The new July 2010 term is now open over at fxphd.com. In addition to existing classes there are plenty of new courses available:
AFX212 – After Effects Project – The Open, Part 2 (Professor: Danny Princz)
BKD217 – Background Fundmentals July10 (Professor: Mike Seymour)
C4D205 – Cinema 4D and Design III – (Professor: Tim Clapham)
DOP203 – Tools of the DOP (Professor: Tom Gleeson)
DOP211 – DSLR Cinematography: Nature (Professor: Mike Seymour)
LST201 – Intermediate Lustre (Professor: Ivar Beer)
NUK303 – Nuke Stereoscopic Master Class (Professor: Russell Dodgson)
PRM201 – Intermediate Premiere Pro CS5 (Professor: Tim Kolb)
RFL202 – Real Flow 5 Project Workshop (Professor: Mark Stasiuk)
RGT201 – Red Giant for FCP (Professor: Simon Walker)
SMK204 – Intermediate Smoke/Flame III (Professor: John Montgomery)
VUE201 – A comprehensive Guide to Vue (Professor: Eran Dinur)
I highly recommend fxphd for professional VFX training. Should you decide to sign up I would appreciate if you name me (Martin Weber) as referal (I get an additional free class then).
E-on Software announced the beta testing program of Carbon Scatter for 3dsmax. Carbon Scatter is bringing E-On software’s EcoSystem to host applications using their native instancing features.
E-on Software Vue 8.5 PLE (personal learning edition) is available.
Boxx Technologies announced their renderPRO personal render option. It is a quiet PC with a small form factor that brings dedicated rendering to your desk. It is available in three different configurations with 4, 8 or 12 Xeon cores and up to 192 GB of RAM. Operating System options are Windows and Linux. Of course you need software that has the option of network rendering to use the renderPRO. It is a great solution to free up computing power at your workstation.
There has been some buzz about CS5 on twitter etc. with Adobe pushing for it (with an own CS5 launch page etc.). Now Adobe finally released it today – with free trials available now.
Roto Brush (let’s see if it holds up in production, could be a killer feature)
AVC-Intra and improved RED .r3d support
Color LUT support (3DL and CUBE)
Color Finesse
mocha for After Effects v2 (including the shape plugin)
DigiEffects Freeform
Photoshop Extended
64-bit
improved HDR features
tools for complex selections
Content aware fill (this should be awesome!)
Paint Effects
Puppet Warp
new 3D tools (like 3D extrusions and enhanced 3D objects)
There is nothing like the smell of new software in the morning but especially with tools like After Effects there is always that bad taste of plugin compatibility. That’s even more important with CS5 going 64-bit, leaving all those 32-bit plugins a thing of the past. So it is great to see that there are already CS5 compatible upgrades available.
As Red Giant Software is hosting many of the all time favorites plugins it’s great to see a list of CS5 compatible plugins from them also:
Magic Bullet Colorista 1.1
Magic Bullet Mojo 1.2
Trapcode 3D Stroke 2.6
Trapcode Echospace 1.1
Trapcode Form 1.1
Trapcode Horizon 1.1
Trapcode Lux 1.1
Trapcode Particular 2.1
Trapcode Shine 1.6
Trapcode Soundkeys 1.2
Trapcode Starglow 1.6
(Trapcode Suite 10)
Read Red Giant Software’s FAQ for the small print. Most other plugins are announced for Summer 2010.
