DV mag raps gammastyle

DV Magazine's March issue features a overview of gamma-corrected compositing by the venerable Meyers. Thanks to Chris and Trish for the shout out to eLin, and for boiling down the evangelism portion of the eLin docs into a very readable two pages!

Trish and Chris Meyer are the authors of the undisputed bibles of After Effects:

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects
Volume 1: The Essentials

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects
Volume 2: Advanced Techniques

After Effects in Production:
A Companion for Creating Motion Graphics

(Unabashedly commercial Amazon.com links)

Highly recommended!

free Shake killer

Someone finally did it.

A friend on the Media Motion AE list just posted news of a freeware 32bpc compositing app called Edo. Mac only. Like Shake. Except Edo seems to use the GPU for various realtime effects, including 3D transformations and stuff, in very much the same way that Shake does not.

http://www.anioni.com/edo/

Why the hell would you use a visual effects compositing plug-in set to color grade your HD short?

In part so you can make this:

Look like this:

Eric's an old hand at shooting for HD post, and knew well to keep his highlights in control. The raw image from the Varicam practically looks like a scanned film neg.



He then pushed the contrast in eLin, freely clipping highlights — or so it appears. In truth, those pegged values in Renée's arm and the back wall are actually only clipped in the video preview. Eric's Cineon log output preserved the entire dynamic range of the original footage, and his 35mm film print has the nice, smooth rolloff into the extreme highlights that was once thought to be the sole privilidge of film.



Plus, Eric had a great DP and is a hell of a colorist!



The LA Day demo movie covers the process in some detail. Questions? Post them on the eLin forum.



Mad stilz from One Weekend a Month coutesy of Eric Escobar

Spitzak Lives

Bill Spitzak's site is alive and well with a new ISP, including his excellent stuff about linear floating point.



Thanks to Stuart of Eyeon for the headsup.