Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 11, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This year at the NAB, Autodesk is presenting a series of extensions to its products for visual effects, processing/finishing and colour correction that are available exclusively to subscription customers.
The new products shown include the Incinerator Cluster Technology 2007 for Lustre as well as Lustre Color Management, an integrated, turnkey solution. The system provides better colour fidelity within the Autodesk systems. Thanks to application-specific reference tables (Look Up Tables, LUTs), this toolset can reproduce precisely and consistently what a digital image will later look like as a print. Different input image formats can also be brought together under a common frame so that they can be converted into the corresponding output formats and viewed in advance.
The functionality of Lustre Color Management is being integrated into the new versions of the Inferno, Flame and Toxik effects systems as well as into the Fire and Smoke editing and finishing systems. In addition, Lustre Color Management is being incorporated into the Autodesk Backdraft Conform background media-management and input/output software as well as into the current version of Autodesk Lustre itself.
Extension 1 for Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire and Smoke offers numerous workflow improvements, including Quicktime support on Linux, improved timeline editing and network processing integrated into the modules via Autodesk Burn. As part of Lustre Color Management, the extensions also offer new options for colour matching, improvements in colour conformity and new functions such as newly developed automatic 3D trackers and lens distortions.
Toxik Extension 2 offers new creative tools for visual effects in film and improves the functionality introduced with Toxik 2007. The new functions include the Retimer, with which the artist can change the speed of a clip, as well as Grain Management, with whose help grain properties can be added to or removed from live or computer-generated film material.
With the two extensions that have come out since the introduction of version 2007 of Lustre, Autodesk continues to build continuously on the GPU functionality of the solution. The features of Lustre 2007 Extensions 1 and 2 include: VTR emulation for playback control, GPU acceleration for all secondary colours and additional GPU-accelerated correction functions such as RGB curves, gamma and blurring.
All new extensions as well as the Maya 8.5 and 3ds Max 9 animation, modelling and rendering software will be on display at Autodesk booth No. SL1420. Various parallel workflow presentations also take place there daily. Flame, Smoke and Lustre systems as well as Autodesk Backdraft Conform and the API interface (Application Programming Interface) of Autodesk Wiretap are used. In addition, top artists present their film and television work, including Michael Ruzicka, Broadcast Manager at CBS Corporation Boston, David Cole, Senior Colourist at LaserPacific Media Corporation, Michael Landon, Fire and Smoke Artist at NBC/Universal, John Budion, Senior Inferno Artist at RhinoFX, Dr. Patrick Witting, who was responsible for the animation effects of the film “Ghost Rider” at Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Jeremy Jozwik, Head of Lighting Effects, and Nick Whitmire, Animator, both from Tigar-Hare Studios.
Further links:
- Information on Autodesk’s trade-show appearance
