Gene Roddenberry’s team shot the first pilot episode for “Star Trek” back in 1964. The Anderson Company, which was part of Desilu, the production company, was responsible for the visual and optical effects for both pilot episodes as well as the following episodes. However, the Anderson Company was already hopelessly overwhelmed when editing the effects for the first regularly filmed episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

At the time, nobody was prepared for the mass of visual effects that a weekly science fiction series would entail. Before Star Trek there was “Lost in Space” and “Buck Rogers”, but here you were surprised if you didn’t see the strings on which a model was hanging. The quality standards for Star Trek were different.

Star Trek was also the first science fiction series to be shot in colour, which significantly increased the effort and problems involved. What’s more, the cinema was just showing what science fiction could look like: “The Time Machine” from 1960 or “Fantastic Voyage” from 1966, which won an Oscar for its groundbreaking effects, naturally also increased the pressure of expectation on the makers of Star Trek.

In desperation, producers Gene Roddenberry and Robert Justman hired Eddie Milkis, who had previously worked as an editor. He quickly realised that the sheer number of effects shots, or opticals as they were called at the time, could not be managed by one effects house, but rather by all the effects houses that existed in Hollywood at the time. And so Milkis became probably the first post-production supervisor in our industry, even though this job title didn’t even exist back then. He was listed in the credits as a production assistant.

The practice that is common in our industry today of distributing shots to several service providers and coordinating them in terms of content, design and economics by a studio-side supervisor thus took place for the first time on “Star Trek”. But visual effects not only created problems, they also solved some of them: Beaming the crew around Kirk and Spock was not only a futuristic means of transport, it also solved the problem of having to land the Enterprise or one of its shuttles in every episode – an effect that would have been much more costly than a dissolve between the take with the actors and a corresponding cleanplate.

The actual transporter effect was applied to this dissolve with the help of an Oxberry printer – moving aluminium shavings, illuminated by a strong light, transported our heroes to alien worlds. Incidentally, the fact that the Enterprise ended up with a shuttle at all was thanks to one of the first and probably most creative merchandise deals of all time. The company AMT Ertl was granted the licence to sell Star Trek model kits. In return, AMT promised to build a full-size model of the shuttle for filming – another way of keeping the ever-exploding budget down.

The Enterprise itself was built as a model in three sizes: A twelve centimetre model, one ninety centimetres long and a detailed version four and a half metres long. The materials used were balsa wood and plastic, which didn’t exactly make filming any easier, but modern materials such as fibreglass were still rather experimental at the time. There was also little motion control technology available, which meant that both the movements of the Enterprise and the lighting were limited. The shots of the Enterprise were filmed in black and white and then recoloured on the Oxberry printer and punched in front of the appropriate planet of the week.

This process of re-colouring also explains why the Enterprise often had a different colour cast in different episodes. It was particularly noticeable when the producers used another cost-cutting measure: the recycling of optical effects. Especially exterior shots of the Enterprise, when it was not shown in orbit around the planet of the respective episode, were often shown several times. For example, the Enterprise could fly around a planet with a reddish tinge, only to chase the Klingons a few minutes later in the most beautiful blue.

Especially in the third season, when the budget was radically slashed, this can be observed very often. But every trick in the book was used to transport viewers into the twenty-third century. The beams from the phasers were painted frame by frame for both the live action shots and the model shots of the Enterprise – whether the phaser was red, green or blue often depended in the end on which effects house was responsible for the respective shot.

Today, the effects may seem antiquated or even ridiculous in some cases, but you should really bear in mind that “Star Trek” was the first series to work with effects on this scale. Whereas other series had perhaps two or three visual effects shots per episode, one episode of “Star Trek” easily had twenty such shots on the television screen.

Star Trek’s path to the cinema led through many stages of “development hell”. Several projects were considered and then cancelled until Paramount Pictures, now the rights holder of Star Trek after the acquisition of Desilu Studios, decided to send the Enterprise on a second five-year mission. Star Trek – Phase II was to become the cornerstone of a new television channel. Sets were built, scripts written, test recordings made – and then everything changed. After the success of “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Paramount now saw Star Trek as an opportunity to bring something similar to the big screen.

The script for the pilot episode of “Phase II” was thus developed into a two-hour opus and Robert Wise, known for “The Sound of Music”, “The Day the Earth stood still” and “The Andromeda Strain”, was hired as the director. Without going into too much detail about the drama behind the scenes, it is important to know that the script was constantly changed.

Screenwriter Harold Livingston was in a constant battle with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy insisted on changes on their part and, to add to the pressure, Paramount had the film booked for a fixed date in cinemas. On the seventh of December 1979, “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” had to flicker across the screen or the studio would be heavily sued.

Robert Abel and Associates was chosen as the effects house at the time. This company had made a name for itself in Hollywood with groundbreaking commercials for the time – but also with notorious delays and exploding budgets. Concerned about this situation, Paramount brought Douglas Trumbull onto the project as a consultant in August 1978. Trumbull had already been responsible for the visual effects on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 – A Space Odyssey” and was working at the time for the Paramount company “Magicam”.

When it became clear that Abel and Associates would not be able to meet the deadline, which was so critical for Paramount, Trumbull took over the visual effects and was thus given carte blanche on the project in many respects, also with regard to the finances. Meeting the release date was so important to those responsible at Paramount that the budget was increased several times and ended up at 44 million US dollars – originally calculated at 15 million.

But even Douglas Trumbull could not cope with the mass of visual effects on his own, which is why John Dykstra’s Apogee Studios also came into play. While today it is common practice for several companies to work on the effects of a single film, this cooperation caused additional logistical problems at the time. While Trumbull’s Entertainment Effects Groups Pipeline relied entirely on 65 mm film, Apogee worked with Vistavision. All live action scenes were shot on anamorphic 35mm.

The film contains some beautiful shots and groundbreaking effects: Marvellous flights through the giant alien probe called “V’ger”, all an evolution of the slit scan process from “2001”, the wormhole effect, and of course the almost nine-minute flight around the completely refurbished U.S.S. Enterprise – to this day a breathtaking sequence that fans like to call “ship porn”. Never before and rarely since has the Enterprise looked so good. And yet, to this day, one still has the impression that the film comes across as long-winded, elegiac and bloated. Here, too, the fans have found a fitting name: “Star Trek – The Motionless Picture”.

There is a reason for these lengths – in addition to weaknesses in the script. The effects were largely completed so late that they were used in full length in the editing process – there was simply no time for a proper editorial process. In the end, it was so tight that director Robert Wise personally took the still wet film reel of the fifth act to the premiere.

Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” were nothing less than a perfect storm for the fledging VFX industry. The deadline was set in stone, the film had to be finished. If you study the credits of this first cinema adventure carefully, you will realise how many remarkable careers began here.

The Genesis trilogy

The budget, which had exploded from the original fifteen to forty-four million dollars, was still a very sour pill for Paramount to swallow. Nevertheless, they wanted to send the Enterprise on another journey, perhaps this time a little more profitably than with the first film. Paramount turned to Harve Bennett, then a producer in the TV department of Paramount Pictures. When asked if he could make a Star Trek film for less than 44 million dollars, he replied that he could make three of these films for the budget. He was to keep his word: “Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan”, with a budget of 11 million dollars, was to become one of the most successful films in the franchise.

Industrial Light and Magic, although still busy with “Return of the Jedi”, opened its doors to other clients at this time, and one of the first was Paramount Pictures for the Enterprise’s latest adventure. Some shots could be recycled from the first film – just like they did on the TV series. When the Enterprise leaves Earth, it’s a radically edited version of the dry dock sequence from “The Motion Picture”, and the simulated battle with the Klingons has also been seen before.

Nevertheless, the film has a completely contrasting look, much denser and more compressed than the opulent first film. This is also reflected in the techniques used. For example, the Mutara nebula, in which Admiral Kirk duels with the eponymous Khan at the end, was not created using slit scan technology, but in a water tank. Different coloured liquids with different viscosities were mixed and filmed at a high frame rate. The Enterprise in battle with the U.S.S. Reliant were then visually superimposed over this nebula. “Star Trek” probably benefited greatly from the experience ILM had gained with “Star Wars”, especially with the use of motion control and the impressive orgy of destruction at the end of the film.

The masterminds at ILM used another clever trick in the two battle sequences between the Enterprise and the Reliant: In order to have a believable scale during the explosions, especially of flames, details that were destroyed were built as a partial model on a larger scale. This meant that a warp nacelle could explode without looking as if it had been hit by a gigantic Bunsen burner.

In another respect, however, “The Wrath of Khan” broke completely new ground and has a unique effect sequence that can hardly be underestimated for our industry as a whole: the genesis sequence, in which the creation of a planet from the impact of a torpedo on a dead celestial body to its transformation into a living planet with mountains, valleys, meadows and lakes is shown in a one-shot, is the first completely computer-generated sequence to be used in a cinema film. It was created before Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division. This division was renamed Pixar shortly afterwards.

Two years later, “Star Trek III – The Search for Spock” followed. Ince again the effects where made by ILM, and the aforementioned Genesis sequence was once again recycled. The film is quite solid in terms of the effects, but suffers a little from the conditions in the TV department. The scenes on the Genesis planet unfortunately show that they were filmed in the studio and not in Hawaii, as cinematographer Charles Correll wanted. The destruction of the iconic Enterprise, however, is still an eye-catcher even after almost forty years and has definitely aged well.

“Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home” is not really a film that makes you think primarily of groundbreaking visual effects,as most of the film is set in the 1980’s San Francisco. What is remarkable, however, is the journey through time that Kirk and his crew manage by warping around our sun. During this flight, we see a somewhat etheral scene in which the CGI heads of our heroes morph into one another. Back then, the actors were scanned in a construction that seems crude today and which, in retrospect, can be seen as the great-grandfather of today’s light stages. Quite remarkable for the year 1986.

Never change a winning team

“Star Trek V – The final Frontier” was not only to be William Shatner’s directorial debut, but also to continue the success of “The Voyage Home”. However, competition in the 1989 cinema summer was fierce and ILM was already busy with films such as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “Ghostbusters II”. Worried that ILM would only be able to let the “C-Team” work on Star Trek V, the decision was made in favour of the effects house Assoicates and Ferren from the east coast of the USA.

As with “The Motion Picture”, they opted for an effects house from the advertising sector and overlooked the fact that this company did not necessarily have the right pipeline to handle the effects for a science fiction motion picture. The distance between Hollywood and Long Island, New York caused additional problems in the approval processes, as did the lack of experience and the obvious disinterest in the effects of director William Shatner.

Many of the effects in the “Galactic Barrier” appear overlit, the Enterprise is poorly integrated or not integrated at all and the overall proportions in the film don’t seem appropriate. The approach of Associates and Ferren was also fundamentally different to that of ILM. While ILM had already refined the bluescreen technique for itself at the time, Bran Ferren was absolutely unwilling to work in this way.

To make matters worse, between “The Voyage Home” and “The Final Frontier”, the model of the Enterprise had been loaned out to film an attraction at Universal Studios. The effects company responsible had sprayed the model with a matt finish, presumably to prevent blue screen spill. The elaborate mother-of-pearl effect that the Enterprise had been given for “The Motion Picture” had to be reapplied over a period of several weeks.

Whether or not, as William Shatner claims, better effects or even the ominous stone creatures he wanted for the film’s finale but was denied for budget reasons would have made the film better in the end is up to debate. What is certain is that “The Final Frontier” was considered a flop at Paramount and the sixth and final film with the original cast only came about because Paramount did not want to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Star Trek” without a film in the cinema.

For “Star Trek VI – The Undiscovered Country”, they once again relied on the experience of ILM, who were able to contribute their expertise to the destruction of the Klingon moon Praxis and the morphing of the model Iman into William Shatner.

Back to television

While “Star Trek” had established itself well as a franchise in the cinema, Paramount wanted to bring the Enterprise back to television. And even though “Star Trek – The Next Generation” was seventy-eight years past Kirk, Spock and co. in the future, there were to be some synergies between the franchise in the cinema and the new series on television in the here and now. For the pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint”, ILM was once again commissioned to create the visual effects for the new Enterprise.

Probably the most important shot here is the scene in the opening credits in which the Enterprise goes to warp speed. The rubber band effect, where the front part of the ship appears to be flying away while the rear part is still stationary, was created by a combination of motion control, slit scan and the use of a streak camera.

The original plan was for ILM to create a kind of stock library of effects shots, which would then be used as required during production, thus minimising the need for new effects shots. However, it was soon realised that, apart from the usual fly-by shots, each script required very individual settings, so this library could only be used to a limited extent.

It was originally assumed that around ten new effects shots would be needed per episode. However, this very quickly levelled off at an average of sixty effects shots, and in particularly effects-heavy episodes it was as high as one hundred. However, the aforementioned warp effect was so complex and cost-intensive to produce that there were only two different shots available for the 178 episodes in which the Enterprise went to warp – because even though the effect only lasts a few seconds each time, the pure shooting time for a single shot was two days due to the many passes and long exposures for the rubber band effect described above.

It is interesting to note that the producers of the new series were seriously considering realising the effects entirely in CG at the time – in 1987. It would be another six years before another science fiction series – namely “Babylon 5” – was prepared to take this risk. The documentary “The Trek not taken” (included on the Blu Ray edition of “The Next Generation” Season 3) shows fascinating test footage and is astonishingly open about the decision-making process as to why the decision was ultimately made in favour of classic model shots.

What was a massive innovation in “The Next Generation”, however, was that it was edited on D1 video. This decision not only brought cost savings, but also greater flexibility. Phaser beams could now be created on a real monitor, effects footage could be used and reused much more flexibly and new effects systems such as Quantel’s Mirage and later Harry and Henry were used. And it was only with this change that the desire for a serious stock library could be fulfilled: From the third season of “The Next Generation”, the effects shots were also no longer optically printed, but digitally comped. And so the same shot of the Enterprise could also appear in orbit around different planets.

The transition to CGI

The success of “The Next Generation” heralded the first golden age of Star Trek. This became apparent in 1993 when a second Star Trek series was launched in parallel for the first time with “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine”
was launched in parallel. While CGI elements tended to be the exception in “The Next Generation”, such as the crystal being in “Silicon Avatar”, “Deep Space Nine” was to have a main character, the shape-shifter Odo, whose production included regular morphs. The company responsible for this was VisionArt Design & Animation; this iconic effect was designed by Dennis Blakey, who was deservedly honoured with an Emmy for his work.

in 1995, “The Next Generation” left the TV screen for the cinema, making way for “Star Trek – Voyager”. Star Trek on television was a well-oiled machine at this point, and so things were done the way they had always been done. In terms of the spaceships and stations, this meant that in the mid-nineties, most of the filming was done with models and miniatures. But science fiction was booming and so there were several other shows vying for viewers’ favour.

One of these was the ambitious “Babylon 5” by J. Michael Straczynski. The exterior and effects shots for this show were entirely CG, rendered on several Amiga 2000s with Video Toaster hardware and the associated Lightwave 3D. That way, Foundation Imaging, the VFX vendor for “Babylon 5”, avoided the purchase of expensive Silicon Graphics hardware. This cost saving turned out to be so successful that the producers decided early on in the course of “Babylon 5” to realise the effects “in house” using the same business model, and so Foundation Imaging was relatively quickly left without its biggest customer.

Star Trek Voyager was just in its first season at the time, but thanks to successful lobbying, more and more of the effects went to Foundation Imaging. Foundation Imaging took over the CGI model that Amblin Imaging had previously created for the title sequence – in fact, the CGI model was used in three shots, in the others it is a classic model – and prepared it so well in the episode that from the fourth season of Voyager onwards virtually all exterior shots were created in CG on this basis. However, the need for CGI also grew on the sister show “Deep Space Nine”.

The more the conflict with the Dominion came to a head in the show, the more opulent the space battles became – these scenes could not have been realised with classic models and motion control. Originally, there was to be a fixed separation, with Foundation Imaging responsible for “Voyager” and Digital Muse for “Deep Space Nine”. A nice plan, but it didn’t do justice to the reality of production. For example, Foundation Imaging helped out with the finale of the fifth season of “Deep Space Nine”, “Sacrifice of Angels”, to stage the conquest of the space station by the Dominion.

How to meet up legends

The “Deep Space Nine” episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” was a highlight in more ways than one. In view of the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary at the time, the idea was to take the crew around Sisko & Co. back to the time of Kirk and Spock – and have them meet their heroes there. The concept gave the producers quite a headache. Although Paramount had just released “Forrest Gump”, a film that accomplished exactly the same task – integrating a contemporary actor into old archive material – the question remained as to whether this was also possible within the constraints of a television series.

The answer came when the team led by VFX supervisor Gary Hutzel showed the producers a scene from the original episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. They were a little confused as it was just a normal scene. It wasn’t until the second playback that they noticed the security officer in the background, who was not an actor from the sixties but a VFX artist from the nineties. With this proof of concept, one of the most elaborate Star Trek episodes of all time was given the green light.

As the original model of the Enterprise was on loan to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, Gary Hutzel had a new model built. Unfortunately, the models of the Klingon ship and the K-7 space station had been destroyed in the meantime, which is why new models had to be built as well. To this day, it has to be said that the effort was well worth it – the effects still hold up today and the attention to detail of everyone involved can be seen in every scene.

Rarely have VFX and the on-set team worked so closely together as on this episode. Parts of the original sets of both the Enterprise and the K-7 space station were recreated. The typical lighting of the original series was meticulously recreated. The original negative of the old episode was completely rescanned and the corresponding scenes were matchmoved. With the help of a lot of compositing and rotoscoping, wonderful scenes were created in which O’Brien and Bashir help Scotty and Chekov in a brawl against the Klingons and Dax is allowed to pine after her dream Vulcan. No expense or effort was spared for the exterior shots either.

Meanwhile in the cinema

When “The Next Generation” said it’s farewell to the television screen, this crew went straight to the big screen. Within two weeks, the existing sets were polished up for the cinema and the long-awaited, but ultimately somewhat disappointing, meeting between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard took place.

Even if the film falls short of its potential, the makers did take advantage of one opportunity – they got rid of the model of the “Next Generation” Enterprise that the VFX artists hated in a spectacular way. The NCC-1701-D was often referred to as the “Hilton Hotel in space” due to its wide curved shapes and its aesthetics borrowed from the 1980s. In fact, the model was extremely difficult to stage due to its size and proportions. So what could be more obvious than to blow it up?

The resulting sequence is truly impressive: the Enterprise’s large saucer section separates from the engine section about to explode and tries to escape, but is pushed into the atmosphere of a planet by the force of the explosion and crash lands in a jungle. This landing in particular, as this massive saucer mows away row after row of trees and leaves a trail of devastation, is a prime example of believable shots with miniatures and models.

Two years later, it was time for the Next Generation crew’s first independent adventure. “First Contact” not only had the Enterprise crew travelling through time again, it also brought back the most feared antagonists: the Borg. To give the huge collective a face, the filmmakers created the Borg Queen. In order to showcase this symbiosis between the natural and the artificial, there is a scene in the film in which the Queen’s head, complete with mechanical spine, is placed in a torso. Here, too, plenty of matchmoving, CGI and morphing were used – if there was anything at all to criticise about this scene, it was that the original one-shot was subsequently intercut.

“Star Trek – Insurrection” followed and, like the two previous instalments, got the Industrial Light & Magic treatment. Only with the last of the four “The Next Generation” films, “Nemesis”, did the effects go to another company, this time to Digital Domain. And as with the television series, the trend here was increasingly towards digital models, although the company did not want to completely abandon the miniatures – these were used in the Enterprise’s ramming manoeuvre with the Reman ship.

Back to budget

in 1999, “Deep Space Nine” ended its run with seven seasons and 176 episodes, followed two years later by “Voyager”. The management at Paramount wanted to launch another Star Trek series, this time, in keeping with the times, a prequel. For “Enterprise”, they used completely digital models for the first time. They also had the foresight to produce the series not only in 16:9, but also in HD – even though the effects were only produced in 720p.

Unfortunately, “Enterprise” was not very successful. Various factors, which were summarised by the producers at the time under the term “franchise fatigue”, but which were much more complex, did not put “Enterprise” under a favourable star. The fact that “Nemesis” was squeezed in between “Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers” and “James Bond – Die Another Day” at the box office didn’t really help either and so the third season of “Enterprise” was supposed to be the end. Only the switch from film to HD video and slashing the budget by half made the fourth season possible, which is still regarded as the best by many fans today.

Remastering

But before “Star Trek” was sent back to sleep after seventeen uninterrupted years on air, a whole new chapter began that brought its own challenges in terms of VFX: remastering.

Let’s go back a little, more precisely back to the first motion picture, “Star Trek – The Motion Picture”. As described at the beginning, the film was made under enormous time pressure and never received a proper polish. Director Robert Wise considered the version that was shown in the cinema at the time to be a rough cut. To make matters worse, an “extended version” was released on the American channel ABC in 1983, in which unused material was added in, bloating the film up even more.

This version included a scene in which Kirk leaves the Enterprise and the entire studio construction, including tripods, can still be seen on the right-hand side. in 2001, Foundation Imaging, together with Daren Dochtermann, David C. Fein and Michael Matessino, set about creating a real director’s cut of the film under the direction of Robert Wise – twenty-two years after the release of the original version.

Cuts were trimmed, the sound was mixed better and effects shots were either reworked or in some cases even completely recreated. For example, obvious logical errors were removed, such as the fact that Spock holds his hands protectively in front of his eyes on the planet Vulcan to avoid looking at the sun, which was simply not present in the original edit. And “V’Ger”, the film’s antagonist, also finally takes shape in the Director’s Edition. In the original version, you could always see the energy cloud surrounding V’Ger and close up shots, but never the ship in its entirety, which was somewhat underwhelming.

Last but not least, dialogue scenes were removed that were obviously only there to explain missing effects shots on the narrative level. And all this… in standard definition. With the advent of Blu-ray and streaming services, to call this cost-cutting measure by the studio “short-sighted” in retrospect is a grandiose understatement. It was to take another 20 years before the 4K remaster of “The Motion Picture” was released in April 2022.

However, this experience was not the only reason why Paramount and CBS in particular, who now held the rights to the TV series, began to think more long-term. The effects of the original series in particular no longer really stood up to modern viewing habits. After there had already been several “digitally mastered” versions of the series as a video release, a remastering was to take place in 2006, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the series, which would bring the original series into the 21st century:

All 79 episodes were re-scanned, re-graded, the sound optimised and, what was definitely considered controversial at the time, new CGI scenes of the Enterprise were produced. CBS Digital, which was responsible for this, faced several challenges: Firstly, the aesthetics, the pace, the whole style had to match the legal content from the 1960s.

The credo that Mike and Denise Okuda, who worked as consultants for CBS Digital, issued to the team was simple: the effects had to look like the original team behind Gene Roddenberry would have done them if they had had the technical possibilities of 2006. Nevertheless, the constant repetition of shots, which was unavoidable in the original version for cost reasons, should no longer occur. The aspect ratio remained conservative: the old series was designed for 4:3 and that’s how it should stay.

Anyone watching it on a modern-day disply will have to live with pillar boxes. But there was another problem in addition to tight deadlines: as the show was cut to film and the uncut rushes were no longer available, the new scenes had to be exactly the same length as the original shots. It became even more complicated when effects shots were faded. But no expense or effort was spared when it came to cleaning up the old negative.

What the software did not recognise as dirt or scratches was painstakingly painted out frame by frame on Flame and Inferno. The new “remastered” versions are now available on Netflix, iTunes and the like. However, a special feature is reserved for Blu-ray owners: Here you can seamlessly switch back and forth between the original and remastered effects.

The CBS Digital team worked on these remasterings for three years. After that, “The Next Generation” was to receive a similar remastering, but the challenges here were completely different. Unlike the original series, “The Next Generation” was comped and edited on video. This meant that over 25,000 rolls of film had to be retrieved from the archives, scanned in HD, cleaned and graded. However, a different approach was taken for the effects shots, as the negative with the individual elements of the effects was still well preserved.

And so the shots from the eighties and nineties were scanned layer by layer and recomped in Flame. Although some of the planets were given more detail, the camera angles and movements remained very close to the original. Other effects, such as screen inserts, beaming or phaser beams were recreated in HD, but only very rarely did they deviate stylistically from the SD original. In “The next Generation”, the preserving approach was even greater than in the original series.

One would expect that “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” would also be brought up to date afterwards, but fans are still waiting in vain for this to happen. Remastering the first season of “Next Generation” alone cost CBS Digital nine million dollars at the time. At the same time, Blu-ray sales were slowly dwindling in favour of streaming.

To make matters worse, as already described, “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” relied more and more on CGI in their initial production rin. The assets were considered lost in the meantime, as shops such as Foundation Imaging have since closed their doors. You can get a small glimpse of how good “Deep Space Nine” would look in HD in the documentary “What we left behind – a Look back at Star Trek Deep Space Nine”.

Thanks to very successful crowdfunding, the producers of that documentary were able to remaster fifteen minutes of footage in HD – including the breathtaking battle from “Sacrifice of Angels”. It seems that someone had made a backup of old Lightwave files after all. Whether and when fans will be able to enjoy full length high-definition episodes of these two series is still uncertain. Some are hoping for AI upscaling, others for Paramount, the streaming service where Star Trek now has its home.

in 2005, “Enterprise” went off the air and Star Trek disappeared into its second slumber. Star Trek was not due to return until 2009, but in a big way. The Enterprise was to return to the cinema and also be freed from the moderate budgets that had accompanied the film series from the second part onwards. The film was directed by J.J. Abrams.

The whole look was to be younger, more modern and more realistic. The effects were once again handled by Industrial Light and Magic, this time under the direction of Roger Guyett. What really sets the film’s effects apart is the focus on a realistic environment. A scene in which Kirk and Sulu jump onto a drilling platform high above the planet Vulcan was actually shot on a replica of part of this platform outdoors.

The rest of the platform was added in CG afterwards, but you can tell that the actors are in a tangible environment and that they are standing in real sunlight. None of this is unusual today, but when you consider that films like “Revenge of the Sith” were shot entirely in front of blue and green screen just a few years earlier, it’s fair to say that “Star Trek” (2009) was definitely a trend-setter here.

in 2012, “Star Trek – Into Darkness” continued in the same vein. And in the meantime, the shots were also distributed to several service providers, which is why Kirk & Co. were also worked on at the Pixomondo locations in Frankfurt and Stuttgart. 2016 saw the release of “Star Trek – Beyond”, the latest member of the Star Trek cinema family. Over 900 people around the world worked on the VFX, at least 300 of whom were credited in the end credits after tough negotiations. With streaming, increasingly on Paramount , Star Trek is currently experiencing its second golden age and continues to set standards in terms of VFX.

Conclusion

While in other franchises it was the visions of the respective creators that pushed the boundaries of what was possible with VFX, with Star Trek it was often more a matter of necessity. In the beginning, the pressure to take viewers to alien worlds in twenty-six episodes a year made them inventive. Paramount’s blind booking of “The Motion Picture” acted as an incubator for the still very young VFX scene in Hollywood and the Genesis sequence was an opportunity for Ed Cadmull’s team at Pixar to show where CGI was still going.

Later, “Voyager” filled the gap in Foundation Imaging left by “Babylon 5” and paved the way for CGI in the science fiction genre, from which other shows such as “Battlestar Galactica” would also benefit.

The fact that Star Trek’s effects were often enough orientated towards what was feasible is what makes them so interesting for our industry. Because in the end, the famous song line is true: “Space may be the
final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”

The post The visual effects of Star Trek – a retrospective first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

In this episode of Let’s fix it in Pod Christoph & Bela browse the FMX Programme and talk about their favorite picks. They are then joined by FMX project manager Mario Müller for a deep dive into what goes into planning an fmx and bringing it to life.

00:00:00 Intro
00:03:52 Mufasa: The Lion King (Link to FMX Programme)
00:04:53 Nuke: From it’s beginnings to today (Link to FMX Programme)
00:06:14 Watch your language! (Link to FMX Programme)
00:07:17 Fear and loathing in the age of A.I. (Link to FMX Programme)
00:08:29 Next-gen procedural city design (Link to FMX Programme)
00:09:00 Anamorphic Lenses in Witcher 4 (Link to FMX Programme)
00:10:15 Acting for Animators (Link to FMX Programme)/ Part Two on Wednesday)
00:11:22 Paul Debevec (Link to FMX Programme)
00:12:30 Building a state-of-the-art VR stage (Link to FMX Programme)
00:13:17 General recommendations
00:20:31 Introduction Mario Müller
00:22:39 The tasks of a project manager
00:24:41 How FMX changed over the years
00:29:59 Building a programme
00:33:38 How to deal with the hype train
00:42:24 The pros and cons of a hybrid FMX
00:46:56 Mario’s recommendations
00:47:48 The role of Paul Debevec
00:50:50 The metrics of FMX
00:52:26 The connection to the Filmakademie
00:56:09 The Rhythm of change
01:00:09 The only constant is change

Links

FMX Programme: https://fmx.de/en/program/program-202…
Schlesinger: http://www.schlesinger-int.de/

The post Let’s fix it in Pod 07 FMX with Mario Müller first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

Mask ML, as the name suggests, is a machine-learning powered roto tool, complimenting the existing roto toolset in Syntheyes. Artists can very quickly define objects to be masked in a simple point-and-click procedure on either a single or multiple frames and then let the application produce roto to be used for example to exclude moving objects from a solve or to be rendered out to be used in another application.

Dynamic Tagging, Multi-Exporter and Workflow Presets

The 2025 release also focuses heavily on pipeline automation, introducing Dynamic Tagging. With the Project Tag Manager, Artists can set up a blueprint for file paths to be used on a certain project, ensuring that all the assets, renders and cameras are automatically saved in the right location. 

This feature works hand in hand with the new multi-exporter, which allows you to save multiple export presets into a single preset file. That way deliverables can be streamlined and automated, allowing you detailed control on type of export, geometry and trackers to be included and much more. This feature also takes advantage of the Dynamic Tags.

The new Workflow Presets Manager allows Artists to more easily adhere to a specific workflow by starting a new shot with specifically designed presets – these can be managed on a facility-, user- or project basis.

Head Geo

For head tracking, Syntheyes is now supplying a standard human face mesh in low, medium and high resolution meshes. These meshes can easily be added to a head track and then be customized using the brush tools inside of Syntheyes. From there the mesh can either be used in CG or compositing applications. Especially for de-aging and digital beauty work this feature can be really helpful.

Batch Processing

Batch Processing allows the Artist to queue numerous Syntheyes tasks like tracking, solving, processing lens distortion or the new Mask ML feature and then process them inside a single batch. As resources are allocated accordingly, the artist is still able to work in the foreground while the batch processing is happening simultaneously in the background.

Users on subscription or active upgrade and support plans will receive Syntheyes 2025 as a complimentary update. Right now Syntheyes is on a flash sale with 25% off until Friday, February 28th, 2025.

The post Syntheyes 2025: ML-powered masks, batch processing and more… first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

Samesame… but different

At first glance, the Rugged SSD Pro 5 can’t deny its lineage. The form factor is the classic Neil Poulton design that Lacie has used over the last twenty years. Beveled edges and a rubbery surface not only give the device a distinct look, but also added surface adhesion – more on that later. However, if you are used to the larger 2,5” form factor, the drive is now turned 90°, with the Thunderbolt 5/USB-C Port added on the broad side.

Also, like the previous model, LaCie has sadly ditched the lifeboat-like orange color. But instead of the last generations full black, this model comes with a dark blue enclosure. But not only the color has changed – the Rugged SSD Pro 5 comes with a IP68-certification for water resistance. LaCie claims that this will protect the drive not only from your everyday splash of coffee, but it is supposed to last up to thirty minutes in a depth of up to 1,5 meters – and no, we didn’t verify that ourselves.

Neither did we actually check if it would actually survive being driven over by a car with up to two tons in weight – we are confident that some courageous Youtuber will pick up the mantle on these tests.

The numbers

Rather, we focused in on the speed. The Rugged SSD Pro 5 comes in 2 TB and 4 TB. In ideal conditions, LaCie claims this drive achieves speeds of 6.700 MBit/s for reading and 5.300 MBit/s for writing. As both models come with 50 GBs of cache, it can maintain this write speed for quite some time before dropping to a still very acceptable 1.800 MBit/s on the 4 TB version and 1.400 MBit/s on the 2 TB version. And with the cache being this big, this should really only come into play when working with very large RAW- or ProRES-files. 

So we did our own test on a MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro, one of the few computers on the market with Thunderbolt 5 currently built in. There is the Razer Blade 18 and the Schenker Key 17 Pro out there in the Windows Worlds, but at the time of testing we didn’t have access to either of these machines. So for this this test, Mac it is.

As the Rugged is designed for outdoor use, we thought it made sense to test it on a mobile computer and not the Mac Mini, the only non-mobile computer out there with Thunderbolt 5. And as we are talking VFX and video here, we resorted to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Achieving a solid 3.800 MBit/s on Read and a whopping 5.030 MBit/s on Write. Also noticeable: There was no noticeable difference between running the MacBook Pro connected to a power outlet or on battery.

Power Issues

So much speed comes at a price: While the SSD is small, it is definitely hungry. As it has no external power supply – as it is meant for mobile use – it draws all of its power from the Thunderbolt 5 connection. So you always want to use the supplied Thunderbolt 5 cable. And with a length of just 0.3 meters that might force you into some compromises.

For example, when we connected the drive to a iMac Pro, we had to build a rather weird contraption just to not have the drive dangling in mid-air. But even if you use the cable, there are some caveats in regards to backwards compatibility: On a M1 Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4 the drive was recognized, but the OS asked us to disconnect other peripherals so it would be able to supply sufficient power to the drive. On the previously mentioned iMac Pro, we needed to upgrade to MacOS Sequoia for the drive to be even recognized. After that, it worked like a charm.

And when quickly connecting to the USB-C Port of a small windows PC, the SSD did not even show up. And while current generation iDevices come with a USB-C port, don’t expect the Rugged to show up on an iPhone – not enough power. On a iPad with USB-C however, it SHOULD show up, though we did not test that ourselves. Also, it should be noted that there is only one Thunderbolt 5 port on the device – so if you plan on daisy-chaining, consider the Rugged to be at the end of that chain.

However, once you overcome these little inconveniences, you still have got a really fast drive, only limited by the bandwidth of your Thunderbolt Port.

The rugged takes a trip

But let’s keep in mind what the Rugged series has been designed for from the beginning: Mobililty. So we took that literal, got that MacBook Pro and our Rugged SSD Pro 5 on the next train and started editing in Resolve, as you do. It should be clear from the test data above that editing feels snappy, no matter what format or resolution you throw at that thing. So let’s talk about ergonomics. The choice to put the port on the broad side of the device actually makes a lot of sense. That way, we were able to put it on the left side of the MacBook Pro, in front of the Keyboard. So it is really not in the way when working on the touch pad and suddenly that 30 centimeters of cable are more than enough to connect to your mobile workstation without trapping your own feet in the process.

During that commute, the device became warm, but never hot. With the whole device being encapsulated to provide IP68 water resistance, there is no effective way to dissipate heat, so we will have to see if other devices like the announced OWC Envoy with Thunderbolt 5 can perform better due to a metal enclosure.

However, be careful with what you wish for… The biggest advantage of the Rugged series for mobile users has always been that it is, well, Rugged. The rubber enclosure gives you unparalleled surface adhesion. If you angle your knees, if the train goes into a curve, if somebody bumps into you – a rugged hard drive will likely stay in place rather than follow Newtons laws.

Prices

The Rugged SSD Pro 5 retails at US $ 399.-/€ 429.-  for the 2 TB version and US $ 599.-/€ 689.- for the 4 TB version. This comes with a limited five year warranty and a free month of Adobe Creative Cloud thrown in for good measure. In addition to that, LaCie is so confident in its durability claims that it gives you a free Rescue Date Recovery Service should you suffer data loss inside your warranty. Is that expensive? Yes and no.

Thunderbolt devices are always at a premium, when the latest standard launches, but compare it to upgrading your shiny new MacBook Pros internal SSD to let’s say 4 TB instead of the base configurations 1 TB. That’s going to set you back US $ 1.000.- / € 1.150.- for just 3 TB more instead of the 4 TB the large version of the Rugged SSD Pro 5 offers. And yes, that internal SSD will still be faster due to being connected by PCIE 4.0, but in fairness, Thunderbolt 5 is pretty close.

External Scratchings

Also, we would make the argument that having a external scratch disk has a lot of advantages over using your internal storage for that kind of throughput. Because , you can extend whatever workstation you are working on, and that drive will only be used for Scratch Activies, not for anything else, any software might be looking for. So you get all the Scratching speed.

An, let’s be honest, those files in media production quickly add up, and since the technical term of a 99% filled internal drive with the OS is “unusable”, having all of that data on n external drive makes a lot of sense in day-to-day productions.

Conclusions

So should you buy it? If you want to utilize Thunderbolt 5 right now (February 2025), the Rugged SSD Pro 5 is a great choice. If we take a look at the competition out there, the announced OWC Envoy and the Sabrent Thunderbolt 5 SSD are roughly the same price, all with breathtaking speed. What sets the Rugged SSD Pro 5 apart is the water resistance and the overall durability. This is what really sets it apart and if those factors are important to you, then this should be a no-brainer.

If you are working with a fixed or semi-portable setup and want a fast external scratch disk? In that case we still can highly recommend the Rugged SSD Pro 5. But if you are looking for a solution that has more redundancy for storing project data for longer periods, then it might be worth holding out a little bit more. The OWC Thunderblade X12 has been announced for March, giving you RAID redundancy and a external power supply and the option for far bigger storage.

Other solutions will surely follow very soon if that is what you are looking for. Meanwhile the Rugged SSD Pro 5 holds up to what it promises. A very fast, mobile and durable external scratch disk. If you currently don’t own a Thunderbolt 5-compatibile computer, it might still make sense to invest in the Rugged SSD Pro 5 to future-proof your investment – but be sure to double check that it really works with your current hardware and OS-version. Also be aware that the previous generation with Thunderbolt 3 is still available if you don’t plan to use Thunderbolt 5.

Pro & Contra

Pro: Extremely durable and water resistant
Pro: Big 50 GB Cache
Pro: Very fast read and write speeds
Pro: Proven design with great surface adhesion

Contra: Expensive
Contra: Limited Backwards Compatibility

The post Speed in a small package: LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 Review first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

In the Interview section, Bela turns from host to guest as he shares some big news in regards to digital production magazine. The news section brings us the latest from ARRI, Autodesk Flame, Re:Vision Twixtor and of course the latest from the AI hype train.

For all the different ways to listen to this podcast, check out linktr.ee/letsfixitinpod – we have Spotify, Youtube, Libsyn, Apple Podcast and More!

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:44 How politics influence our industry
00:05:36 Changing tax incentives
00:11:01 The fallout of the streaming wars
00:23:09 Rough times for software developers
00:29:22 The peak of the AI hype train
00:35:43 How studios need to reinvent themselves
00:40:01 Not everything will be in the cloud
00:45:19 Synergies between departments

00:48:04 Interview Bela Beier

01:03:59 The New Arri Alexa 35 Base and Premium
01:12:16 Flame 2025.2
01:19:06 DeepSeek and the NVidia shakeup
01:22:39 Twixtor stand-alone version
01:24:16 FMX tickets now on sale

01:25:32 Tooltip: Eizo monitor testing website
01:28:46 Outro

Links mentioned in the show:

digitalproduction.com

https://www.arri.com/en/company/press…

https://help.autodesk.com/view/FLAME/…

https://revisionfx.com/products/twixt…

https://www.eizo.de/monitortest/

The post Lets fix it in Pod 05 Looking to the future first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

5D Cyborg was there to mix-up things before unfortunately succumbing to a premature end. So let’s timewarp back to the age of the Cyborg.

Once upon a time…2001

When you look at the high-end VFX market of the late 1990 and early 2000s, there were two very distinct paradigms facing each other. On the one side you had very expensive high end turnkey systems, such as Quantel Henry or Discreet Flame & Inferno. Those did not only have a really astronomical price tag, they were also closed off systems. Quantels Henry for example ran on proprietary hardware.

On the other side you had an emerging market of software-only packages that were designed to run on off-the shelf hardware. While still pricey by today’s standards, those packages like Combustion, After Effects and Shake were only a fraction of the cost of the high-end counterparts, but they came at a snail-pace rendering speed and sometimes prohibitive limitations on resolutions and bit depth.

Enter the Masher

But, apart from the high price tag, the high-end systems had another predicament they were in – lack of connectivity. Especially Henry suffered from that and tried to find solutions to open up the system while at the same time sticking with its proprietary approach. One of these solutions was the 5D Masher. 5D Solutions at that time was a plug-in developer, supplying plug-ins for a range of hosts – this was years before OFX and basically every new point release of software on the host application required a plugin update as well. And Quantel was a special case as its proprietary hardware didn’t allow it to run third-party plug-ins. 5D came up with a very unique solution. They got a rack-mountable PC workstation – build by Boxx Solutions – with a video I/O that interfaced with the Quantel system and could basically be remote controlled from there, sending off a clip via the video I/O to that workstation, called the 5D Masher. On the masher it would be processed in the background and then be send back to the host system, ready to be inserted into your composite or timeline.

But there was a very tight bottleneck: The whole communication between the Quantel System and the Masher had to be built around Javascript. And while the processing speed of the Masher itself was acceptable, the update speed on the Quantel system to set up a plug-in was atrociously slow. Also, the artist was forced to set up only one plug-in at a time. Furthermore, plug-in setups had to be saved separately, basically undermining the whole Quantel concept of clip history. In the end, as explained in our previous look back at the Henry, the 5D Masher was a stopgap measure that was only slowing down the inevitable fall of the proprietary solutions from Quantel.

But the Masher also started something new at 5D Solutions: The British company got a lot of client feedback on the masher and that in essence was: Give us a Masher with a monitor and a User Interface so that we can put it next to our Finishing System. Now this part of the story might be a little bit of a retroactive legend building, but what we saw next from 5D was pretty much that: The 5D Cyborg.

Unleashing the Cyborg

In that first version it had basic 2D compositing capabilities and most of the 5D Monsters Plugins. In that iteration it couldn’t do much more than a Henry with a Masher attached but, wow, it could do that fast. The Cyborg system came – like Henry or Flame – as a turnkey solution. For that, 5D once again partnered up with Boxx Solutions and shipped it on a certified Windows NT Workstation with a Wildcat 3 Graphics Card by 3D Labs. Even the Sony 24” Monitor and the Wacom Tablet and Pen were part of that turnkey solution.

I started my very first employment as a junior Henry Artist at “Das Werk” in Frankfurt in the Summer of 2001. At that time “Das Werk” was a beta site for 5D Cyborg and Thomas Maier, now a respected colorist, was taking care of the beta as a student intern. Seeing how he was able to very quickly put something together that took me ages to run through the Masher really got me hooked. When he ended his internship I spent every free minute of my time in that beta suite. But unlike Thomas I was a full employee, expected to do my share of jobs. Trying to fit in my ever growing fascination with Cyborg into my daily work schedule was easier than expected. I just started to offload more and more effects work to that Cyborg system. Also, it was a gap I could jump into. I wanted to grow beyond the Quantel systems, but at that time, the only alternative would have been Discreet Inferno. Now those machines were not only expensive, but also fully booked. Also, there was a more-than-healthy rivalry between the Discreet Artists and the Quantel Artists. Back then you were either one or the other: The Quantel Artists were considered grunt workers that took brute-force approaches by the Discreet Artists. In turn the Discreet Artists were thought of as overthinking divas by the Quantel Artists. But in the end it was far easier for me to dig into the machine that nobody else cared about rather than fighting to get some precious screen time on a fully booked Inferno Workstation. Easing me into this was the fact that Cyborg was Windows-based. I knew my way around that OS as opposed to UNIX, which was back then the Infernos OS.

My interest in Cyborg didn’t go unnoticed. As a Junior Artist, I often sat in the passenger seat of client-attended Henry sessions. With my knowledge of Cyborg I could apply myself much more. It started with really simple conversion tasks. Load a file sequence into Cyborg and let it play in loop so that we can capture it into Henry. By today’s standards it is unfathomable that a seven-figure workstation was not able to do that on its own in the early 2000s. From there it continued with Rotos, Tracking and of course Plug-Ins. And the senior Henry artists saw the added value. “Das Werk” had four Henry Infinity suites at that time and it was decided to equip two of these suites with a Cyborg System.

The delivery of those two machines coincided with the release of version 2 of the Cyborg software – and this was the time where one could see that 5Ds ambitions were much higher than a simple assist workstation. EDL Conform, 3D Compositing environment and Timeline Editing truly unleashed the Cyborg. It was also at that time that 5D further defined the product line-up: There was a Cyborg S with Standard Definition I/O and just 2D compositing capabilities for roughly € 120.000 and a High Definition version called Cyborg M with all the bells and whistles for € 210.000 – an astronomical sum by today’s standard, but, as Alex Gabrysh wrote in his Cyborg v2 review in Digital Production 2002:04 “No matter which configuration of Cyborg you wish for, the price is a battle cry to competing systems and will definitely shake things up.”  

The 3D environment was blistering fast compared to all the competition out there. It really took advantage of the Wildcat 3 Graphics Card and the software utilizing OpenGL. In that regard 5D was unique – while the hardware was not custom-built like Henry nor the operating system customized like with Discreet, it was not written for generic off-the-shelf hardware either. When you ran Cyborg without that specific card, the 3D environment was much more unresponsive and more on par with the performance of Shake and Combustion at that time.

What makes a Cyborg?

The user interface took its lessons much more from the high end workstations than from the software-only solutions. The interface was clean, had no floating windows and was very clip-centric. Clips could be organized on reels and also edited there. But the real timeline, which was introduced in Version 2, didn’t live on that desktop. Rather, it was sitting right inside the compositing module – called “Create” – and it lived there as a node. This was a revelation. Neither Henry nor Flame/Inferno possessed a multi-layer timeline. Those were only privy to editorial systems at that time which in turn couldn’t deliver broadcast quality. But with a timeline as a node, artists were able to insert effects up and downstream of the edit, host multiple edits in the same compositing set up and change timings of layers while working inside their composite.

Another feature that made Cyborg unique between the two giants of Henry and Flame/Inferno was the native implementation of Primatte. At that time Primatte was so far ahead of its competition and having that right inside of your finishing system was just awesome. But Cyborg also broke new ground in other areas. Already in version 1 it had optical flow functionality quite ahead of its competition. Not only were the results pretty good, it also had a very clever approach to rendering. With Cyborg being clip-centric, the Motion estimation was rendered as a separate clip just once, giving the artist the ability to process multiple versions of a timewarp without going through constant re-Renders. Once again, this is expected behavior today, but at that time, almost all software packages were either rgb or rgba-based. Nuke was the first software to really embrace the concept of multi-channel and really utilize AOVs, and that was made available to the industry only in 2002.

The point tracker inside of Cyborg was far superior to the one in Henry and also the first one that could give the famous discreet tracker a run for its money. Also it came along with the very nice pre-tracking feature, where you could already see a HUD preview of your track while placing the tracker. And the paint module, while not being vector-based and hence destructive, introduced the ability to rotate the canvas either by shortcut or the 4D mouse that shipped with a Wacom tablet at that time. If you think that some of these features sound somewhat familiar, just keep on reading, we will get to that part of the story. 

Making an impression

To describe the impact Cyborg had onto our industry at that time one simply had to walk Hall 7 of the IBC in Amsterdam in 2001. Discreet had a huge booth with multiple workstations and Quantel’s booth doubled the discreet one in size, sporting a stage with seats for up to fifty attendees. Quantel presented its new flagship product, the iQ. While the hardware was impressive, the software was really not there yet, especially in regards to compositing. There were rumors that discreet was working on a new architecture, but it would take until NAB 2002 for Mezzo and Strata to be revealed. And then, near the south wall of Hall 7, was the 5D booth – and that one was crowded. Not for the plugins, not for the swag, but for Cyborg. Cyborg was the buzzword of that show and people talked about this machine being a potential Flame-killer. 

The two Cyborg systems were set up at Das Werk right alongside two of the Henrys. That really kickstarted my involvement in productions. What happened was that a symbiosis formed between the Senior Artist and me as a Junior Artist. While I would introduce them to the capabilities of the Cyborg and a file-based workflow, they would teach me about compositing itself and – even more important back then – the fine art of working with clients. To this day I am still grateful for all things I learned back then and for having such great teachers.

The Cyborg also broadened the spectrum of jobs I could participate in: Unlike Henry, Cyborg was resolution-independent. So when a Barilla Commercial directed by Wim Wenders came in and it was clear that the two Infernos would not be enough compositing power to finish this project in time, the Cyborgs were a welcome addition and I got my very first taste of high-resolution work. And while the crashy Paint module gave me headaches, the crowd replication work we did on that was really something for the twenty-two year old me.

However, not everything was great. With 5D still being a plug-in manufacturer, support for third party plugins was not exactly exuberant. There were no Gen-Arts Sapphire Plugins, neither was there a Cyborg version of the Tinder Tools by The Foundry – Yes, back than The Foundry was still a plug-in company. Versions of Knoll Lens Flare Pack and Digital Arnachy’s Text Arnachy were announced, but…

Stock market disasters, legal battles and new adventures

Out of the blue customers were hit by the news that the 5D closed offices on October 11th, 2002. That was only one month after IBC, where 5D announced a cheaper solution based on Cyborg called Eclypse and previewed the 2.5 version of the Cyborg software. So what has happened? A couple of years before, 5D Solutions sold a totally different part of their business, the printing division, to a company called Global Graphics for 24.7 Million Euro. Most of this amount however, was paid in stocks. During the dot com crisis, these stocks plummeted, but 5D was still liable for taxes on the original price of the stock at the time of the purchase. One could basically call this second degree murder by the stock market. The offices in London, L.A. and Miami were closed and all the assets went into litigation.

At the time I thought my time with Cyborg would now come to a very abrupt end – I was heartbroken. Little did I know that it would take another five years for me to finally part ways with that little monster of a machine. What took much less time was the liquidation of 5D itself. The people responsible for the plug-in division bought the division out of the liquidation mass themselves and founded Speedsix software. For seven years they maintained the Monster plug-in set until they eventually got bought by rival GenArts, known for their set of Sapphire plug-ins, in 2009. It should be another seven years before GenArts, in turn, is bought by Boris FX. While the monsters themselves are no longer around, some of them found their way into the Sapphire’s Suite of plug-ins.

And Cyborg itself? For two months, the user base held its collective breath.There were rumors that Quantel, Thomson, Avid, even Apple might be interested in picking up the reins on Cyborg. In the end, Discreet, by then already part of Autodesk, bought the intellectual property on Cyborg. Naturally, I hoped of course that Quantel would win the bid – but the “best of both worlds” scenario that I envisioned back then might have been a little bit biased. 

Now suddenly Discreet owned the property that was once labelled as a potential Flame-killer. They did what you would expect – kill the product. But, eventually, over the years, some of my more beloved Cyborg features found their way into Autodesk products. It would just take a couple of more years for me to find them there.

Some of the developers and management divided however that this was not the end and founded Assimilate Inc. and build Scratch – a color grading and digital intermediate solution that is still on the market today. While many of us tried to see in Scratch the spiritual successor to Cyborg, it was clearly a very different product aimed at a different task in our industry. The only ones that begged to differ in this matter was Autodesk, who sued Assimilate Inc. in 2008 on the grounds that they allegedly infringed on the Cyborg intellectual property that they purchased back in 2002. The example Autodesk gave was the functionality of a Confirm/Escape button and the concept of a pop-up calculator window. It seemed as petty back then as it does now, as these concepts even back then were not unique to neither Cyborg nor Flame. However, in 2010 Assimilate settled with Autodesk, acknowledging that Cyborg code was actually used in Scratch. 

Not quite dead yet

But the effects of companies getting into rough water and new companies emerging were not limited to software companies. In spring of 2003, while “Das Werk” itself was in chapter 11, a new company emerged, with me being one of their first employees. The company was called “Acht Frankfurt”, and started off with two Henrys, one brand-new Quantel eQ and four Cyborgs. Three of them were actually previously owned by CIS Hollywood and used on the first Season of “Star Trek – Enterprise”. This fact  thrilled me – being a huge Trekkie my whole life – to no end.

So why would a freshly founded company invest in a defunct product? Well, the answer is quite simple: By then all the Artists joining Acht were quite skilled in using Cyborg – we were able to work on these machines from day one. We couldn’t anticipate that these actually held up until October 2007. That was when Acht switched to Autodesk Flame. Up until that point we threw so much work at those machines they were not necessarily designed to do. For Lexus we did a 10:1 master, 5760×576 pixel. In 2005 we actually increased this to almost 8K for a installation for Mercedes Benz. This was something no other workstation could do at the time, most of them being limited by 4k width at the max. We also did a music promo with a runtime of three and a half minutes, containing up to nine layers of bluescreen. Comped by a single artist in nine days. This would not have been possible without the native primatte keyer.

But there were also drawbacks. Cyborg stopped being developed before it reached a critical mass in the industry – hence we had no freelancer base to scale up our workforce. And while we were able to squeeze an impressive number of years out of the system, with it being centered around the Wildcat III, we had no option to increase the performance of those workstations. As long as the jobs were predominantly SD, this was not an issue, but by 2007 it was clear that Acht needed workstations for the HD age.

For me, there was a certain irony that Acht took delivery of the Flame systems that were going to replace the Cyborgs on the very last day I worked for that company. But at my next location, Deli Pictures in Hamburg, i was finally able to get my hands on a Flame and boy, did i find some old friends. A number of features have actually made it into Flame. The concept of a timeline residing inside of the compositing environment, the rotatable canvas in paint and of course the optical flow for slow motions and many more little features showed up.

So what is the legacy of cyborg? In my opinion, it cannot be underestimated how cyborg bridged the gap between the proprietary world of the nineties and the open, networked and connected world we do find ourselves in today. Cyborg entered the scene at just the right time and dared to do things differently. In a relatively short timespan, 5D was able to put together a system that gave the two market leaders a run for their money. Also bear in mind that around that time a lot of companies tried to enter the compositing market. There was Sony’s ill-fated Soccrato, there was Tremor by Nothing real and some more tried. Even the established companies Quantel and Discreet tried to reinvent themselves with new products, and both of them failed as well. Developing a compositing, let alone a finishing application is very hard work. There is a reason why all the major compositing applications out there today reach back for at least thirty years. And for a very brief moment, there was a Cyborg out there who was about to shake all that up. One can only dream what would have been…

The post The Rise and Fall of Cyborg first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

They are joined by three guests representing their distinct associations. First off, Agon Ushaku (VES Chairman of the Board, German Section) talks about the VES – Visual Effects Society. After that, Stefan Albertz (Professor of 3D Animation and Visual Effects at Hamm-Lippstatd University of Applied Sciences) represents the SMPTE (Society of Motion Pocture and Television Engineers). Completing the trio is Sonja Langhans, who is on the Board of the FKTG (Fernseh- und Kinotechnische Gesellschaft). In the News Segment they discuss Vray for Blender, Nuke 16 and Mocha 2025. You can reach us at letsfixitinpod@gmail.com

For all the different ways to listen to this podcast, check out linktr.ee/letsfixitinpod – we have Spotify, Youtube, Libsyn, Apple Podcast and More!

Links mentioned in the show

https://www.vesglobal.org/

https://www.smpte.org/

https://www.fktg.org/

https://www.movieprint.org/

FMX 2025: https://fmx.de/en/home

The post Let’s Fix it in Pod 04 Industry Societies and Associations first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

They are joined by Software Developer Jonas Kluger and Compositing Artist Arne Palluck. They also discuss the E.O.L of Modo, the World VFX Day, FMX 2025 as well as the latest releases of Resolve, Final Cut and Blender.

For all the different ways to listen to this podcast, check out linktr.ee/letsfixitinpod – we have Spotify, Youtube, Libsyn, Apple Podcast and More!

Links mentioned in the show

Modo End of Life License: https://campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eo…

Academy Software Foundation: https://www.aswf.io/

Das Element: https://das-element.com/

Garlic VFX: https://www.garlicvfx.com/

World VFX Day: https://worldvfxday.com/

FMX 2025: https://fmx.de/en/home

The post Let’s Fix it in Pod 03 Open Industry Standards with Jonas Kluger and Arne Palluck first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

They are joined by Benjamin Wild, Creative Director at Raumkontakt, to discuss how A.I. affects the work of our clients. In the current affairs segment the discuss Inkscape 1.4, the latest A.I. tools from Adobe MAX, the MX Creative Console from Logitech and the Chris Mayne Job List

For all the different ways to listen to this podcast, check out linktr.ee/letsfixitinpod – we have Spotify, Youtube, Libsyn, Apple Podcast and More!

Links mentioned in the show

The Chris Mayne Job List: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/…

The MX Creative Console: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/produc…

Comfy UI GitHub: https://github.com/comfyanonymous/Com…

The post Let’s Fix it in Pod 02 Jobs and A.I. with Benjamin Wild first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

In their very first episode, Bela Beier (Editor-in-Chief, Digital Production Magazine) and Christoph Zapletal (Compositing Artist & Instructor) talk about control surfaces for an artist’s workstation. They are joined by Angry Face founder Mazze Aderhold for an in-depth discussion of new and refurbished grading panels and the upgrades you can apply to a panel. They finish the show by discussing the latest news from IBC 2024.

For all the different ways to listen to this podcast, check out linktr.ee/letsfixitinpod – we have Spotify, Youtube, Libsyn, Apple Podcast and More!

Links mentioned in the show

https://www.angry-face.com/

https://3dconnexion.com/

https://contourdesign.com

https://loupedeck.com/

https://www.tangentwave.co.uk/

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

https://electricsheep.tv/

https://www.maxon.net/en/zbrush-for-ipad

The post Let’s Fix it in Pod 01 Control Surfaces with Mazze Aderhold first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

My first contact with a Quantel Henry was during my training as a media designer for image and sound at Voss TV Ateliers in Düsseldorf at the end of the nineties. In addition to three Avids, a Discreet Logik Inferno and two tape-based editing systems, there was one of these wickedly expensive effects systems from England. Of course, each of these systems was housed in its own suites designed for customer visits and the more expensive the respective suite was, the less likely it was that a young, pimply-faced apprentice like yours truly would be allowed anywhere near it. So I could only get an idea of what a Henry was and what you could do with it bit by bit. But as soon as I had formed a reasonably clear picture, I knew that I wanted to work on the Henry.

Of heavy boxes and rodents

So what was this machine that the young apprentice found so fascinating? The Henry was an online compositing and finishing system from the British company Quantel. The Henry had proprietary hardware designed and produced by Quantel, which was directly addressed by software from the same company. Anyone who thinks Apple’s approach of closely integrating hardware and software is restrictive did not experience Quantel back then. Every major function within the software was assigned to a dedicated board in the mainframe. The whole thing was supplemented by memory.

A considerable 30 minutes of memory for the time. In an incredible 720 × 576 pixels. But uncompressed. This memory was then distributed across two so-called Dylans. These were the Henry’s disc arrays and if you wanted to keep your discs in the right place, you’d better carry them in pairs. So, one mainframe, two Dylans and – bang – 24 units were occupied in the rack. Because you didn’t put a Henry under or on the table, but of course he sat in the cooled technical room. The artist was then given a keyboard in his suite, a – let’s say – generously sized tablet with a pen and a hardware accessory that is really hard to imagine today. A kind of thumbstick that you could hold in your hand, with four buttons arranged above it. Quantel officially called it the Hand Control Unit, everyone else called it a rat. And what did the future Henry Artist view his work on? On a class 1 Sony PAL monitor. The Henry was not familiar with a dual-monitor layout.

In keeping with the Henry’s minimalist design, the broadcast monitor also became a GUI monitor. The user interface could be shown and hidden by swiping to the side with the pen. So it was natural to spend eight, ten or sometimes even fourteen hours in front of these things clocked at fifty hertz. The fact that you went home afterwards with a bit of a headache probably needs no further explanation. What we should mention, however, is the price. As the Henry was available in various expansion stages, was later supplemented by the Editbox at the bottom and the Henry Infinity at the top, and price lists were well-kept trade secrets, it is very difficult to give a clear answer here.

But to give an order of magnitude: You could easily buy your own home with the money you wanted to invest in Quantel equipment. It is said that a fully equipped Henry Infinity could be bought for 1.4 million Deutschmarks in 1998. And Quantel knew how to collect this money: Important customers were flown to Newbury in the company’s own helicopter to convince themselves of the merits of their future Henry.

Welcome to Henry

The price and the proprietary hardware explain why it was so difficult for my younger self to get hold of and learn the Henry in the first place. This machine had to be well booked to amortise the enormous purchase and maintenance costs. Nobody wanted to risk a greenhorn accidentally deleting the current Persil campaign because he needed storage space for his first attempts. To make matters worse, YouTube and the like did not yet exist as a source for tutorials.

So without an experienced artist to take me under his wing, it wasn’t going to work. But with some negotiating skills, I managed to convince the two Henry artists in my training company. Now I was finally allowed to take my first steps on the legendary machine myself. Some time later, I finally got my hands on five training tapes, which I played on my VHS recorder until they were unrecognisable. This is what the granddaddy of online tutorials looked like.

The Henry’s interface was very special. The decision to turn the broadcast monitor into a GUI monitor at the same time required a number of decisions. The lower quarter of the screen was reserved for the menu, the rest consisted of either the content to be edited or the desk. Anyone who thinks of a PC desktop when they hear “desk” is unfortunately only partly right. This is because Henry used a completely different analogy to visualise the handling of data than pretty much every other software manufacturer.

While the classic PC is based on the analogy of a desk with folders and files stored in it, Henry used the analogy of a cutting table, which was widely used at the time. This desktop had three reels, i.e. film racks, on which clips could be stored. This was quite logical, as most of the artists who were to work with Henry came from the analogue film world and had had little or no contact with classic PCs. Henry was released in 1992, when digitalisation was still really new territory.

Clips could be sorted and edited in the centre and right-hand reels, while so-called packs could be created in the left-hand reel. Packs were several clips that could be layered on top of each other and then taken into the “Blender”, the compositing area of the Henry. And there you had transforms, blur, colour correction and keying at your disposal. That was it. No 3D environment. No node tree. Plug-ins? When I asked about plug-ins, a very self-confident Quantel employee simply said: “Mr Zapletal, a good artist doesn’t need plug-ins”. Fortunately, Quantel had integrated its then already famous Paintbox into the system and tracking took place in a module called “ALF” – Auto Lock Follow. The marketing team had once again gone all out for the christening.

At that time, the number of layers I could take into the Blender was limited to six. You can’t really imagine it today, but that was enough for a lot of comp tasks back then or you just worked in several steps. Nevertheless, I was absolutely thrilled when “my” Henry got an update. Suddenly I had a Henry V8 under my fingers, so eight layers in Blender.

But there were also two other features: Firstly, I now had a small audio mixer with eight motorised controls next to my tablet, which then moved according to the set level when the clip was played. This was pretty pointless when editing commercials, but it was a party trick favoured by many customers.

Secondly, clip history. The setup no longer had to be saved separately in the library, but was virtually “attached” to the clip. A rendered clip could now simply be inserted into an edit, cut, blended or used in any other way and then removed and edited again at any later point in time. This was an incredible time-saver and made my work on the Henry much faster.

Speed is everything.

And that brings us to the Henry’s real strength: speed. Because this resulted not only from the incredibly fast proprietary hardware at the time, but above all from a very well thought-out user interface. The menus were organised in a strict hierarchy from left to right, with no windows or nested menus. All in all, the Henry had an estimated three hundred different buttons. That’s what you call focussing on the essentials. The consistent use of the tablet was another reason for this speed. If you had the rat in one hand and the pen in the other, you could work incredibly quickly. The thumbstick and the four buttons were context-sensitive, so you didn’t need any shortcuts in Henry. The keyboard was only needed in the library for saving and searching. And the use of the pen was also miles ahead of its time. Swiping outside the tablet area was the way to switch between full-screen view and menu view or to retrieve a clip that had been thrown away. Because in the Henry there was neither a rubbish bin nor an undo function. A clip that was no longer needed was placed on the “CRF” – the cutting room floor. The analogy to the cutting table was also consistently applied here. And if you did need it, you simply swiped the pen outside the desktop – and it was back on the pen.

However, the functionality that I still miss today with my Wacom is the “dropping” of a clip. If you had a clip on the pen, for example to take it to another module such as the Paintbox, and you changed your mind, you simply lifted the pen a little further up from the tablet and the clip was put back in its original place – i.e. dropped.

And there was another area where Henry consistently lived out the speed – in editing. Just as there was no node tree, there was also no timeline. Clips were cut together on the desktop in the centre and right reel. This could either be done with “unfolded” clips, where you could see every single frame (realistically a maximum of four frames, more did not fit into the PAL resolution) or with “folded” clips, where every single cut image could be seen as a thumbnail. If you had attached two clips to each other, you could move the cut by dragging the pen up or down between the two clips using a yellow handle. quantel called this technique “gestural editing”. Operations such as fades or wipes (it was the nineties after all) were carried out directly in the Full Screen Viewer or via the menu on the desktop.

If you came from AVID, it was all very confusing, but once you got the hang of it and had a good logic of how to organise your rushes, your edit and your comps on the three reels, you could cut incredibly quickly. But where there was no timeline, there was also no multi-layer timeline. And so with graphics such as corner logos, URLs and the like, you were spoilt for choice – either you rendered the corresponding logo separately on each individual edit, which could get really out of hand, especially with cut speed ramps, or you committed all your edits and then overlaid the graphics completely. In this case, it was necessary to save everything properly in the library so that you could still see what had happened when afterwards.

Who needs folders..

The library – this was probably the slowest and toughest part of the Henry. While all the other components had their dedicated boards with incredibly fast processors, the library was managed by a 20 megahertz Motorola CPU. So just listing the entire library could give you time for a coffee break. More problematic was that the library had no folder structure or even the concept of a folder. You could either scroll through the library and manually search for the clip you wanted or use the search function – which again called the terribly slow Motorola CPU into action. If you consider that originally each pack, which was basically the setup for a comp, had to be stored separately without a folder, it becomes clear how important a proper naming convention was here. Unfortunately, among my colleagues at the time, the longer the session and the more nonsensical the customer feedback became, the more and more swear words crept into the names. I won’t reproduce them here for obvious reasons; no-one back then would speak to their mum in the way they called these set-ups. In the end, we knew that the wilder the name, the closer it was to the final version.

Clip History was perhaps not intended to help with the beauty of the language, but with the management of the many setups. Because – at least that’s the theory – if every clip that is blended in a timeline carries its setup with it, you would only have to save one timeline and thus have everything saved. And this worked well in many scenarios. But as soon as speed ramps, sandwich fades or the aforementioned graphics over several cuts came into play, it became difficult and you had to save individual steps again and the library grew again.
Under the bonnet, however, the library was really ahead of its time. I still remember two features very well: firstly, Frame Magic. The name sounds pompous, but in the end it simply meant that every frame in the library was well referenced, thus preventing frames from being loaded twice unnecessarily. With thirty minutes of PAL memory, this was a highly desirable feature. When copying clips, new media was never created, only referenced. When conforming or loading archives, Henry always checked whether this media was already in the system. This was a surprisingly good way to manage the limited memory.

Whoever writes archives, stay alive ..

Speaking of archives. Just like ingest and playout, these were tape-based. So not LTO or a similar data format, but based on D1 and later Digital Betacam. The media was written to the video tape and all meta and audio data to an MO – a magneto-optical disc with an incredible 640 MB of memory. Once a job was finished, the MO was placed in the Henry drive, a tape machine was connected and every single clip, including any handles in the timeline, was played onto the tape.

If there were comps with clip history in the timeline, the source clips used were also played. If the same job then had to be reloaded, all of this was loaded again. However, since Frame Magic also applied here, meaning that in case of doubt only things were archived that had not already been archived on this tape before, at some point Henry began to rewind and rewind the tape wildly, loading two minutes here, then shuttling to the other end of the tape to load another ten frames from here, and then back to the beginning again. Watching this dance was always a bit fascinating, because even after years of using the device, you could never quite believe that all this actually worked so smoothly and that you had actually loaded your entire project back cleanly at the end. Incidentally, there was no file-based archive solution – with 10 MBit, the Henry’s optional TCP/IP module was only suitable for exchanging stills, fonts and EDLs.

Incidentally, this tape-based archive feature was one of the reasons why Quantel was so popular with the Henry in advertising. It was extremely robust and customers had the security of knowing that they could still access all the data cleanly a year after completion, cut a twenty-second cutdown from the thirty-second, remove the new jammer and insert the next flavour. And if in doubt, you could quickly request tapes and take them to another vendor.

The Infinity Saga

In the meantime, I had completed my training and got a job as a “Junior Henry Artist” at “Das Werk” in Frankfurt. My jaw dropped at the interview when I was shown four Henry suites. Here I was also given my first Quantel pen, including a satin-lined box. This pen was even more important to me than the fancy new title of my first permanent position. For me, it was a kind of accolade: if you had your own pen, you were in the club. At least that’s how it felt back then. Speaking of the club: with four Henrys, there were of course a lot of artists from whom I could learn a lot. One of them, however, was very enthusiastic about performing the aforementioned swiping and swivelling movements on the tablet, so I was afraid more than once that I might pop his pen out of my eye next.

Incidentally, my new colleagues had a nice little trick for learning from each other. When they didn’t have customers, they simply patched the output of another Henry onto their own control monitor. This meant that they could keep an eye on what the colleague next door was up to with one eye – provided it survived the pen attack – and learn a thing or two. This was so easy, of course, as the Henry’s GUI landed directly on a video-out. So you only had to patch a normal video signal.
Most of the time, however, this was not possible because customers were present. Because with all this speed, Henry was designed to be used in customer sessions. It’s hard to imagine in the post-Covid era, but it was quite normal for customers to attend almost the entire production on site. Understandable, after all, they paid around 1,500 Deutschmarks for their Henry session – per hour. For this, not only should there be sushi on the table at lunchtime and the customer’s sofa be nice and comfortable, but the artist should also have a chat, listen to the briefing and, incidentally, finish the film. In this respect, the typical Henry Artist at this time was just as much an artist as an entertainer, sometimes also a shrink or hairdresser. Filigree tinkering was done on Flame and Inferno, later perhaps also on Shake, the Henry was stretched. It sounds like marketing speak, but the superior speed and fast user interface at the time – in addition to the extremely reliable archive solution – made Henry very popular. Conventional PCs of the time simply couldn’t keep up with the rendering power of a Henry.

But what kind of jobs were done at the Henry? Large cinema projects were not his profession, if only because of the SD resolution. However, Henry was at home in advertising. From classic adaptations and look development to complex new productions. The minimalist interface allowed the artists to always react very quickly to the wishes of the clients present. And so the rapid swishing on the oversized tablet sometimes had a bit of a shell game about it. You could quickly create a lot of effect for the customer with just a few movements – the rendering speed did the rest to give the customer the – quite justified – impression that they were getting a lot for their money. In addition to advertising, we produced an incredible number of music videos, trailers, station IDs, image films and the like.

What was also new for me at the plant: the four Henrys at the Frankfurt plant were in the highest expansion stage, “Henry Infinity”. Infinity stood for an infinite number of layers. However, I soon realised that it was not possible to simply add a ninth and tenth layer to the eight layers that I had previously known as the maximum from Herny – the entire architecture and the UI design did not allow more than eight layers to be managed simultaneously. This is why Quantel introduced so-called super layers. If you wanted to integrate even more layers into a comp, you could, for example, “push” layers three, four and five into a super layer. The three layers then became a new one, the content of which could then be accessed within the blender by double-clicking on the layer icon. However, these super layers had to be calculated separately by Henry. In the end, superlayers were a glorified prerender.

The Henry tries his hand as a team player

Quantel’s strategy of relying on proprietary hardware was slowly reaching its limits in other areas too. At the beginning of the 2000s, the pressure to open up the system grew. The plug-in manufacturer at the time, 5D, introduced the “Masher”. The Masher was a PC connected to the Henry via TCP-IP, on which 5D plug-ins could then be executed. The parameters could be set via the Quantel GUI. However, as everything had to be sent to the masher for updating via an extremely slow connection, the entire speed and interactivity of the Henry was reduced to absurdity.
Another approach was “Java on Quantel”, which used the aforementioned scripting language to introduce functions that were not possible by default. In its last major update, the Henry finally got something like a keyframe graph, a long-cherished wish of the Quantel community. Unfortunately, the same problem arose again: Java was never known for its speed and the diversions via a third-party interface created such a bottle neck that hardly any artists used the feature. The biggest problem, however, was that the hardware was not resolution-independent. You could choose between PAL and NTSC – but not just like that in the middle of the project: if you had to switch the resolution, all the material was deleted from the Dylans. Oversized files had to be broken up in Photoshop just to be reassembled in Henry. All of this was no longer up to date and the development of the Henry had come to an end.

The echo

With “generationQ”, Quantel launched a new product series that could work independently of resolution and whose proprietary hardware was controlled by a Windows PC. In theory, a “best-of-both-worlds” approach. In practice, the designers of the time unfortunately did not succeed in transferring the strengths of the Henry to the next generation. The user interface lost its speed and the successor eQ was never able to achieve the stability of the Henry. And so the Henry lasted longer than many would have thought. Although the Henry was no longer actively advertised by Quantel from 2002 onwards, in April 2003, when I joined the then newly founded ACHT Frankfurt, there were two brand new Henrys in the rack. The memory had been expanded to an unbelievable one hundred and twenty minutes and had found its way into the case, the rest was well known and should actually serve us well until 2005. However, the Henry became more and more of a conform and mastering tool, the effects were done on contemporary machines like the 5D Cyborg – but that’s a whole other story.

When you talk to artists who worked on the Henry back then, there’s always a bit of nostalgia. The Henry was so fast, the interface so straightforward and the functions not so overloaded. But you mustn’t forget that the Henry could be like that because it was the child of a different era. With only one resolution and just two relevant aspect ratios, without internet formats and without large teams working across several continents. Without workflow tools and shot management. The Henry was designed to allow a single artist to work on a film together with their clients. Long before approvals between two meetings took place on a smartphone. And to be honest, I don’t miss the rat on the table or the booming fifty-hertz monitors. But that swiping on the tablet was cool.

The post Once upon a time, there was a Henry first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

The biggest innovation is probably noticeable as soon as you start the application: There is no longer a dedicated Flame user to select, only the project is still available for selection. All data that was previously attached to the Flame user profile will in future be attached to the log-in of the operating system, i.e. Mac OS or Linux.

Of course, this has the disadvantage that you will have to exit Flame and log in at OS level to change users, but otherwise the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. First of all, Flame adapts its behaviour to the modus operandi of almost every other application. In addition, this change allows some fundamental optimisations under the bonnet. For example, unlike in the past, user log-ins will not have to be recreated with every major update. This means that when Flame 2026 comes onto the market next year, all modifications such as keyboard shortcuts, interface customisations, etc. will continue to work. And here’s the good news for freelancers: The user profile can be exported and imported to another workstation.

Shared presets

Every artist who has ever worked in a facility with more than one Flame knows the problem: sharing set-ups or presets with another workstation was a pain. The background to this was that Flame created or copied its own presets and set-ups for each individual version installed on a workstation. If you wanted to share these with another workstation, copies were created again. This not only made the process cumbersome, but also error-prone.

With Flame 2025, there are now standardised locations for both presets and set-ups, whereby presets can now also be created very easily so that they are then displayed in the corresponding drop-down menus in the Flame GUI. From the glow preset to the most up-to-date aspect ratio for social media, all possible settings can be saved in a central location and distributed from there.

Keyboard shortcuts

While other compositing applications see no need for a keyboard shortcut editor, Flame’s setting options can be described as excessive. However, the abolition of the user log-in also creates new possibilities here and perhaps even offers the opportunity to finally settle a long-standing dispute in the community: Flame or Smoke hotkeys?

The fact that both presets exist at all is due to the fact that Flame and Smoke Advanced were merged twelve years ago in the Anniversary Edition of Flame. However, Flame hotkeys have always worked better in batch, while the Smoke hotkeys worked better on the timeline. Flame 2025 now offers the option of changing the keyboard preset directly when switching between tabs. For example, the Smoke hotkeys can be used on the desktop, but the Flame hotkeys can be used in batch. Each applicable setup can of course still be configured individually.

Speaking of configurations. If you want to use your user profile on both Mac OS and Linux, you can create a Mac OS and a Linux version for each shortcut. So any confusion as to whether it is Ctrl-X or Cmd-X can now be resolved manually. And even under Mac OS, the Shortcut Editor now supports Windows keyboards.

Match Grain

Grain management is now an essential part of compositing. Flame has been able to count on “Neat Video” for Denoising since version 2019, as this was the very first OpenFX plug-in for Flame. However, when applying grain at the end of the comp, you previously had two options: Either use the rather outdated regrain node to approach the result channel by channel or subtract the degrain and original plate from each other using the comp node and then add the grain back on at the end. Both methods are done with a queasy gut feeling, because both methods would almost certainly fall on your feet at the QC at the latest. The regrain node usually doesn’t get close enough to the look of the original and the comp method quickly causes halos and artefacts.

Other compositing apps also have this problem – Nuke, for example, needed the now very popular Gizmo “Das Grain” by Fabian Holtz, which has become a quasi-standard in the Nuke world. And it was precisely this tool that Autodesk in Montreal must have taken a closer look at, as the basic workflow is very similar.

Two inputs, in addition to the comp or element that is to be supplied with grain, are mandatory for Match Grain: the original plate and the denoise version and Match Grain uses these to sample a frame range. This can also be very short if there are no strong light fluctuations in the scene. The analysis runs via the GPU and the process was also completed in a few seconds with the 8K Blackmagic RAW we tested. The only important thing here is that the colour space of the material has been tagged correctly, as the material is linearised under the bonnet to extract the grain without errors.

In this setting, Match Grain delivers a result that is technically cleaner than the classic subtraction/addition method. However, artefacts can still occur in high-contrast areas of the plate. The tool provides the Disperse function for this purpose, which provides a small, yellow sample box. This is moved to a low-detail area of the plate and the sampled pattern is repeated. To create an organic grain here, Match Grain uses a Voronoi pattern, just like the grain in Nuke. It is also possible to edit the grain with various post-processes after sampling. The grain can also be scaled, repositioned and blurred – individually for each colour channel.

The node has two outputs – one for the result, i.e. the element fed into the input or comp with applied grain – and then another output just for the grain alone. This can then be fed into another Match Grain node as an external grain – useful if you have to delive the same shot in different formats or if you want to distribute a good sampled grain over several shots. Last but not least, Match Grain has a matte input if you want to limit the retraining to a specific area.

Lens distortion and STMap

When Flame received a new match mover three years ago, the feedback from the community was really positive. What was immediately noticeable, however, was that the lens distortion workflow was still the same and really no longer up to date. This has now been rectified with Flame 2025. The tool has been completely overhauled and leaves hardly anything to be desired. In the unlikely event that a lens grid has actually been shot, it can of course be fed into the tool and analysed. However, it is much more likely that splines will be set manually on straight lines in the footage. This requires precise work in order to ensure the best possible analysis. Lens models can also be imported from 3D Equaliser.

A new STMap node has also been released together with the new Lens Distortion Node. This is also very welcome, as the Lens Distortion Node has two further outputs in addition to a de- or distorted footage, which provide an STMap and an inverse STMap. The idea here is that the analysis only takes place once in the script and all de- and distortions in the script then take place via the STMap node to save time. The Lens Distortion Node has all the important functions, from automatic adjustment of the plate size to options for manually influencing the calculated distortion and an extensive selection of filters to minimise the loss of quality during de- and distortion.

And what else?

Connected Conform has some nice little details: it is now possible to create connections between different versions not only depending on reel or desktop, but also simply by selection. This means that you no longer have to subordinate your own (dis)organisation on the desktop to the various deliverables, but can adjust them at any time during the finishing process according to your own logic. The source timeline can now be made invisible if desired and the order of the clips in the sequence reel is now synchronised with the order of the sequences in the timeline. Most keying nodes now have a matte and an inverse matte output as standard. In addition, “legacy” nodes, i.e. tools for which there is a modern replacement and which are no longer being actively developed, are no longer displayed in the node bin by default – but this can be switched on again if desired. This makes it easy to get rid of the old GMask (without “Tracer”) or Lens Distort (without “-ion”) and avoid getting lost so quickly. The Clamp Node now has fields for values that can be used to precisely define the clamp. The Colour Corrector now has curves that are easier to modify, as can already be found in Mastergrade or the new Match Grain. Apple RAW is now supported when importing from Flame. The Preferences Panel has now been divided into four areas: User, Project, App Version and System. For example, all adjustments to the GUI can be found under “User” and are also saved with the user account now managed by the operating system, whereas project-relevant data, such as colour management, can be set under “Project”.

Conclusion

After the last releases with native Apple Silicone support, Flame in the Cloud, Vulkan support and the like contained a lot of “under-the-hood” work, Flame 2025 focusses entirely on requests from the Flame community. A revised Lens Distortion was a long-cherished wish and, together with the new Match Grain, removes two thick bottle necks that have nudged towards Nuke on one or two occasions in the past. Admittedly, neither feature has reinvented the wheel, and it is clear that “Das Grain” was the inspiration for Match Grain in particular. For Flame artists, however, the fact that a major gap in the toolset has been closed is likely to be decisive. Shared presets and the elimination of the Flame user will help to integrate Flame more easily into existing pipelines and thus strengthen Flame’s role as a visual hub.

The post What’s new in Flame first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

Autograph has been on the market since the beginning of 2023 and is distributed by the plug-in manufacturer Re:Vision Effects, but is produced by the French company Left Angle. The software is available on Windows, Mac and Linux and can be purchased either as a subscription model (monthly and annually) or as a perpetual licence. In addition, there are three versions of Autograph: Creator, Studio and Render. While Render is really intended as a pure command line rendering tool, Creator is a licence for freelancers and smaller companies with less than 1 million US dollars in capital or income. For those who land above that (congratulations!) there is the Studio licence, which also includes the Python API. A monthly subscription for Autograph Creator starts at 35 US dollars, for Studio it is then 60 US dollars. Those who prefer to buy their licence will then pay a price of 945 US dollars for Creator and 1,795 US dollars for Studio. Before that, however, you can easily get a first impression in a ninety-day trial – to be found at left-angle.com.

The first impression

When you first look at the interface, you quickly think that you are simply sitting in front of a darker After Effects. And indeed, anyone who is familiar with Adobe’s motion design software will quickly find their way around Autograph. The viewer in the centre, properties on the right, the project window on the left and the timeline at the bottom. Similar to Nuke, you can create your own workspaces for different tasks so that you can customise the layout to suit your needs. However, there are only very few types of panels, which is why the design options are quite limited. Footage can be imported into our project via the project panel and compositions can be created. However, as with After Effects, the real centre of attention is the timeline. Individual layers can be dragged in here and the parameters can be expanded and edited accordingly. The filter function, which not only helps to isolate individual layers but also specific operations, is very convenient. These filters are also assigned to hotkeys and can be combined with text input. As an artist, you can then isolate the position value of a specific layer quite quickly, for example, in order to animate it. All parameters that are displayed in the timeline are also available in the Properties panel. This may seem redundant, but users who don’t want to scroll through thirty layers will find an alternative workflow here. And if you only want to work in the timeline, you can modify your workspace accordingly. Speaking of parameters: Those who prefer to enter values gesturally rather than numerically will be pleased with the hotkeys that adjust the intensity of the value input. For example, Shift lets you “drag” larger values, while Ctrl ensures finer input. Autograph does one thing fundamentally differently to After Effects: the Curve Editor is not integrated into the already fully loaded timeline, but is available as a separate panel. However, the viewer will undoubtedly remind many experienced artists of Nuke. No wonder, under the bonnet Autograph processes all files in 32-bit float – and so the viewer has silders to not only apply gamma and gain, but also saturation as a post process to the viewer, so that you can visualise even the last highlight in the EXR file. The viewer has two inputs, where a HUD and the blend modes known from Nuke are also available, for example to compare a reference with the current comp.

On to something new…

Up to this point, the interface looks familiar. But let’s take a look at the things that Autograph does differently from the two software packages between which it is positioned. The first thing that stands out is the use of the HUD. While Nuke’s on-screen controls are often very small, Autograph’s are not hidden at all. They are clearly visible and an important part of Autograph’s fast and fluid operation. The fact that right-clicking and the associated context menus are largely dispensed with also contributes to this fast interface. Pen and tablet users in particular will really appreciate this. But it is also the absence of clicks that makes the interface incredibly fast. For example, there is an option (which can of course be switched off) to briefly highlight layers that can be clicked on in the viewer so that you can see whether you have made the right selection. And how nicely the alpha channel is respected here – others can take a leaf out of this book. Hovering over drop-down menus works in a similar way. The selected parameter is displayed as a preview, so to speak, before you have even clicked on it. Not as a thumbnail, but actually applied to the current comp in the viewer. This works for the layer blend modes, for example, but also for the more than fifty interpolation presets. So you can run your animation in a loop and simply scroll through the presets and see what these different interpolations would look like.

Let’s stay on the subject of animation for a moment: Autograph is also trying to rethink things here. All image content always has its pivot in the centre of the image and the zero point of the coordinate system is also in the centre of the image. This may sound banal, but it is enormously helpful when it comes to adapting an animation for different output formats. It also helps tremendously when creating symmetrical animations. Autograph has a sophisticated system for dynamically linking values to each other without the artist needing a maths degree to write the corresponding expressions. Autograph uses so-called modifiers, which can simply be dragged onto the corresponding layer like an effect in After Effects. Somewhat confusingly, Autograph also refers to classic effects such as keyers or colour correctors as modifiers, but this shows how important they are for the workflow in Autograph. In addition to the modifiers, there are generators that can produce everything from images, i.e. classic colour areas or gradients, to text and numerical data and even 3D primitives. This now brings us to the 3D environment. This is based entirely on USD and as the USD files are only linked and not imported into the Autograph project, common formats such as Alembic or the rather old FBX are not supported. Autograph uses the filament developed by Google as its render engine. As a result, the 3D environment is quite fast and is likely to bring tears to the eyes of some Nuke artists. Camera and lights can simply be dragged into the timeline and if 3D layers are stacked directly under each other, they are treated and rendered as a single 3D scene. This makes it possible to mix 2D and 3D elements in the same timeline without having to create precomps. And by using filament, post effects such as ambient occlusion, fog and depth of field are also available.

What is missing?

The developers of Left Angle do not seem to lack enthusiasm, as can be seen in the interview with Francois Grassard on page 30. For a first version, Autograph makes a well-rounded impression. OpenFX plug-ins are supported, even if at the moment only those from its own distributor, Re:Vision FX, are available. The extent to which plug-in manufacturers support the newcomer will be seen in the coming months. However, both Nuke and After Effects, the two programmes that Autograph is competing with, both have an ecosystem of plugins and gizmos that has been growing for several years, not to mention a very large user base, which naturally does not exist right from the start. Nuke artists will miss their Node Graph the most. Even if the toolset is impressive, the speed of the interface and software is blazingly fast and the rendering is super-precise, the logic in a timeline is of course different from that in a node graph. Motion designers coming from After Effects will certainly find it easier to familiarise themselves with Autograph.

Conclusion

First impressions can often be deceiving. Autograph is far more than the After Effects clone that some people thought it was at launch. The user interface in particular has some innovative surprises and concepts in store that the developers of the long-established software either didn’t dare to tackle due to their user base or simply didn’t think of. This breath of fresh air is something that has definitely been missing in recent years. It’s reminiscent of the days of 5D Cyborg and Socratto, where innovative software forced established developers to rethink things and push their software forward. Competition stimulates business. That alone is a reason to be happy. Autograph is already interesting for a certain group of artists. Anyone who moves between motion design and compositing or wants to make the leap from motion design to compositing will find Autograph a possibility without having to learn a completely new paradigm such as working in Node Graph. Finishing artists can find a complement to Flame or Resolve without having to commit to a monthly cloud subscription. And if the developers of Left Angle continue with the same verve, this circle will certainly grow even larger.

The post From the left.. first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

X_Tesla

If you’re currently working on the next dystopian streaming series or just like to let it rip, you’ll love X Tesla by Xavier Martin. This beautiful gizmo generates a lightning bolt between two naturally animated points defined by the artist that would make Thor green with envy. In terms of adjustability, the tool is absolutely on a par with the competing product from a well-known plug-in manufacturer. Amplitude, number of spurs, frequency, glow, spread and much more can be customised, leaving nothing standing in the way of the next thunderstorm.

is.gd/x_tesla

Grad Magic

Next up is a real jack-of-all-trades – Grad Magic from Tony Lions. Grad stands for gradient. But anyone expecting just a colour gradient here is mistaken. When you open Grad Magic, you are immediately reminded of Nuke’s Corner Pin Node: four dots can be moved through the picture to sample colours at their respective positions. Grad Magic thus creates a colour gradient between these four points. The colour gradient then also includes any changes in light over the duration of the footage.

Of course you can also animate the four sampling points, but it gets even better: these can be linked directly to a corner pin node. This allows you to use a point or planar track to quickly generate a patch. For example, an annoying U-crane can quickly disappear when retouching paint. Both the colour sampling itself and the corner pin can be baked in the node or switched live again, which makes the whole thing very flexible. If you have the Nuke Survival Toolkit installed, you already have Grad Magic, otherwise it is also available separately on Nukepedia. As so often, Tony also has an excellent video tutorial(is.gd/tutorial_gradmagic) on his YouTube channel. is.gd/grad_magic

Caustics

A very simple and at the same time very helpful tool is Caustics by Jason Bidwell. With just a few sliders, you can create wonderful water reflections and refractions. Size, distance, speed and aspect ratio can be adjusted as required. From there, it can help to enliven a matte painting, break up masks or control distortion – there are no limits to the imagination here. is.gd/caustics_jb

Colour Noise

If you don’t just want to break up your alpha a little organically, but perhaps also want to imitate an old tube TV or just want to go psychedelic, you’ll find a noise here in which all three colour channels can be set completely freely. Ozgur Taparli’s tool offers separate X and Y scalings for each channel as well as a parameter for distributing the noise. is.gd/colour_noise

Flare Factory 4.0

Lens flares have been a blessing and a curse ever since JJ Abrams’ foray into the Star Trek universe. If they are unwanted in the picture, they make the artist’s life hell. If you want them in, you can spend hours or even days recreating the correct lens flares. The bench mark for this has always been Optical Flares for Nuke from Video Copilot, but if you needed something quicker, Sapphire from Boris FX could also help. The only time you looked really stupid was when there was neither one nor the other, because the lens flare tools that Nuke comes with out of the box make you despair pretty quickly.

Fortunately, Doug Hogan’s Flare Factory offers a remedy. With twelve presets ranging from Blue Panavision to Cylon Warning, the tool offers great starting points, which can then be further refined using five different tabs. Even the lens flare can be adjusted, and rings and chromatic aberrations can also be customised. However, the Flare Factory is purely a generator; external textures cannot be added. It is also not possible to save your own presets within the tool. But if you are looking for a free way to generate a high-quality lens flare in a short space of time and don’t need to recreate a specific lens exactly, you will find a solid tool here. is.gd/flare_factory

Iris – A Procedural Bokeh Generator

Since Nuke 14, Nuke artists have had access to the wonderful and much appreciated PG Bokeh, which also allows the feeding of external images as a kernel for the lens used. Anyone who doesn’t have a well-maintained database of lens kernels will be delighted with Iris. Olivier Blanchet has created a completely procedural kernel generator with which all kinds of kernels can be generated. From circular to star-shaped, with lens dirt and colour shifts, everything is possible here. And, of course, it can also be used to make beautiful glares, flares and glints a little prettier. is.gd/iris_bokeh

T_Steel Wool

Anyone who has studied the pyrotechnic effects of the eighties and nineties will realise that burning steel wool played a decisive role in the destruction of various spaceships and all kinds of other effects. Petar Tsonev’s tool simulates this look wonderfully. An external Roto Shape is used to define the area of the image where it should burn. Thanks to the Roto, the typical burning or glowing edge can then also be displayed. Within the shape, we then see small centres of fire, and the progress of the destruction can of course be adjusted down to the last detail using various sliders. And just like the practical effects from the “good old days”, this can then be used as the basis for all kinds of other effects. is.gd/steelwool

The post Nuke Utilities Volume 8 – Textures first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

AEPowerPin

It would be so easy… Directors and clients could simply decide before the shoot what should be shown in the scene on the smartphone, monitor or iPad and then you could shoot it just like that. But because decisions are so difficult, the screen insert has become an integral part of our day-to-day work. And whether we use a point track, a planar track or Mocha Pro to get to the heart of the matter, we end up with a corner pin in Nuke. This is all very well as long as we don’t have to move or scale the content. In this case, we can get involved in the “artist versus perspective” battle, which is simply not fair with the four corners of the “From” tab of the corner pin node. Aitor Echeveste’s AE PowerPin provides a remedy here, as it not only offers decent perspective guides, but also the option of moving and scaling the content along these guides in the correct perspective. Especially nice: If you have already exported a corner pin with a correct track, for example from Mocha Pro, you can easily import the data from the corner pin node into the AE Power Pin with two clicks.

is.gd/powerpin

AETransform

Our second tool also comes from Aitor Echeveste. The AETransform is a gizmo based on the STMap, which makes it extremely easy to distort image content. The STMap as a basis ensures that the script also remains nice and performant. As the name suggests, the controls are based on the classic Transform Node. Translate, Rotation Scale and Skew and, of course, a centre point are available. The area that is to be distorted accordingly is defined via a control mat. This opens up many possibilities, as the control mat can now also be animated. Of course, the possibilities are not quite as sophisticated as, for example, Nuke’s own Spline Warp, but you can find your way around much faster and reach your goal quickly.

is.gd/ae_transform

bm_Camera_Shake

The last touch of realism is sometimes missing, especially at the end of large comps. When you’ve pulled out all the stops, from chromatic aberrations to perfectly matched grain, and the comp still isn’t where it should be, sometimes all you need is the subtle shake of a hand-held camera. Nuke has its own Camera Shake Node, but Ben McEwan offers a truly fantastic alternative with his Camera Shake. Instead of amplitudes, octaves and frequencies, Ben Nodes uses three terms that can also be used by the director, for example: jitter, shake and float. In addition – just like in real life – the centre point is also moved slightly, which provides more realism. In addition, different types of edge treatment can be selected in the tool itself, so that you don’t necessarily have to zoom in on the plate after the camera shake.

is.gd/camerashake

Transform Dissolve

There are those of us who have always been good at maths, who have never had problems solving equations with two unknowns and who can simply write an expression for every little problem. For the rest of us, there’s Transform Dissolve. Frank Rueter’s tool does pretty much what you’d expect – it blends the keyframe data from two different inputs. However, as Nuke’s Node Graph is an image processing pipeline, the tool only has one input – the two transforms to be blended can be fed via two tabs within the node properties – drag and drop in the properties panel is a good option here. Of course, these can also be dynamic links, for example to trackers. And then you can fade back and forth between the two transforms as you wish. And regardless of whether you want to match two moving plates with each other, whether a long sequence could not be tracked in one or whether the editorial has made itself popular again with a few “invisible cuts”, there are certainly enough possible applications for this practical helper.

is.gd/t_dissolve

Morph Dissolve 1.1

When AVID introduced Fluid Morph to editors a few years ago in a surprising fit of innovation, you could have guessed what would happen. All of a sudden, dialogue pauses were cut out, the tiniest winks of the eye were removed and otherwise beautiful takes were pieced together. And the fluid morph was completely sufficient for the editing – “good enough for jazz”. But when it came to getting the whole thing ready for broadcast, or – heaven forbid – onto the big screen, the whole thing became a topic for the VFX department. And that could then escalate into quite elaborate comp arias. Thankfully, Erwan Leroy took on the subject and wrote his Morph Dissolve for Nuke. The principle is as simple as it is ingenious: two inputs that can be faded between with a control
can be faded between, except that morphing takes place between the two sources. You can choose between two underlying algorithms, the iDissolve and the Kronos. For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the iDissolve unfortunately did not work in the last releases of Nuke, but Kronos continued to work perfectly. It is to be hoped that an update will soon make both variants available again. However, the possible uses of the tools do not end with classic fluid morphs. With pre-stabilised plates in particular, you can blend retouched plates together wonderfully, reconstruct shadows and much more.

is.gd/dissolve

The post Nuke Utilities Volume 7 – Transform first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

January saw France-based Left Angle (left-angle.com) introducing Autograph and while at first glance it looks like a “Darker Version” of After Effects, there is actually a lot more to it (See our test).

We were able to sit down with Francois Grassard, lead developer at Left Angle during IBC and talk about where Autograph is right now and what to expect in the future.
With over 25 years of expe­rience in 2D & 3D motion design and visual effects, François knows a thing or two when it comes to industry standards. Over the years, François has worked in va­rious development, graphic design, and managerial roles across the broadcasting, film, and advertising industries. His client roster includes Walt Disney, Universal, Fox, Warner, Renault, Dior, CBS, BBC, NBC, Yves-Saint-Laurent, and Unilever. François is also an author and has taught university students, sharing his insights and expertise.

DP: Autograph is a new contender in a market dominated by After Effects and Nuke. What sets it apart from the competition?
Francois Grassard: Autograph, created by Left Angle, is a software intended to be between After Effects and Nuke. After Effects, because we are a layer based compositing system. So obviously it looks like After Effects, but we are closer to nuke in the technical aspect because we are working on 32 bit per channel and we manage all the colour spaces. So we try to be more precise. So we try to have a very fast workflow for motion designers, but also VFX artists. We are working on a new way to switch from layer based approach to a nodal approach. So this will be a bi-directional way without committing to one workflow or the other. But we decided to create Autograph for different things. We think that the progression of software such as Nuke or After Effects was pretty slow because there has been no real evolution in this software since maybe 20 or 25 years.

I actually started to use After Effects in 1995. So it was version one or version two, I don‘t remember exactly. And since this day the process is almost the same and a lot of things have changed in the media industry. Regarding 3D and the way we composite together different elements. So we decided to create a new product with a focus on specific topics such as the possibility to work on different formats at the same time. For example, you can work in a responsive design composition, it can be turned into 16 by 9 or 1 by 1 or square or 9 by 16, or any kind of format in parallel, just by defining rules of creative positioning in the composition. So if you want to place a layer on the left of your composition, if you change the size of your compositions, usually it would be replaced, according to this new format. So for this kind of specific issue, there‘s actually not really a solution in After Effects for you, except you can script your own solution.

And the scripting is obviously a good answer to this, but it‘s also a really technical one. So we are really aware that all these really common tasks can be not really easily achieved in other applications. We also want to break the bridge between 2D and 3D because when you work with a 3D scene and want to work with the image produced by this scene, you have to render these images onto disk and you have to integrate these images in your compositing package. That way you have a huge footprint on your drive. You need to have a lot of storage to keep this render on the hard drive. Also it shouldn’t be such a linear process between the two tasks. So with Autograph, we try to be able to render a 3D scene on the fly and grab images from this 3D rendering and do the compositing of the side within the same application.

So that was another part of the project initially to break the bridge, to make a bridge between 3D and Compositing. I think it‘s nonsense to separate these two things. And we can see this nowadays with virtual production. And most of the time when you see some virtual production based on a game engine or any or any other system, you can see that the missing part in this process is compositing. Of course, Game Engines offer things such as Glows or ambient occlusions, but real compositing has always been missing. So the goal was to propose a proper solution. At the same time, in the same software. We are not saying Autograph is a real-time engine because we know that every real-time engine is real-time until it is not. So we prefer to define Autograph as interactive rendering.

DP: So, speed is not only important to rendering, but also in using the software. What is Autographs philosophy in regards to speed and user interface design?
Francois Grassard: I am personally very frustrated with the interfaces in other applications. The way you can interact with for instance dropdown menus: You have to click on any kind of style, any entry to test it, but in Autograph you just have to hover your mouse over the style you want to test. The interactivity of the feedback, that‘s one of the things we want to focus on, because so much time is lost just by navigating the interface. In the current release, we changed a few things about the way you interact with shapes.

Another way we achieve speed is by utilizing all the cores available with the CPU and the GPU as much as possible. But, there‘s always a bottleneck. The question is what is the bottleneck? Is it the GPU, is it the CPU Cores, is it RAM or is it that may be the bandwidth of your hard drive. So the question is to find the right balance between both to achieve almost 100 percent for each kind of device. So we try to find a good relationship between the interface and the reactivity of the software because when you have to wait for the software to have a response, you are losing time.

DP: VFX applications typically use a node based approach. Autograph, however, uses a timeline. Could you elaborate on the choice to take the timeline as a starting point?
Francois Grassard: Yeah. Autograph has been designed for motion design artists and VFX artists and when you work on VFX you mainly work on one shot. So the concept of timing is not the most important aspect of your creative process. But when you work on motion design, you have to put a lot of different sequences together, one after the other, and it‘s really important to have the concept of timing in mind.

In Autograph, a lot of things are related to timing. If you work with sound, for instance. In the next release, we are going to have the full audio pipeline and you can source this audio and extract frequencies for this audio drive any parameters also display curves based on this audio and all of this thing is related to a ribbon. So timing is pretty important.

So there‘s a reason we try initially to focus on the timeline approach. On the other hand, if you are a VFX artist working on a single shot, you want to have a really precise control over the process.

DP: And Autograph handles this how?
Francois Grassard: In Autograph, even if we have a layer-based approach, we actually have underneath a node-graph created, but with thousands of nodes. So if we show the graph created by maybe stacking ten or 20 layers, we have a bunch of modifiers – that‘s the name of your effects – you are going to have thousands of nodes. So if we have in a few months or in a few years a node-based approach, when you can convert your layer-based approach to a node-based approach, we have to think about maybe a bigger node with more parameters.

In Nuke, for instance, you have to create a read node and then a transform – two separate nodes. In most cases you want to use a transform just after the read node. So why not just merge a transform into the read node? It‘s something that you have to think about to have a ma­nageable node graph. So the first question was to have good control over the rhythm, the music and so on. So that‘s the reason we decided to introduce the layer-based approach first.

DP: USD is quickly rolling out everywhere and is already a de facto industry standard. How does autograph handle USD files?
Francois Grassard: Yeah, we decided to integrate USD three years ago when we started the development of the 3D part of autograph. We started to work on Autograph about seven years ago, but the main development started about three years ago. So we decided to use USD as a basis. Each time you add a new primitive or you inject a new geometry, everything is based on USD. We create the USD scene under the hood. At the time we took a risk, because it was just emerging and Pixar was saying: ”This is the future.” But at that time USD was like an empty box. You know, you open the box, you can see a few things about the geometry, but nothing about the materials. And it‘s still the case today.

There‘s some evolution there, a lot of things that are on MaterialX. That’s a good way to interchange material between applications and something you appear about two months ago with the creation of aerials for Open USD with Adobe and also Apple and a lot ofactors around USD to work on something called Open PBR as a physical based rendering, and it‘s a way to standardize the ma­terial between applications. So in a perfect world you should be able to exchange material between the render engine and the compositing application and physically get the same result. So it was risky at the time, but actually it was a good choice because three years later you see it was the way to go. So basically we have a head start in integrating USD, which is not an easy task.

DP: Autograph was released in January 2023, so it has got a very fresh user-base. Who are the users?
Francois Grassard: We have two kinds of clients. Freelancers, because the software has been designed for small computers, initially. Actually here at IBC, I am at the Dell booth has I have a huge computer to make my demos, but every day I use Autograph on my eight year old laptop. That allows me to optimize the code and detect bottlenecks. And we need to detect those bottlenecks.

If you have a big computer, it‘s going to be difficult to see if there is a problem in this part. And it is also used by big studios to do heavy compositing, even if we don‘t have nodes yet. But for some studios, it‘s not really a problem because we have a 32 bit channel processing linear workflow. So they love the precision of the software and also the speed of the software. That‘s something we hear pretty quickly when someone tests the software “Oh,it‘s fast!”

DP: And what has been the feedback so far?
Francois Grassard: So obviously it needs time to get adopted because it‘s a new concept, even if you come from after Effects because while the interface is pretty close, we have some very different concepts like generators and modifiers and the way you can link parameters together is pretty complex. So yes, we have two different kind of user profiles: motion designers and big studios. Obviously some people also work in VFX and these are freelancers as well, so we are really talking about three user profiles.

But right now it is mostly motion designers because we have a lot of functionality for animating elements, we have a lot of interpolation types built in. In After Effects, If you want to have a bounce movement or an elastic movement, you have to write an expression for this. In Auto­graph we have 49 interpolation types built in, so you just have to create two keyframes and select your interpolation type. So motion designers love this.

There‘s so many small things that actually make a huge difference, such as the fact we have the origins of zero. The origin of the coordinate system is at the centre of the composition. It‘s a good way to quickly create symmetrical ani­mation. We also have really technical users who are really happy to see that they can go really high into controlling the precision of the picture.

DP: Is there a trial version available?
Francois Grassard: Of course! Our free trial comes with the latest version of Autograph Creator and access to free templates and demo projects, so you can jump right in. Sign up for it at is.gd/autograph_trial.

DP: And what are the upcoming features?
Francois Grassard: Yeah, we are working on the new audio system that will be available as a next release at the end of September. We are also working on a new text engine that allows you to have a lot of more control over the animation. And we are working also on the new shape layer feature. So previously in Autograph you had to create a generator to generate, for instance, a stroke or fill. And in the generator you have a path group, a group containing a bunch of paths. And we are actually reversing this process to have the path group first. So you will be able to define your path and then you can apply a style to this path. Right now we have really classic styles such as stroke, solid and fill.

But in the future, because we have two people in the company who were previously in the field of non-photo-realistic-rendering, just like pencil and watercolour. And we are also working on converting a 3D scene to paths. So the goal is to create a non-photorealistic drawing from 3D, but not by drawing directly the pixel, but by defining paths and using these paths, you are going to add style. So it‘s a good feature for people who work in 2D animation, for example the Japanese animation industry. We worked a lot with 2D and 3D at the same time. And for this kind of industry it‘s going to be really useful.

The post The new kid on the block! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

By the way, all the footage is from my workshop on Nuke at FXPhd(www.fxphd.com)– and if you enter the code “DPFXPHD20” by the end of January 2024, you can get your membership for 20 per cent less – and of course there are many more great tutorials!

PxF – Kill Spill

When it comes to pulling a key, Nuke provides you with a whole cornucopia of tools. When it comes to editing the corresponding fill, however, things get pretty meagre. The Hue Correct Node is the closest thing to a proper despill tool, but it’s anything but intuitive. However, as is so often the case, the commu
nity has responded and there is a large, colourful bouquet of gizmos that can take over the tasks. In the last issue we already looked at “Despill to Colour”, today we’re looking at “PxF Kill Spill” from the Pixelfudger Suite by Xavier Bourque.

This is not only characterised by a really clear, simple interface, but above all by a tutorial that not only explains how the gizmo works in ten minutes, but also the underlying concepts so that you really know what you are doing when you turn the knobs. Pxf Kill Spill” usually delivers a very useful result the very first time you connect the tool.

The tool achieves this by comparing the channel to be despilled with the other two and calculating a corresponding limit. If the tool is now to carry out a green despill, it must not exceed the average value of blue and red. Once this has happened, the luminance is equalised. All this happens automatically. The limiter can then be used to increase or decrease the limit and the suppression can be used to change the weighting of the other two channels, in our example red and blue. If you don’t like the neutral background that has now been calculated, you can use the SpillTweak to adjust this value so that it also matches the background plate.

pixelfudger.com

PxF – Screen Clean

The Pixelfudger Suite offers yet another tool that many of us have probably sorely missed. To explain it properly, we need to make a small digression in the direction of IBK. This “Image Based Keyer”, which is certainly one of the most popular and efficient keyers in Nuke, needs a cleanplate to create a good key
a cleanplate to create a good key. This was of course either created by the extremely responsible team or generated with the help of the IBK colour node.

What happens in the IBK under the bonnet is that all imperfections, dents, shadows and spots are removed from the actual keying plate with the help of the cleanplate. This cleaned plate is then the basis for the next key that is generated. The only annoying thing about this is that you cannot access this cleaned plate to use it in the chroma or primatte keyer, for example.

PxF Screen Clean now fills this gap. Clean Plate and Keying Plate are quickly connected, the Screen Type is filled in and the piercing pink, which is set by default, is replaced by a self-sampled colour. Prepared in this way, the plate can then be further processed to your own taste.

pixelfudger.com

Additive Keyer Pro

I hear there are still some veterans who worked on Quantel equipment. Not only were these boxes bulky and expensive, they also had a feature that was the envy of all shake, nuke and flame artists – the Additive Keyer. In the meantime, however, not only have Quantel Henry and Editbox moved on to the eternal VFX hunting grounds, there are also several gizmos for Nuke that have brought the additive keyer into the twenty-first century.

An additive keyer is not actually a keyer at all – at least not in the sense that it separates pixels and the result then becomes part of the alpha channel. The additive keyer is much more of a very sophisticated merge node that comps parts of the foreground onto the background using min and max operations. This is extremely helpful for getting small subtleties such as edges, hair and motion blur into the comp. Three inputs are required for this: the foreground, the background and – of course – the cleanplate. The cleanplate and foreground are then used to calculate which parts should be screened into the comp and which should be multiplied.

So much for the theory. In practice, there is once again a large selection of additive keyers on Nukepedia, but we recommend the representative from Tony Lions here, as it has a few very nice additional features and is of course also part of the Nuke Survival Toolkit – quite rightly, by the way, this little gizmo has already saved quite a few keys.

These features include, for example, the option of working with a picked colour instead of a cleanplate and the option of packing the calculated difference matte into the alpha so that this matte can then be further processed downstream. On Tony’s YouTube channel there is, as always, a very good tutorial that illustrates the workflow well.

is.gd/nuke_survival_toolkit

Point Cloud Keyer

If you’ve ever had a closer look at Primatte, you may already be familiar with the principle: the colours are plotted in a three-dimensional coordinate system and then you use the GUI to model a kind of bubble that defines which part of this coordinate system will then become part of the mask and which will not. And as powerful as this tool is, it is also very confusing.

Isaac Spiegel has taken the concept but shifted it to a two-dimensional coordinate system. The whole thing works as follows: The artist chooses a colour space. This does not mean ACES, Rec.709 or similar, but actually the way in which our RGB image fits into a two-dimensional coordinate system. To do this, you use the colour spaces that have already mastered this in the days of good old magnetic recording. The default and absolutely sufficient for most cases is yCbCr, or, so that it rolls off the tongue a little easier, Chroma Red/Blue. Based on this selection, a point cloud of the pixels present in the plate is now generated. This point cloud can now be displayed either solo or above the plate or a slapcomp. But what can you do with it? Well, the Point Cloud Keyer has a shape input that can be used to connect a Roto Node. We can now use this Roto to isolate the parts of the Point Cloud that we want to key.

Admittedly, this is a concept that is difficult to explain. But it is fascinating to paint your key with a shape. The tool offers the above-mentioned overlay function as well as scale and position values for the point cloud to ensure that this works well. If desired, this can also be displayed more densely and the axes can be swapped for display. In any case, the gizmo is a new and innovative approach to the problem of how to separate foreground from background.

is.gd/pointcloudkeyer

Check Matte V4

Jonas Almeida brings us this little quality control gizmo. As the name suggests, the whole thing produces a matte overlay, but with a little more functionality than Nuke would like to give us out of the box. The overlay colour can be freely selected, the BG can be switched on and off and all areas of the matte that are below 1 but above 0 are displayed as an edge in a second, freely definable colour.

is.gd/checkmatte

Advanced Keying Template

Finally, Tony Lions once again contributes something to our keying arsenal. This time, however, it’s not a gizmo or a tool, but a template, i.e. a clear pipeline in which we can create our key. The individual steps, such as Core & Edge Despill, Core and Edge Matte, Cleanplate Generation and so on, are not only clearly labelled with backdrops, but the most obvious tools have also already been provided for us. A Primatte is already available for the Core Matte and an IBK for the Edge Matte. Even post processes such as light wraps have been taken into account.

Whether you want to work in such a rigid structure is something everyone has to decide for themselves. The template certainly helps to keep things organised and to take important steps into account. On the other hand, it very clearly defines a certain way of working, which may push the artist in one direction too quickly. But especially for people who are still struggling with the concept of node-based compositing or who like to work within a fixed structure, this template is certainly helpful. Even if you use it as a starting point or inspiration for your own template, it is certainly very helpful. Incidentally, there are two versions of the template: one uses “Stamps”, the tool we already presented in issue 22:06, while the other works without it.

Like the Additive Keyer Pro, the Advanced Keying Template is part of the Nuke Survival
Toolkit. On his YouTube channel “Compositing Mentor”, Tony Lions has published a multi-part and very comprehensive keying tutorial, in which not only the template, but also the exact task of each individual sub-area is explained in detail.

is.gd/nuke_survival_toolkit
youtube.com/@CompositingMentor

The post Nuke UtilitiesVolume 6 – Keying first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

Before we go any further: If you haven’t used it: SynthEyes is a standalone tracking and matchmoving application for camera, objects, geometry and planes – including tools for stabilisation and motion capture. It is used – among many other things – for critter insertion, fixing shaky shots, virtual sets, object removal, stereoscopic production, 360°VR, architectural previews, accident reconstruction, product placement, face and body capture, and many more – and in the 20 years it has been around, it has been one of the premiere trackers in the market – although with a strong focus on features, and not necessarily on ease of use. See the announcement and Dr. Russ Anderson in action here:

blog.borisfx.com/3d-camera-solving-syntheyes

In the current version, a few of the “highlights” are a new “Curves” colour correction tool, a PrepSet Manager, easier roto splines editing, with per-spline Invert and Ignore. As well as a camera view “RotoMask” display, “Greenscreen” Keying panel improvements, “Render Cameras” for independent preview renders and many workarounds and fixes for problems in “adjacent programs” – Syntheyes is well aware that it has to talk to any platform out there.
But enough of the preliminaries – we went to the Beach at the Amsterdam RAI and chatted to Boris Yamnitzki, CEO and Foun­der of BorisFX and John-Paul Smith, CEO Imagineer Systems. If you want to know what else they are doing: borisfx.com

The Boris FX Team at the Dell Booth in Amsterdam: Third from the left John-Paul Smith and on forth from the left Boris himself

DP: Syntheyes has been around for 20 years now. What can existing users expect now that it has joined Boris effects?
Boris Yamnitzki: Syntheyes is joining the Boris FX suite of products, which means that it will be marketed and sold and – what‘s more important – supported by a larger team. Up to this point it was basically a one-person effort – however brilliant and hard-working Russ (Anderson) is. Now Syntheyes is going to benefit from a larger team and wider technical support. In addition, obviously, there is a big road map for Syntheyes technology and we plan to take it further. Russ is of course staying with the product and is obviously going to lead the technology and the science of 3D camera solving, but there‘s a team of programmers who will be supporting him in that – speci­fically, the original Mocha Imagineer Team.
Also, we would like to invest in education and training of this product. We would like to enhance support and basically increase what I call the “product availability” – in other words, the product will be available to a wider range of users.

John-Paul Smith: I think the one important point to reiterate for the existing Syntheyes users is we‘re not planning to stop making the standalone version of Syntheyes. We‘re not planning to step away from any of the really important use cases. This involves growing the house of our industry and I know that there are particular niches where it‘s widely used and so far just our exposure to this entire community is that it is really passionate about the product, and we really want to build on that and, you know, make the most of the community engagement and take the products in the direction that benefits this community.

DP: Can we expect to see a plug-in version of Syntheyes in the future?
Boris Yamnitzki: Well, without commenting specifically on a date, yeah.

John-Paul Smith: And I just add on to that, people should see what happened to Mocha when it was acquired by Boris FX and the kind of direction we took that product – something similar will probably happen with Syntheyes.

DP: You‘ve got a pretty broad line-up now, starting with some pretty easy to use tools like Optics or Continuum to really complex applications like Silhouette or Syntheyes. How hard is it to bring these into streamlined UI/UX?
Boris Yamnitzki: Hard! But we do have a standardised development toolchain that really helps us on every platform and streamlines our software development. One example of that would be Particle Illusion – which originated (similarly) many years ago with one developer and had access to the develop­ment framework. And then it was brought on the more standard framework that our other products use. And of course, the program itself benefited greatly from that. I expect all current and future products joining the Boris FX family to benefit from that – and the developments of the platform in the future!

DP: One of the biggest trends in our industry at the moment is A.I. which is
of course always connected to the fear of A.I. replacing the artist. What is your stance on the issue? Especially looking at the tasks that artists use Mocha, Silhouette and Syntheyes for?
Boris Yamnitzki: Well, first I can mention that Syntheyes currently has an AI component in it, which was developed earlier by Russ Anderson. So, it definitely will move that forward or improve and retrain and enhance that.
In general, the company is investing heavily in A.I. development and essentially rapidly becoming an A.I. company where we spend a lot of effort in building training sets, adopting models, creating more programing models and releasing new features based on A.I. Features that were solved by traditional programming methods earlier. However, having said that, we have not found that it is a “cure all” for everything.
So there is always this final human push that is necessary for any professional pipeline and results in film or broadcast tele­vision – the last 5 percent quality that can only be done by humans. A.I can help streamline the work. It can definitely accelerate and make the projects more cost effective. And it‘s just the technology shift, or rather a technological revolution. That‘s how I would put it bluntly.
I think about it as it‘s like the internet: That was a threshold. It was a changing point for a lot of industries and a lot of markets. And so A.I. is no less and we‘re just in the beginning. I‘m not afraid of A.I., and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from being enthusiastic, but there‘ll be winners and losers, like with every technological shift, like the horse carriages gave way to automobiles. Same thing will happen here.

John-Paul Smith: We don‘t want to replace the creative process with an A.I. process. It‘s very much “assisting”, as far as we‘re concerned. And those are the areas that we‘re investing in – assistive technology. I think it‘s worth saying that our focus on the A.I. side at the moment is very much around things that are currently either awkward, time consuming or bad – meaning where the existing algorithms just don‘t give as good quality results as A.I. can. We‘re focused on making artistic tools, which help create and tell a story or, do whatever it is that they‘re trying to achieve.

DP: So we‘ve seen a lot of integration across the BorisFX line-up. Can we expect similar things for some folks or other products?
Boris Yamnitzki: Again: Yeah, without directly commenting on the roadmap. We
try to take advantage of all technologies that we have in the Boris FX Suite. Mocha made a big impact on Sapphire, likewise on Silhouette. So, you know, definitely something to look forward to in the future.

John-Paul Smith: We‘re demonstrating a kind of experimental data exchange between Mocha and Syntheyes. We showed taking Mocha mesh tracks into scenarios and then solving them in 3D. And that‘s something that we were able to put together in the space of two or three weeks of development – that‘s really promising. It illustrates the kind of thing that we would like to do in the future.

DP: Looking into the rise of smaller content creators, are there plans for simplified versions?
Boris Yamnitzki: That‘s a difficult question. On the one hand, yes, you would want everyone to be able to matchmove. The strength of Syntheyes, though, is in that specia­lised user interface. That‘s not to say that we won‘t be able to offer maybe a simplified version of that.

John-Paul Smith: The depth in Syntheyes is one of the reasons why it is a successful product. Ob­viously, the camera solving algorithm and the 2D tracking process is fantastic, but it‘s the 20 years of deve­lopment of Syntheyes. I‘ve seen so many features added in response to specific customer situations. Anything we want to make sure that we don‘t dumb it down too much. But yeah, there‘s the potential to do something different – we‘re well aware that there‘s a steep learning curve and Syntheyes and we‘re absolutely interested in reducing that. And certainly, as we look at the roadmap of Syntheyes, we are definitely going to be putting effort into the user interface and making it more accessible. Whether it will ever be accessible for a casual user, I‘m not sure.

DP: Anything else our readers should be on the lookout for?
Boris Yamnitzki: By the time everyone reads this, Syntheyes will be included in the Boris FX Suite, which is a one license for all pro­ducts and all programs, and that also goes for CrumplePop audio plug-ins, which was also recently acquired. So this is what I call „a larger availability for a wider availability“. Whilst people may not necessarily go out and buy a license and start learning it, Syntheyes will already be included in the “Swiss Army Knife” that is the Boris FX Suite.

So they will be entitled to it, it is very much available to them and that may encourage them to look into it and use it. And of course, we are working on training materials for everybody in the Boris FX Family, to use Syntheyes to its fullest potential!

The post Look into my Syntheyes, Boris! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

That‘s what we want to change that a bit with this overview and in this part two we will take a look at what we can do with tags and Colors and how to get to the nodes . . . Here we go!

Colors & Tagging

We already know this from Nuke‘s Node Tree: The colors of nodes always have a meaning, they assign nodes to a certain category and generally serve for better orientation. But it can also be very helpful to color nodes individually, just to facilitate this orientation. It is no different in the Timeline Environment of Nuke Studio. If we take a look at the Project Bin, we can already see that the different items have different colors. By default, the Project itself is Purple, Bins are Olive, and Timelines have an orange tint. If we look to the right to the proxies, they are all colored pale blue. If you want to have different default colors for your projects, you can change this in the Project Settings (like in Nuke by hitting „Shift-S“) under Panels – Project Items. Here you can also assign different colors to different file types. But also individually you can assign a color to an item – for example to be able to distinguish the different timelines in a project with several edits. To do this, you can right-click on any item and change the color using the „Color“ option.

What is interesting here – if an item is used in one or more timelines, whether single or multiple, this color will also be updated in the timeline. So coloring it accordingly can really help you find a particular clip again. To make this even easier, you can sort by color within the thumbnail view. In our conforming workspace, to the right of the „Project Bin“ tab, we find the „Tags“ tab. The tagging system is really powerful, especially since it works closely with all kinds of asset managers like Shotgrid, FTrack, NIM, Cerebro and so on. But even within Nuke Studio, tags can really help us out, especially when the status of different comps, versions, etc. changes.

If we take a closer look at the tagging window, we will find quite a selection of tags, which Foundry already provides. We can drag and drop the appropriate tags from the tags panel onto the timeline. This also works with multi-selections and of course each clip can have multiple tags. So we can distribute descriptive tags, like whether an element is for foreground or background, or whether it‘s a green screen shot.
Even the Color tagging is dynamically linked between Project Bin and Timeline.

However, we can then also assign a status tag such as „Ready to Start“ or „Omitted“ to the same shot. If you want, you can also distribute the tags in the spread sheet by right-clicking, but then things quickly become confusing, because we don‘t find the pre-division into folders here, but a gigantic pull-down with all existing tags. By the way, not only clips, but also tracks and entire sequences can be tagged. It is also possible to create your own tags. Via the Presets tag we see our Project Bin displayed. By right-clicking on „New“ we can generate tags as well as bins for sorting the tags. PNGs are supported as thumbnails for the tags. To add your own PNG, click on the „Icon“ pulldown and scroll all the way down. There is the „Custom“ option and we can give our tag its very own flair.

Another very nice way to distribute tags is to simply drag them into the viewer. A HUD appears on the viewer and we now have the option to either assign a tag to the sequence, tag an individual frame, tag the clip within the timeline („Tag Track Item“) or tag the source clip („Tag Clip“). And depending on where we drop our tags, they will appear above the Viewer (For Individual Frames), In the Project Bin (For Clips and Sequences) or in the Timeline itself (For Track Items). With a double click on the tag we can open an Info Window, where we can assign Notes or Metadata to the tags. These are individual, meaning they are not shared with other tags of the same name in the project, and can help share additional info. However, only if the Notes are written after dropping the tag: Notes that are written during creation or within the tag panel are then also consequently distributed. Especially with longer timelines it makes sense to be able to search and filter for tags.

And this can be done quite easily by drag and drop.The tag you are searching for can be dragged from the tag window into the search bar of the spreadsheet in our conforming workspace. The Search Bar of the Spread Sheet has the same options under the magnifying glass as the search in the Project Bin. That means and-or- search, flagging, etc. are available, but unfortunately you cannot combine the tags search with a text search. But of course you can search for tags directly in the Project Bin.

The post Timeline Tools von The Foundry 2 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.

In recent years, Foundry has not only tightened up the release schedule considerably, but also made it much more regular. Nevertheless, version 14 is not a maintenance update, quite the opposite. Not only are new features being added, but in some areas the existing ones are being shaken up. The biggest and most important area is probably the 3D system, which has been completely overhauled.

Cutting off old habits

Sometimes the time has come to make a clear cut. Even as a software developer, it becomes increasingly difficult over the years to work on the same old architecture. With version 14, Foundry therefore decided to rewrite the 3D system, which has always been one of the core elements of the software, from scratch. In order to be well equipped for the coming years, USD (Universal Scene Description) was chosen as the basis. USD not only offers massive leaps in performance, but is also being supported by more and more other manufacturers.

To accommodate larger pipelines, it will be possible to select your own version of USD to use, regardless of the version of Nuke you are using. However, those who do not use USD in their pipeline should not have any disadvantages compared to the previous system, as everything that the new 3D system requires is already fully integrated in Nuke. As such a changeover is of course a big step, the old 3D system is not being retired just yet. It is still available in Nuke for now and, perhaps more importantly, the new system is currently in beta.

Why USD?

Better performance alone is a nice effect, but there were more reasons for switching to the USD-based system. A major Achilles heel of the old system was the handling of large imported geometries, where there was no way to isolate individual parts and edit them individually. The new Scene Graph and Path and Mask Knobs form the basis for this.

The Scene Graph

To organise everything from objects and materials to cameras and lights effectively and uniformly, there is a new panel in Nuke 14 called “Scene Graph”. Here you can find all the objects in a scene in a hierarchical structure and can name them (with a new token system if desired), switch them on and off and create dependencies. The Scene Graph and Viewer are closely linked and objects selected in the Viewer are also selected in the Scene Graph and vice versa. A search function is also integrated.

Path and Masks Knobs

All nodes in the new 3D system that generate or import geometry now have a path as an entry, which simply refers to the name of the node by default. However, it is linked directly to the scene graph and can also access the token system. This means that more complex scenes can be named more quickly and cleanly and dependencies can also be created via the path without having to play connection limbo in the node tree.

The name “Mask Knob” is somewhat misleading, as it is actually a way of defining which objects in a scene should be influenced by a modifier node such as a GeoTransfom. The new default behaviour now looks like this: If you insert a node below another node, the result of the last node is affected – no longer the entire stream. However, if you want the new node to influence several objects, you can assign it to the mask knob from the scene graph or via an expression.

USD Lights and Materials

If USD-based geometries are imported into the new system, lights and materials are now displayed correctly and thus provide a better preview of the actual asset. The new Preview Surface Node is a new way to create more complex materials within Nuke and is seen by developers as the first step in a development that is progressing through beta. There are also new USD Lights. Unlike the old system, lights are no longer converted into Nuke’s own format, but are displayed exactly as they looked in the USD-based DCC software they came from.

Old and new

As already mentioned, the old and the new system will both populate the Node Graph for the time being. However, they are not compatible with each other. The old nodes retain both their name and their colour, while the new ones stand out with a new nomenclature (TransformGeo is now called GeoTransform) and a green that complements the old red. They also appear with a small “Beta” notice. Speaking of beta: Foundry wants to use this beta to actively incorporate feedback from the community, which is why there is now also a forum on the Foundry site for the new 3D system.

Unreal

The Unreal Reader Node for Nuke X and Nuke Indie is completely out of beta. It can be used to transfer maps and sequences directly from an Unreal Editor session to Nuke. To do this, a “Nuke Server” plugin must be installed in Unreal, which then provides the session for Nuke. From here, the artist can have exactly the channels and passes that he needs made available, as everything is provided “on-demand” by Unreal. Various types of crypto matte can also be requested. The current OCIO colour transforms are also supported.

Cameras can be synchronised with the Unreal session as well as replaced by Nuke. The whole thing works non-destructively for the Unreal session, so that you now have the freedom to position the camera slightly differently in Nuke than in Unreal. If you are happy with your result and want to make sure that further changes to the Unreal session are not passed on to Nuke, you can generate an EXR sequence of all requested channels and passes from the Unreal Reader Node.

A particularly nice feature is the stencil mode, which allows you to split individual objects in the Unreal scene into separate layers. Even shadows and occluding objects can be removed. You also have the option of rendering the Nuke scene as a CubeMap, which allows you to transform your scene into a Lat:Long image or an Environment Sphere in Nuke.

The cat gets a new home

The machine learning tool “Copycat” is getting a major performance boost. Ten to twenty per cent faster learning should be possible on current Nvidia cards. The automated rotoscoping of human bodies has been accelerated even further. New setting options should dramatically speed up training here. Finally, users now have the option of displaying only the thumbnails relevant to them in the LayerContactSheet view for training.
Outside of Nuke, Foundry has created the “Cattery”, a free repository where copycat files contributed by the community can be downloaded. The whole thing is sorted by category and will hopefully continue to grow over the coming months.

Bokeh

Foundry acquired the rights to PG Bokeh from Perigrine Labs. This popular depth of field tool is natively available in all Nuke versions from version 14.02 onwards. PG Bokeh has already been used in many major productions and is the only depth-of-field tool that can be combined with deep compositing.

Login-Based Licence

Nuke 14 offers Foundry customers a further option for managing their own licence or licences. In addition to the classic node-locked licence or an RLM-based server licence, you can now also opt for a login-based licence. Artists can log in with their email address and a password to activate their licence. This makes it much easier to take a licence to the home office.

The online platform also offers numerous options for managing multiple licences for teams. Foundry emphasises that this licence model is purely optional and anyone who doesn’t want to switch doesn’t have to. This is also important for anyone who still has to work in parallel with older versions of Nuke, as the login is only available with Nuke 14.

Subscription

Subscription is always a double-edged sword. Some see greater flexibility, more predictable costs and the opportunity to get started without a major investment, while others simply see subscriptions as a “money grab”. The Foundry is now also offering the Nuke Family as an annual subscription. The prices are as follows: Nuke costs customers 2,699 Eur per annum, Nuke X 4,099 EUR and Nuke Studio a whopping 4,999 EUR.

As with all Foundry products, there is no monthly subscription model and unfortunately – unlike other products – no monthly payment option. Although there is still the option of quarterly rental, the prices here are not really attractive – they are over fifty per cent of the annual subscription. Existing customers still have the option of purchasing the previous “perpetual licences” until the end of the calendar year and then continue to receive maintenance for them. However, Foundry has also tightened the price screw here: Nuke now costs EUR 5,118, Nuke X EUR 9,758 and Nuke Studio EUR 11,358.

Conclusion

With the new 3D system, Nuke 14 lays the foundation for the coming years and sets a future-proof standard with USD. The system of making a feature available to the user base as a beta for one release and then bringing it out as a final in the next release or the one after that has already worked well in the past with the Unreal Reader or with the sync sessions in Nuke Studio and Hiero(Player). The Unreal Reader may only be of interest to a certain target group at the moment, but the more popular virtual production becomes, the more comp artists will have to deal with Unreal. They have the basis now.

Copycat gets a nice, comprehensive product maintenance – important, because Nuke’s approach to machine learning only works as long as it is regularly updated. The fact that all Nuke users now have PG Bokeh on board is really pleasing – especially because of the support for deep compositing. The login-based licence system will certainly provide more flexibility in the medium term.

One criticism is that, once again, the small Nuke – without X – has hardly any features – of course the new 3D system is also being introduced here. But apart from the bokeh, all the new features are limited to Nuke X and Studio. Copycat is still a feature that is reserved for Windows and Linux users due to its close integration with NVIDIA.

It remains to be seen whether the announced port to Apple Silicone will also let the cats jump over the Mac. And last but not least, the switch to subscription will not be greeted favourably everywhere in the community. For larger VFX studios in the feature sector, an annual subscription may actually offer more flexibility in scaling the pipeline. Customers in the advertising sector and freelancers, on the other hand, will not find an attractive offer here to be able to react appropriately in an ever faster changing market.

The post What’s New in Nuke 14? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.