Heads up (Updated: Almost here!)

New build of Fusion is coming. Fair number of bugfixes in it.

Updated (16th Dec): Coming real soon now! There's a lot of bugfixes, but there's a few new features as well:

• Fullscreen DirectX viewer (supports 3D Vision stereo, no Quadro needed!)
• View mirroring (copies the main display view to an external view, like the new DX view)
• Pick channels directly from 3D view (includes color, position, Z, UV, and rotation from normals)
• Disk caching on mask tools
• Huge 10x speed improvement in the Probe tool! :-)
• Double-precision support in OpenCL
• Improvements to polyline rendering, point cut/paste etc
• and more...

3D Stereo with a 2D tool

Here's a quick trick: you don't need Fusion's 3D engine to get stereo 3D. You can manage it with an instanced pair of 2D tools - so long as they do 3D rotation :-) All you need to do is produce two slightly-different viewpoints, and combine them. It can be faster to render, too.

OpenCL fuse manual

Hm, been a while since the last post, hasn't it? Fate of most blogs I guess. Not entirely uneventful, what with Fusion 6.1 being released & all. Now that that's out of the way, I can divert a little mental energy elsewhere.

This is just a heads-up that I've posted an updated OpenCL fuse reference manual over on VFXpedia, so you've officially run out of excuses (except for the guy over there with last year's ATi card, you're off the hook). There are some example OpenCL fuses included with Fusion 6.1, and a quick walkthrough (could use a little revising) also on VFXpedia. I'm curious to see what people come up with, now that fuses can be even faster than built-in tools!

Next up, I'll show you how to do stereo 3D titles - without using the 3D engine (cue audience gasps). Also, should I be announcing things like the Build 667 point release here too, in case someone actually notices it here first? Anyone? Bueller? <FX: crickets>

Die 24fps, die!

No, that's not German, I'm just tired of the fascination the industry has with 1920s technology. What is it about blurry, shuddering cinema that's so consistently attractive?

Teasers

I was going to throw up a few artfully-revealing screenshots of Fusion 6.1, to give people something to talk about, but now it looks like I won't have to. With NAB fast approaching, Marketing is going to take all the fun out of things, real soon now it seems.

Stereoscopic developments

So, we've been watching the enthusiasm Hollywood has with stereoscopic video, and pondering ways to take it further. We think we've hit upon a big one: stereoscopic audio.

Adapting existing visual stereoscopy techniques has proved quite fruitful, and neatly avoids the extra expense and inconvenience of requiring more than one speaker. Here are a few approaches we've experimented with:

Grain's Anatomy

Film grain has complex characteristics, both in spatial structure and in value/intensity. Many understand the basic principle behind how film works (in simple terms, light sensitive crystals - or grains - causing variations in density depending on the amount of exposure to light), and therefore why grain exists and why it tends to have the shape it does (lots of overlapping crystals/grains). What isn't immediately obvious to many is how the intensity of the grain is influenced by the nature of film.