VizWorld.com

PHYX Inc, creator of several plugins for the popular Apple Shake compositing system, have partnered with Noise Industries to bring their plugins to several new platforms including Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Final Cut Express.

“Our Apple Shake customers were interested in utilizing our tools in After Effects and Final Cut, which lead us to Noise Industries and FxFactory,” says Justin Bendo, President and CEO, PHYX Inc. “PHYX Keyer is designed to empower users with a toolset to achieve fast, outstanding keying results and FxFactory lets us effectively deliver our powerful visual effects tools to existing and new customers. We thank Noise Industries for their support and look forward to being a part of the innovative FxFactory family.”

Given the recent demise of Shake, this isn’t much of a surprise.  It’s great to see new tools, new common tools, coming to such a diverse collection of systems tho.  Check out the plugin, including a 15-day free trial, at the FxFactory website.

via PHYX Inc. Joins FxFactory Development Partner Program.

Graphics aftereffects, finalcut, fxfactory, motion, noiseindustries, phyx

This week’s recommendation goes out to all of you in the Video Graphics industry: the Apple Pro Training Series: Motion 4.  The Apple Pro Training Series has long been the go-to source of information on all the Apple products, including Final Cut Pro, Aperture, and many others, and the Motion 4 book is another great one.

In this best-selling guide to Motion 4, you’ll create eight sophisticated projects including a 3D show promo, a network-style title sequence, a DVD motion menu, and an actual temp effect used in Overture Film’s Traitor. Each chapter represents a complete lesson, with a commercial-quality project to work through as you learn. Master trainer Mark Spencer starts with the fundamentals of motion graphics and quickly moves into compositing, animation, motion graphics design, visual effects design, and the world of 3D. The book is fully revised to take advantage of the software’s new features: you’ll explore 3D shadows, reflections, and depth of field; “fly” a camera from one object to another; ripple text characters on and off the screen with ease; animate date and time sequences automatically; and master Motion’s remarkable new linking behavior. Along the way, you’ll work with particles, generators, filters, effects, templates, greenscreen mattes, keying, tracking, paint, and more. Whether you’re just entering the field or are already an accomplished motion graphics pro, this book will have you designing in Motion in record time.

Head on over to Amazon and check it out now!

Graphics apple, book, feature, motion, resource of the week

In a somewhat unexpected move, Apple updated their website and store and removed all mentions of their popular compositing application “Shake”.

Apple has removed its high-end, node-based visual effects and compositing application, Shake, from its website and online store. While Apple has made no official announcement and did not respond to our request for comment, Apple sales representatives were reportedly informed that it has been discontinued.

If you go to the old Shake site, you’ll be redirected to the pages for Final Cut Studio.  While the two products really aren’t similar, Final Cut comes with “Motion 4″ which has recently added several features that replicate much of the old Shake functionality.

Guess it’s time to folks to start looking into Nuke.  If you’re going to SIGGRAPH, maybe you want to check out the Nuke User’s Group on Monday.

via Apple unceremoniously discontinues Shake pro VFX app – Ars Technica.

Graphics apple, motion, shake, software

In an interesting visualization with convenient timing, a chart of Micheal Jackson’s famous glove through a Billy Jean performance has emerged.

On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected.

The source code, the dataset, and the resulting movie visualization are available at their website.  The visualizations were created by users and show some fun video overlay work (replacing the glove with another object), setting the glove on fire with procedural effects, and various tracking visualizations.

White Glove Tracking via information aesthetics.

Science image, motion