VFX Industry Gets Open Source Exchange Format
Written by Carolyn Giardina
Leading visual effects houses Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks have co-developed an open source system aimed at a common problem in the visual effects industry: How to easily share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of what software is being used. Dubbed Alembic, this is essentially a computer graphics interchange format focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. That includes off the shelf software as well as proprietary or customized toolsets, within a single facility or across multiple VFX houses.
“All VFX companies, like us, work with multiple partners around the world and have multiple products in the same facility,” said Lucasfilm CTO Richard Kerris. ”Now they have a way to be assured that what they send and receive back is consistent. This can shorten production complexities when dealing with multiple geographic locations and multiple products,” he added, suggesting that directors, cinematographers and others in the filmmaking process will feel the impact. “It won’t be ‘we have to redo this because we got the wrong files’ or ‘our system can’t read those files’ or ‘our proprietary system doesn’t talk to that third-party system.’ All of that can eventually go away.” Read the full story
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‘Interoperable Master Format’ Aims to Take Industry Into a File-based World
Written by Carolyn Giardina
Industry professionals are well aware of the celebrated Digital Cinema Initiatives, or DCI, a joint venture of Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios. DCI was formed in 2002 as the industry began a sweeping change from film to digital cinema distribution and projection. DCI established and documented voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that literally changed the face of cinema post production, distribution and exhibition around the world. A decade later, the industry is facing another monumental shift, as it moves from tape to file-based workflows. Again the Hollywood studios have come together—this time under the umbrella of the Entertainment Technology Center@USC—to act on the change. The goal: To create a specification for an interoperable set of master files and associated metadata, to enable the interchange and automated creation of downstream distribution packages within the motion picture and television production and post production industries. Read the full story | Learn more about our upcoming Digital Asset Management Conference
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Digital Cinema Buyers Guide
The Digital Cinema Buyers Guide is an online Equipment Guide and News portal for the Digital Cinema industry. It is a comprehensive online resource for the Digital Cinema industry, offering all the information you need to find products, services and vendors for your Digital Cinema projects. Plus, it provides the latest Digital Cinema industry news, new product news, new product reviews, Digital Cinema Calendar of Events and a variety of other resources.
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WESTDOC 2010
Award winning documentary filmmaker Chuck Braverman and Non-fiction distributor Richard Propper kept meeting up at broadcast conferences on the East Coast for years. Back in L.A., Chuck kept asking Richard (President of Intl. Documentary Association at the time), why there weren’t any good conferences on West Coast for this segment of the industry. A good question. In 2009 they launched the first WESTDOC with over 30 panels and more than 100 speakers. Keynote speakers included RJ Cutler and Thom Beers. Read More. Find out about PITCHFEST and get a 10% discount off registration.
World Screen Newsflash
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Controlled Vocabulary Takes the Guess Work out of Searching
A controlled vocabulary makes a database easier to search. Since we have many different ways of describing concepts, drawing all of these terms together under a single word or phrase in a database makes searching the database more efficient as it eliminates guess work. However, arriving at this efficiency requires consistency on the part of the individual indexing the database and the use of pre-determined terms.
