Magazine Articles

What's So Hot About Nuke?

Nuke is emerging as the compositing software of choice for VFX facilities that want to move up to the next level in their compositing departments for both visual quality and production efficiency. Its unique management of floating point colorspace coupled with its novel multi-channel architecture and superb 3D support make it the most effective compositing tool for any CGI production pipeline. Any digital artist that wants to stay on the leading edge of VFX compositing needs to learn Nuke. Click here to read the article.

Commercials:
How They Changed Film Production Forever!

While digital compositing is what I do, I started out as a CGI artist working on television commercials. For me, it all started on Super Bowl Sunday, 1984— “Super Sunday,” the showcase for all cool new commercials. A spot came on with a sexy robot pitching the virtues of packaging food in cans for the Canned Food Information Council (a spot entitled “Brilliance,” created by Ketcham Advertising). It blew me away! Click here to download a PDF of the article.

Digital Intermediate:
The Wave of the Present

Student Filmmakers magazine (www.studentfilmmakers.com) publishes articles on filmmaking for the students of universities and film schools to prepare them for their new role as rising stars in the movie making business. One of the major paradigm shifts in modern filmmaking is the Digital Intermediate (DI) process where the entire movie is digitized and color corrected on a computer system. This article gives an eye-opening tour of the DI process and all its amazing capabilities and man-traps from scanning the film to delivery of the 24P master video. Click here to read article

Jill Bogdanowicz
The Colorful Colorist

A profile of Jill Bogdanowicz, a winsome colorist with impeccable credentials such as Blade 3, Ray, and She Hate Me. A fine arts major and a physics minor at University of New York at Geneseo, she grew up in her father's lab, a color scientist for Kodak. Entering the trade at a the very tender age of 18, she landed an internship position at Kodak as a telecine assist. The article goes on to explore Jill's fascination with color science and how her expertise in it helps with color timing features digitally.    click here to read article

The Auto Conform Process
The Agony and the Ecstay

A description of the autoconform process is and the virtues and complexity doing it in the Digital Intermediate process. It has the advantages of not cutting up the precious and irreplaceable camera negative and provides unlimited freedom for revisions. However, it is also very much more complicated for the DI facility to execute and requires extremely close coordination with the production company's editorial department.    Click here to read article

The Power and the Glory
The Scope of Creative Control in the DI Process

The Digital Intermediate process is very new and very technical so there is much confusion and curiosity about what can be done in a Digital Intermediate suite and how it works. This article attempts to de-mystify the DI process to make it understandable to non-computer experts. It describes the various color correction tools that are available plus new advanced image processing tools such as degrain and scratch repair that can now be applied to improve the overall quality of a feature film.    Click here to read article

Digital Intermediate: Inner Workings
By Charlie White

This article actually started out as a recorded interview of Steve by Charlie White to collect background for an article. When the one hour phone interview was over Charlie had so much material that he decided to just transcribe the entire conversation as one huge article. It is a wide ranging conversation on the current state Digital Effects and the Digital Intermediate industry with some crystal ball gazing of future trends.
Click here to read article