July 29 LOS ANGELES - The Visual Effects Society (www.visualeffectssociety.com) has released “The VES Handbook of Visual Effects,” what the organization describes as “a Bible for VFX practices and procedures.” 

July 29 LOS ANGELES - Guildford, England’s Imagineer Systems (www.imagineersystems.com) is at SIGGRAPH with the latest version of its Mocha planar tracking and roto solution. Mocha now offers seamless export capabilities to The Foundry’s Nuke compositor, greatly improved performance, and support for multi-layer film resolution projects. 

July 29 LOS ANGELES - Gothenburg, Sweden’s Craft Animations (www.craftanimations.com) is offering Director Studio, a suite of over 25 specialized vehicle and camera tools. 

July 29 LOS ANGELES - Corvallis, OR’s OptiTrack (www.optitrack.com), owned by NaturalPoint, worked with LA’s Halon Entertainment to develop the Insight VCS virtual camera solution, an affordable, full-featured motion capture systems. 

July 29 LOS ANGELES – System integrator Integrated Media Technologies (www.imtglobalinc.com) hosted a 3D Summit at SIGGRAPH 2010. The event was co-sponsored by Atempo, Isilon and Southpaw, and offered insight into how to best strategize for the various 3D markets, including feature films, sporting events, TV, Internet and mobile programming. 

Recently, Kirk Arnold, COO of Avid Technology, spoke with Post about their new Media Composer 5 and the future of the company. 

The ILM artists that created those amazing fire-bending sequences in The Last Airbender got a lot of help from the innovative application of GPU technology. For those scratching their heads wondering what that means, it’s using the graphics processing unit (GPU) as opposed to the central processing unit (CPU) to build frames of visual effects animation. The ability to switch this computationally intensive process to the GPU is possible thanks to the CUDA technology now embodied in Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 and FX 5800 pro graphics cards. 

With version CS5, Adobe After Effects finally has an upgrade with features for visual effects artists. Migration to a 64-bit application, 3D LUTS and the roto brush are just some of the new tools that will make shot production easier.