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Chainsaw, a post-production services company for television, film, and other media, has just expanded into VFX with the hiring of Print Focus VFX Supervisor Boyd Stepan.

“We want to offer our clients the ability to take care of all of their post production needs within one workflow, both for the sake of efficiency and to ensure greater creative control,” said Chainsaw co-founder and Emmy-winning editor Bill DeRonde. “Boyd’s arrival brings us a step closer to that goal. He is a very talented and experienced artist who can help us build a visual effects department capable of delivering the quality our clients expect from Chainsaw.”

They’ve built an entire VFX suite equipped with Autode Flame workstations and Autodesk stereoscopic 3d Tools.

via Chainsaw Launches VFX Department; Adds VFX Supervisor Boyd Stepan.

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Prime Focus is having a big year this year, and expects another 15-20% jump in revenue in FY11.  With all the bad press the VFX industry has been getting over labor problems with folks like VFXSoldier exposing the poor working conditions and low wages, and smaller companies folding left and right and typically leaving employees unpaid, how is Prime Focus doing so well?

“There is a lot of traction from the U.S. markets for 2-D to 3-D conversion,” Chief Financial Officer Nishant Fadia told Reuters. “We are talking to all the studios there and it looks good.” To make the most of the overflowing demand, Prime Focus has earmarked about $2 million to $3 million to set up additional facilities in India, Fadia said.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how long the 2D to 3D conversion market lasts.  If it stays big, then no doubt there might be a lot of money to be made in converting back catalogs of material, but somehow I don’t think “A Fish Called Wanda” or “The Evil Dead” trilogy will really change much in 3D.

via Prime Focus sees 15-20% revenue jump in FY11 – The Economic Times.

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Stereoscopy News brings us the tidbit that Prime Focus just won $11Million from two Hollywood studios to do 2D to 3D stereoscopic conversion work with their ‘View D’ technology.  To be completed within 3 months, the actual movies remain unnamed.

If doing a full 3D conversion in 3 months sounds familar, just take a look at this impressive ‘success story’ on the ViewD website.

The first commercial application of View-D™ was on the Warner Bros. feature film ‘Clash of the Titans’ which became the highest-grossing Easter weekend opening of all time on its release.

ugh.. I think I’m gonna be sick.

2D to 3D = money.

Science prime focus, viewd

A new version of Krakatoa, Prime Focus’s massive particle-set management tool, is upon us and boasts support for FumeFX particles, Thinking Particles 4, 3dsMax Render Elements, and fully multi-threaded rendering support.

“Gone are the days of renders jamming on a million particles, we’re now chewing up tens of millions. With an increasing number of great features, like updated support for RealFlow particle data and improved integration with FumeFX and Thinking Particles, plus the improved connection between Maya and Max via FBX, Krakatoa provides us with a particle manipulation and rendering tool that really breaks down barriers on our VFX work. On top of that, Prime Focus continues to update it quickly, and provide fast helpful responses to tough production questions. It is quickly becoming an overall hub for our particle work and we’re very excited to be working with this great tool.”

Still not for the faint of wallet tho, at $1000 for the base version with 2 render-licenses, and $200 per render license after that.

via CGSociety – Krakatoa 1.6.

Graphics krakatoa, prime focus, software

The A-Team always did enjoy blowing stuff up or riddling harmless vehicles and scenery with bulletholes, and the new movie is no different.  Bringing together the talents of Digital Domain, Prime Focus, MPC, Rhythm & Hues and more, an article on FXGuide discusses some of the more impressive shots from the film.

Digital Domain contributed about 100 visual effects shots featuring a digital tunnel, Baghdad backgrounds, composites and gunfire. “I thought they did a really nice job of set-dressing the street,” noted DD visual effects supervisor Kelly Port, “but we wanted to make sure that there were additional Middle Eastern elements like mosques in there off in the distance that helped make the skyline more realistic. We used Nuke for compositing and took advantage of Nuke’s 3D capabilities. We could re-project some photographic backgrounds onto some geometry and then re-photograph it with the foreground camera so that they tied together much better – the perspective is lined up perfectly and tracks perfectly.

via fxguide

Graphics digitaldomain, movie, mpc, prime focus, rhythm&hues, vfx

NVidia has posted a short case study on how Prime Focus used the Quadro hardware to accelerate the 3D Conversion of “Clash of the Titans”.  The movie was shot in traditional 2D, and then postprocessed (some would say rather poorly, unfortunateyl) into 3D by various studies.  With the amount of footage to convert and the short timeframe, speed was of huge important, and Prime Focus was able to leverage GPGPU on Quadro card to accelerate their View-D process significantly.

Prime Focus set up a pipeline to enable 3D SDI video routing for workstations equipped with Quadro professional graphics solutions. The facility’s 3D playback systems could route streams of 3D content to three different projection rooms in the facility at any given time. The team used IRIDAS Framecycler to playback review files and conform reels. IRIDAS is a company that pioneered the first, real-time color grading solution released based on NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics, and was one of the first systems to provide real-time debayering as well as Stereo 3D support. Having Framecycler accelerated for NVIDIA Quadro, the team at Prime Focus was able to make convergence and parallax adjustments on the fly to reflect director and artist review input.

So, was the effort to convert worth it all?

The designer of the Prime Focus 3D projection pipeline, Sean Konrad, explained, “With the NVIDIA Quadro SDI platform, while clients were reviewing in one room, we could have internal stereographers review shots on another projector in a different room. We could simultaneously set convergence and make adjustments while an editor worked on conforming shots in another screening room. The NVIDIA-based pipeline allowed us to do a lot of multitasking throughout the facility — this was absolutely critical, since we were pushing about 20 minutes of stereo shots through the pipeline every day.”

via NVIDIA Quadro Powers Prime Focus 3D Stereo Projection Pipeline.

Hardware 3d, movie, nvidia, prime focus, stereoscopic, vfx

Renderfarm Wranglers rejoice as Prime Focus has just released version 4.0 of their great render queue management software, including improved OSX support, improved scalability and stability, and compatibility with their upcoming iPhone application.

“Most notable in this release is the number of subtle enhancements that have been made, to not just the main applications, but also all the underlying software-specific scripts,” continued Owen. “Multi-threaded remote command execution and status feedback is fantastic for keeping control and ensuring consistency of our software load and configuration on all our slaves, and the new Pulse web service opens up a world of new possibilities for communicating information to other systems in our pipeline.”

Now available for purchase, it’s $140 per node plus $35 for a year of support.

via CGSociety – Deadline 4.0.

Graphics deadline, prime focus, software

India’s Prime Focus contributed only about 10% of the effects seen in Avatar, but that alone was enough to drive their stock up an impressive 10% when the success of the film hit the news.

The film, one of the most expensive ever made with a reported budget of at least $300 million, paints an eco-friendly tale set in a mineral-rich alien land characterised by visual flourishes such as dragon-like birds, glowing trees, floating mountains and blue-bodied people.

“We contributed about 10 percent of the visual effects for Avatar,” Namit Malhotra, who founded Prime Focus as a 21-year-old more than a decade ago, told Reuters by telephone.

via Avatar effects boost Prime Focus stock.

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Prime Focus got the gig to do 664 VFX shots and full DI for the new bollywood film ‘Paa’ about a victim of progeria, the rare genetic disorder characterized by rapid aging at an early age.  Consisting  mostly of post-processing work to augment prosthetics, CGArena has an interview with VFX supervisor Susheel Peris.

“Paa has an unconventional and realistic storyline. The VFX in the film mainly involved a lot of prosthetic makeup augmentation on Auro and an array of television news channel PIPs. The challenge for us was in getting the look right for the character Auro, to make him look believable and flawlessly real” said Merzin Tavaria.

There were close to 400 shots in the film where the make-up needed to be digitally touched up frame by frame to create a seamless look of Auro's head matching the skin tone of the prosthetic with the real skin tone. Extensive rotoscoping was carried out on these shots followed by colour correction to get the final seamless look.

via Prime Focus Team delivers 664 VFX shots and full DI for Paa.

Graphics movie, prime focus, vfx

One of the biggest additions to the vampire physique from the Twilight series is the “sparkle”, which is the reason why Vampires in the Twilight world avoid the sunlight (not for the instant barbeque complexion, but rather the immediate recognition from the sparkle).  Creating the sparkle proved difficult due to lighting and complexion issues, and Prime Focus’s newly expanded Vancouver Studio talks about how they did it.

“Creating the diamond skin effect turned out to be a very rewarding experience.” said Pascarelli. “The effect appears many times throughout the film in several very different scenarios. It was challenging because the diamond effect appears in sunlight, whenever Edward’s already very pale skin is lit by sun, and on top of all of that brightness, there needs to be a convincing diamond-like sparkle. Film doesn’t really have enough brightness range to do this,

via Prime Focus VFX Adds Sparkle to The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Graphics movie, new moon, prime focus, vfx