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ARC+ and Lightworks have come together to integrate the great rendering technology from Lightworks into the popular ARC+ CAD software package in use by over 30,000 users worldwide.

Salvo Barbera, Development Director at ARC+, added; “We chose to work with Lightworks because we wanted to give our users the best possible product. We’re delighted with the results from our partnership which have exceeded all our initial expectations and those of our customers too. The Lightworks technical team have been a great help with the integration of Lightworks within ARC+ and we look forward to working with them in the years to come.”

via Powerful real-time visualisation from Arc Technology with Lightworks.

Graphics arc, lightworks

DataVisualization has a great writeup on last weekend’s SEE#6 event, held in the beautiful, 101 year old Lutherkirche .

Once again, the good folks of Scholz & Volkmer under the direction of Michael Volkmer achieved to impress me with a well-organized and super inspirational conference. A great list of speakers that complemented each other well, a beautiful venue with space for over 900 happy participants and a sound program made this year’s see a great success.

via Review of the SEE#6 Conference on Datavisualization.ch.

Science conference, see

Another week has passed, and the unrest in the Middle East is still far from ending. The Guardian made an interactive timeline of the situation, that had in Egypt one of the first nations to gain the international media attention. Projekt Cyan made a recap of the situation in that country, and from Ria Novosti comes an overview on Libya’s military force. The folks at GOOD presented a look at the countries most reliant on Libya for Oil, and, to close today’s selection, Breaking Copy talks about the different ways to spell Gaddafi.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

A bit announcement from NAB in the rendering space, Shotgun Software has announced their intent to integrate their impressive web-based project management and collaboration package (discussed here) with Thinkbox Software’s great Deadline render queue management package (discussed here).  Both tools offer some great features to users, and together they’re guaranteed to be a huge success.

The Shotgun and Deadline integration enables a seamless render and review data flow. When Deadline starts a render, a “Version” is automatically created in Shotgun with key metadata. When the render is complete, Deadline updates Shotgun with a thumbnail image, paths to frames, render stats, and playback links. Shotgun then dispatches out targeted notifications with links back to the work. Studios can then view the Versions in various contexts, create reports, and organize work into Playlists for review sessions where they can quickly take Notes with Shotgun’s “Note App.”

The system is already available to Deadline users on active maintenance subscriptions, and will be included in the upcoming Deadline 5.

Get all the details after the break.

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Graphics deadline, shotgun, software, thinkbox

The Pixel Farm has just announced the newest version of their industry-leading camera tracking & matchmoving app, PFTrack 2011.  Already setting the standard for motion tracking, the newest version adds support for their new node-based flowgraph and tracking of deformable objects, among other features.

The acclaimed Geometry Tracking functionality of PFTrack has been enhanced to support tracking of deformable objects, such as an actor’s face while speaking, in addition to solving camera and rigid object motions. Since the track is accomplished using the tracking geometry’s vertices as opposed to point or pattern trackers, Geometry Tracking in PFTrack 2011 conquers many of the typical pitfalls that plague conventional tracking operations such as glints and highlights. Image Modelling and Texture Extraction nodes generate detailed geometry for scene fitting, shadow boxing, and set reconstruction. A set of modelling primitives can be positioned in 3D space and edited to match the image data, or new models can be constructed. Per-pixel Z-Depth extraction now supports masks, used to specify the relative depth ordering of objects in the scene, producing a grey-scale depth map image and triangular mesh geometry. Reengineered Optical Flow tools calculate dense optical flow fields describing the apparent motion of objects relative to the camera plane, and features retiming of clip and motion data to increase or decrease the apparent frame-rate of the camera. Retiming after a camera solve will also retime the camera solution, meaning shots do not require a re-tracking do to editorial decisions later in post production.

It’s available today for $3,300 USD.  Read the release after the break for all the details.

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Graphics motion tracking, pftrack, pixelfarm

NVidia has a huge presence at NAB this year, showing up in over a dozen different booths and cementing their place as a guiding force behind much of the production and broadcast business.  With capabilites in the compositing, rendering, live editing, and routing spaces, it’s really no surprise but the sheer number of booths they are in at NAB is impressive.

NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions, based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, are being trumpeted by industry leaders including Adobe, ARRI, ASSIMILATE, Autodesk, Avid, Chyron, Pixel Power, Quantel, and Vizrt, among many others.

“Some of the biggest names in the production and broadcast business, including CNN and DIRECTV, are using tools that embrace the power of the GPU,” said Greg Estes, industry executive, Media & Entertainment, NVIDIA. “Proof is all around us here in Las Vegas that NVIDIA is a key force behind much of the latest software and hardware solutions that are now being used in the marketplace.”

Read the full press release after the break that lists the individual booths, including 3ality, Adobe, ARRI, Assimilate, Avid, Quantel, Vizrt, and many more.

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Hardware conference, nab, nvidia

Adobe and NVidia have some great announcements at NAB this week, the new Creative Suite 5.5 from Adobe with improved support for NVidia’s Fermi GPU’s.  Adding several new cards to their “officially supported list”, and several new bells and whistles to their capabilities in the new Mercury Playback Engine, they’ve got some impressive new reasons to crack open your wallet.

“With Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, Adobe is continuing to lead the industry in non-linear editing workflow innovation —and NVIDIA GPUs deliver even more productivity gains for our users,” said Bill Roberts, director of video and audio product management, Adobe.

 

Added Roberts, “With CS5.5 we are dramatically expanding the range of NVIDIA graphics cards that are supported by the Mercury Playback Engine from 11 to 19 — thereby empowering an even greater number of video professionals to be as creative as their imaginations will let them be, with no constraints on what’s possible. We’re making the dreams of any production professional a reality today.”

 

Featuring six gigabytes of graphics memory, the most in the industry, the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 is a boon to those working with complex video editing projects, such as ultra-high resolution 4K RED raw video streams, and RED decoding using RED Rocket.  For the first time, users can decode and debayer 4K R3D, and play full quality 2K video scaled from 4K footage in real-time with RED Rocket and Quadro solutions.

Built for Adobe Professionals – Adobe Creative Suite 5.

Graphics, Hardware adobe, nvidia

A world without Google. Can anyone imagine it? Well, the folks at Single Graindid. And after that, we travel back in time to look at some tech timelines, starting with the 20 years of Linux, by The Linux Foundation, then with Web Hosting Buzz‘s history of Internet usage and speeds, followed by the history of HP from 1938 to 2011, provided by Progmic, and Teleread‘s lookback at the 40 years of ebooks.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

DIY Guide to Successful Infographic Production by Voltier Creative

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

Some great news from NAB, Assimilate is first out of the gate to announce full Scratch support for the new RED Epic 5k.  Assimilate has been a big part of the RED story for a long time, and they continue the tradition with this offering.

Ted Schilowitz of RED, commented, “SCRATCH was the first DI tool to support native RED workflows from the original RED ONE, and it’s been right there with us through every innovation since. Now everyone, who wants to invest in our new Epic camera system, will have immediate availability to a solid and streamlined set-to-post workflow in the form of SCRATCH.”

But that’s not all.  In addition to just announcing it, it’s already getting some play with Company 3 in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Started with the usual RED load, they eventually switched to the Epic 5K and found no change to their workflow, even with Stereo 3D, after simply upgrading to the new version.

“We got a new build of SCRATCH from ASSIMILATE, dropped the Epic 5K 3D stereo footage in, and it just worked,” said Dylan Carter, director of non-linear workflow at Company 3, responsible for the overall design, build and management of the 3D stereo workflow on the feature. “Although this is a big story, there’s no story. The message is that SCRATCH already works perfectly with Epic 5k, and on 3D stereo too, just as easily as it does with RED ONE and RED MX cameras.”

Get both press releases after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware assimilate, movie, red, scratch, vfx