE’s grading capabilities.
Making environment work a faster and easier process, a further update to NUKE’s Camera Tracker adds to the set solve functionality and lets artists track and solve cameras from reference stills, helping to assist object or set modelling within one integrated environment. The Model Builder now also features UV creation for even greater 3D control.
Brand new 3D tools include Viewer Capture to allow users to flipbook images from the 2D and 3D Viewer, a new Edit Geo node, a Particle Cache node to speed up rendering times and the Wireframe Shader node for various visual effects and increased control over projection mapping.
Overall speed and performance are also improved with the addition of OpenEXR 2.0 multi-part image read and write support, Alembic 1.5 and Planar Rendering. NUKE 8 also features a new intelligent in-context help system.
With NUKE 8 developers are able to write their own image processing operations inside of NUKE using the new Blink Script node to ensure they get the best possible performance from their teams hardware.
The new Import NUKE function allows developers to use NUKE as a module in any Python interpreter, and developers of C++ plugins can now output planar data in more flexible ways thanks to new Planar Rendering Framework.
MPC Licenses FabricSG and Splice to Customize Production Pipeline
MONTREAL–Fabric Software Inc (formerly Fabric Engine Inc) announced that VFX studio Moving Picture Company (MPC), a division of Technicolor, has purchased a global site license of Fabric Engine, a development platform for building high-performance tools and applications for use in production.
MPC will be using Fabric Splice (an API for creating tools within other applications) to augment its existing pipeline, and Fabric SceneGraph (a standalone framework for building complete applications) to build next-generation tools that fully leverage modern hardware.
“We expect our use of Fabric Engine to transform the productivity of our developers and technical artists,” said Nick Cannon, global director of technology for film. “This will allow us to develop tools that we previously did not have the time to write and ultimately will dramatically improve the productivity of our artists through higher performance tools. The capability of Fabric to immediately scale with new hardware enables us to take advantage of the raw performance available from our multi-core CPUs and GPUs without refactoring our tools.”
MPC originally planned to write a next generation application framework that would take the company into the next stage of VFX making. But after they started reviewing FabricSG, they found the performance and design lined up so well with what they wanted that it made much more sense to partner with Fabric Software and build next-gen applications on top of the Fabric Engine framework.
“What our TDs really need is a simple environment to write their tools in, and Fabric Splice is perfect for this,” said Damien Fagnou, global head of software. “We have always used scripting at MPC because our TDs and developers love the simplicity of it. The programming workflow for scripting makes for very fast iterations, but too often the runtime speed is not good enough. Now with Splice we can have the ease of use of scripting with the speed of a compiled language like C++.”
Ben Eagleton builds Sydney facility around FilmLight
LONDON–Noted Ben Eagleton has returned to Sydney to establish his color grading facility BE in Surry Hills. Famed for his award-winning TV commercials and music videos, Eagleton started his new postproduction venture in July 2013. Eagleton made a choice when kitting out his own facility to standardize on Baselight for grading, offering clients the flexibility to manage content in the most complex postproduction workflows without compromising creativity.
BE was established in the same building as award-winning post house, Fin Design & Effects. Fin had no color grading capability, so the symbiotic nature of their businesses made for a perfect fit. While Fin and BE are run as separate companies, they have a data connection that allows them to collaborate seamlessly on projects when required.
“Our facility offers the latest DI capabilities underpinned by Baselight,” said Ben Eagleton. “I have spent my career working on different color grading solutions, but Baselight wins hands down with its sophisticated grading tools, easily manipulated shapes, superb trackers and seamlessly integrated Blackboard control surface–allowing for unparalleled creative freedom.”
Eagleton went on to say that he is able to do things in Baselight that he would not even attempt on other systems. “I would spend twice as long trying to achieve a result that was only half as good as what I can do on Baselight–so for me there is no other choice.”
Eagleton started his career as a colorist at Rushes in London, after which he set up what was probably the world’s first data-centric grading facility, BEAN, in 2007. He then went on to be the department head at New York’s Smoke and Mirrors before joining Fuel VFX in 2011.
BE currently works primarily in the TV commercial and film market with some recent notable projects including “Nissan Juke” by Steve Rogers, “Hyundai Head” by Hamish Rothwell and “BNZ Coin” by Gary Freedman (Glue Society), as well as short films like “The one that got away” by the Mullane Brothers.
