For those who don’t know the tool: V-Ray runs inside SketchUp, Rhino, and 3ds Max. Update 3 pulls real-time from Vantage, feeds assets from Cosmos, and pushes approvals through Cloud, with traffic extras via Anima.

Real time, now without the app hopping

Chaos released V-Ray 7 Update 3 for SketchUp, Rhino, and 3ds Max. Update 3 adds real-time rendering directly in the V-Ray viewport through a Vantage Viewport Live Link workflow. The goal sits squarely on convenience: keep modeling, keep assigning materials, keep nudging lights, and see the result update instantly.

The live viewport workflow supports continuous scene edits. Walls, columns, material tweaks, and object selections update in real time. Assets dropped in from Cosmos appear immediately as high-quality models, including people, vegetation, and props.

Lighting edits also happen inside the viewport workflow. Cosmos light fixtures with built-in light sources work in this mode, and V-Ray lights can be placed and adjusted interactively, including intensity adjustments while the real-time view stays active.

The real-time viewport mode supports large scenes. Vantage can handle millions of polygons with no noticeable lag in the described workflow, and it uses full ray tracing, without rasterization or approximation in that workflow description.

The real-time viewport workflow includes camera and look controls for composition and presentation. It supports adjusting the sun and adding effects including lens flares, photometrics, fog, and depth of field, while staying inside the host application viewport.

Parallax interiors go native, and finally leave OSL behind

Parallax interiors in Update 3 target a familiar archviz cheat: add convincing depth behind windows without modeling full rooms. Update 3 adds a native parallax texture map that works across integrations and also works in Vantage. This matters for integrations that do not expose Open Shading Language, where older OSL-based approaches were less usable.

Cosmos includes parallax interior shaders designed for drag-and-drop use behind windows. The shaders maintain depth and perspective from any camera angle and support variation controls to avoid obvious repetition across facades.

Quick caustics and Gaussian splats get more practical

Quick Caustics in Update 3 bring sunlight caustics through water, a common request for pools, lakes, and other outdoor scenes. V-Ray includes a general caustics engine, and the update adds a specific option intended to quickly approximate caustics caused by sunlight going through water surfaces. The workflow is enabling Quick Caustics in the material and lighting with V-Ray Sun so caustics appear immediately.

The current Quick Caustics behavior works best with displaced surfaces. It works with the built-in V-Ray water texture in SketchUp and Rhino, and it also supports other displacement textures. A depth parameter controls how far the caustics effect reaches. Reflective caustics can be enabled for shimmering patterns, and the caustics render element can be isolated for easier adjustment after the render.

Gaussian Splats Relighting allows Gaussian splats to receive illumination from scene lights so they blend more naturally with the rest of the scene. A dedicated parameter controls how the lighting blend behaves, and V-Ray lights can be used with their full parameters in this workflow.

Node materials arrive, scatter gets a brush, decals get distributed

Update 3 adds a node-based material editor for V-Ray for SketchUp and V-Ray for Rhino in preview. The node editor supports creating, picking, and editing materials and textures in a visual graph. Cosmos assets can be dragged directly into the graph. Texture nodes can be added and combined, maps can be mixed, and materials can be combined visually. Material types including blend, two-sided, overrdie, and wrapper appear as nodes.

V-Ray 7.3 also adds a scatter brush workflow in V-Ray for SketchUp and V-Ray for Rhino. Objects can be scattered using a paintbrush approach for precise distribution of plants and similar objects. The workflow supports building a base layer and painting additional clusters, following predefined lines from plans or painting freely. Density can be adjusted via brush radius, and unwanted areas can be painted out. The workflow also supports shaping vegetation placement to match camera angles for composition.

AI Mood Match and AI Enhancer focus on faster look decisions

AI Mood Match expands the Light Gen workflow for V-Ray for SketchUp and V-Ray for Rhino. It adjusts environment lighting to match a visual reference instead of trial-and-error tweaks. The workflow describes uploading a reference image, generating multiple lighting scenarios, browsing results, choosing one, and applying it with a click, then refining lighting further as needed.

AI Enhancer adds improved accuracy and object-level control. The described workflow includes detecting characters, vegetation, and large surfaces after upload, then enhancing selected elements without affecting the rest of the image.

For people, the controls include parameters such as age, gender, ethnicity, hair color, and facial expression, with results applied as an enhancement. A creativity mode adds refinement while preserving the original look. Multiple selections can be enhanced at once, enhanced objects appear in an object enhancement list, and results can be saved as a new version.

Large Surface Coverage targets fast breakup of flat or repetitive surfaces. Controls include creativity to add intrical detail and an age option intended to introduce natural weathering, including stains, micro-cracks, and subtle color variation.

AI Materials now support 4K generation and higher-resolution maps. The described workflow includes a redesigned interface and an interactive 3D preview that can switch between sphere, box, and cylinder models, plus lighting direction adjustments and normal and roughness tweaks with instant updates.

Frame Buffer tweaks and per-camera controls in 3ds Max

V-Ray for 3ds Max adds Physical Camera tools intended to make scene variations and view management easier. Objects can be excluded from visibility per camera without affecting the rest of the scene. Focus can be set to object mode by picking an object to remain in focus, keeping it sharp regardless of camera target position, which changes depth of field control behavior.

Update 3 also improves the V-Ray Frame Buffer. A new histogram widget provides insight into color distribution and exposure. Background and foreground folders support reference images, watermarks, and backgrounds. Scaling and positioning tools improve alignment, and effects apply consistently to added elements in this workflow description.

Cloud reviews, video notes, and 3D streaming annotation

Cloud Reviews adds a review hub for sharing work with teams and clients. Reviews can be started from the render engine or created in a review tab workflow. Renders can be uploaded and stakeholders invited. Stakeholders can explore images or 360-degree experiences and leave comments directly on elements that need adjustment. Project status can be updated, new versions uploaded, and an approvers list used to finalize the design.

Video collaboration adds timeline-based commenting. Comments can be pinned to an exact second or a time span, and comments can be repositioned. Annotation tools include markers such as drawing, line, and rectangle tools for pointing out specific areas. Comments can fade out automatically after their time span for a cleaner preview.

3D streaming in the same ecosystem allows real-time navigation once a scene is uploaded. The workflow includes switching cameras and adjusting lighting dynamically, sharing a 3D stream for interactive exploration, and adding annotations. Comments save automatically, and annotations can include attached images or links for context. If your review chain includes external stakeholders, run a dry test early to catch permission and browser issues before a deadline catches you. Or you have an audience, when you try to remember your password.

Have a look at the tools here: Chaos Cloud Reviews documentation
https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VCLOUD/521797640/Reviews

Anima 6: parking lots and smarter vehicle lighting

Anima 6 adds tools aimed at faster traffic population and more believable vehicle behavior. A parking lot feature lets users define parking zones and fill them with vehicles. Zones can be resized, orientations adjusted, density changed, vehicles added or removed, and layouts regenerated.

Anima 6 also adds automatic vehicle lighting for traffic simulation. Brake lights activate when stopping and turn signals engage when changing direction. A road staying tendency parameter controls whether vehicles continue straight or take available turns. If you want to show somebody how they should be driving their bloody SUVs, Anima will help make it look like it should, not like the BMW drivers do mostly behave.

Cosmos sets and new assets

Cosmos adds Sets, described as curated groups of assets that can be placed as a set and then rearranged or duplicated as needed.

Update 3 adds over 700 new assets, including 400 high-detailed plant models from Globe Plants, plus additional branded models. Cosmos also includes new models from Evermotion, new people assets, and additional scatter presets and scan material range in the described workflow.

Pricing and availability

Update 3 releases first for V-Ray for SketchUp and V-Ray for Rhino. Real-time rendering in the V-Ray viewport requires an active Vantage license or an active V-Ray Collection license.

New features can shift habits fast. Test Update 3 on real scenes, real assets, and your actual hardware before it enters a production .

https://www.chaos.com/vray

The post Chaos V-Ray 7 Update 3 goes real time first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

AirFrame.One ships with a simple idea that feels obvious only after you hear it. Ingest media once into cloud storage, then treat it as an addressable web resource from that moment on. No copies, no proxy treadmill, no dragging the creative team behind a VPN just to see yesterday’s footage.

The underlying platform assigns a unique URL to every frame. Creative tools request exactly the frames they need, exactly when they need them, over standard web protocols. The goal is to invert the usual push chain of transfers and transcodes into a pull model where the media stays put and the requests travel.

That frame-level addressability is the novelty here. It is not a new NLE. It is infrastructure that wants to behave more like internet-scale video delivery, but applied all the way back to the point of ingest.

What you can actually touch today

The first module is Media Access. It gives editorial teams two front doors: a web portal with a WebCodecs player, and a dedicated panel inside Adobe Premiere. Editors browse media through a familiar folder-style view organised by tags rather than a replicated file system. Select a clip, hit Link to Project, and native-format media becomes available in the Premiere timeline from anywhere.

AirFrame.One also draws a bright line around what it avoids. It does not mount cloud media as a local drive, and it does not stream or replicate entire files to the workstation. The client downloads only the relevant frames at the moment they are needed. Recently accessed frames may be cached locally in encrypted form for responsive playback, and the cache becomes inaccessible without valid credentials.

Permissions, user groups, and SSO integration are managed centrally from the AirFrame.One portal. Every frame request is independently authenticated and encrypted, aiming at an auditable zero-trust model where access can be verified request by request.

Smart Frames and the end of the proxy side quest

A key component is Smart Frames, described as handling broadcast formats on demand by transcoding from source at the moment of request and adapting to available bandwidth in real time. No proxy files and no duplicate storage is the headline promise.

For workflows that live or die on turnaround, the pitch is that editors start cutting as soon as media lands in storage, rather than waiting for a proxy pipeline to finish the warm-up lap. Think News & Broadcast, as well as today’s multichannel sports circus.

AirFrame.One also positions itself as a better fit for near-live thinking, where time-addressable media and frame-level access aim to reduce the latency baggage that chunk-based systems can introduce.

Storage and governance, with fewer footguns

AirFrame.One says it connects to an existing AWS S3 bucket with no migration. Access is rights-based, and the security model is built around frame requests rather than mounted volumes. When access is revoked, encryption keys are invalidated and any locally cached frames become permanently inaccessible automatically.

It also claims governance at frame-level granularity, including the ability to restrict access to individual frames within a clip rather than the whole clip.

This is the part pipeline TDs will actually care about: not just whether playback works, but whether permissions, auditing, and revocation behave cleanly when freelancers come and go.

Pilots, roadmaps, and where to meet humans

AVROTROS is named as a pilot, aiming for location-independent work with native-format media, without moving files or generating proxies, and with on-location additions becclientoming instantly available. Future modules are already signposted: additional releases are planned for live and file-based ingest, distribution, playout, web browser based editing, and AI-assisted creative workflows.

AirFrame.One is available now, and Media-Anywhere directs interested customers to get in touch to discuss deployment and enterprise onboarding. Pricing is not specified, so it appears to be on request.

If you are going to the NAB Show in Las Vegas from 19 to 22 April, AirFrame.One will be demonstrated there, and you can meet the team directly by booking a private session.

As always, test new tools and workflows hard before you trust them with real deadlines and real clients.

https://airframe.one/

The post Media-Anywhere launches AirFrame.One first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Beeble runs AI relighting and pass generation in the browser via the Cloud app and locally via Beeble Studio, using SwitchLight for video-to-PBR work and SwitchX for background swaps, with exports that slot into comps in Nuke and motion work in After Effects.

Background Remover does not add a brand new trick. It pulls the same AI masking model used in VFX Pass Generator into a standalone, faster workflow meant for the quick matte job, with the provided materials calling it more credit-efficient than a full pass as a marketing claim. Exports lean hard into practical comp handoffs, including RGBA video with alpha, RGBA PNG sequences, and alpha-only sequences, which fits motion graphics work where you want clean holdouts so titles and design layers can live behind moving subjects.

For more background, see Digital Production coverage of SwitchX background swaps, Studio local 4K relighting, and SwitchLight 3.0.

The real news is the shortcut

Background Remover lives inside the Cloud app as a standalone alpha extraction workflow. The core promise is not mystery science. It is a packaging change that targets one task, foreground mattes, with fewer steps and fewer credit demands than running a broader multi-pass job.

That matters because a lot of shots do not need a full buffet of passes. Plenty of days you just want a clean subject cutout so you can comp a replacement plate, push a quick relight downstream, or build motion graphics behind a moving performer. Background Remover aims at that moment when you would normally sigh, open your roto tool of choice, and start paying for coffee by the hour.

It also draws a bright line between where it runs and where it does not. Background Remover is available exclusively in the Cloud app and it is not available in the desktop product yet.

Inputs that match real-world chaos

The tool accepts three kinds of input: a single image, a video, or an image sequence. Single images support common formats, including PNG and JPEG. Image sequences support up to 2,000 frames. For video, the supported container and codec combinations include MP4 using H.264 and MOV using ProRes 422, ProRes 4444, or H.265. The maximum file size is 2 GB. The tool supports up to 2K resolution at 2048 pixels, and it will downscale larger video. It supports clips up to 60 seconds and up to 30 fps, with higher frame rates reduced.

Color handling has a practical bias. Rec. 709 for video and sRGB for images are called out as the best quality settings, while other color spaces such as Log can degrade quality. That is less of a moral stance and more of a reminder that alpha extraction likes predictable input, not surprise curves.

Preview first, then commit, unless you like living dangerously

Background Remover runs a two-phase workflow for video. First comes a preview stage that extracts a preview frame and generates rough alpha previews. This stage exists for sanity checking. The preview alpha is explicitly rough, not pixel-perfect, and fine details like hair edges and semi-transparent areas are refined during full extraction.

If you want to steer the result, there is an interactive refinement step. The workflow uses an Edit Alpha action inside the preview dialog. That opens a rotoscoping UI designed around quick subject selection. The demo workflow shows clearing the existing mask and selecting only the subjects you want to keep by clicking them, then applying the alpha.

There is also a Skip Review mode. It bypasses preview and refinement and runs full extraction immediately. In that mode, the first frame becomes the reference and the pipeline runs without manual review. It is intended for simpler shots with clear subjects and consistent backgrounds. None of this replaces judgment. It simply gives you the option to front-load a small amount of control before you burn the full render.

Exports that behave in comps

Background Remover produces two output types: RGBA results with transparency applied, and grayscale alpha mattes. For RGBA, it can output a MOV file with an embedded alpha channel, plus RGBA PNG output as a sequence or a single image. The MOV output is 10-bit RGBA in sRGB. The PNG RGBA output is 8-bit in sRGB.

For alpha-only delivery, it can output an MP4 grayscale matte as well as grayscale PNG output as a sequence or a single image. Grayscale alpha outputs are 8-bit and represent the matte range from 0.0 to 1.0.

The point here is pipeline friction. An embedded-alpha MOV can drop straight into After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro without juggling a separate matte file. When you do want a separate matte, the alpha-only options cover both video-centric and frame-centric workflows.

If you build motion graphics, this is the part that keeps paying rent. A clean matte lets typography, UI, and graphic elements sit behind a moving subject while staying readable. That trick stays stubbornly useful, even when the rest of the shot changes.

Credits, pricing, and the part everyone asks first

Pricing is expressed in credits and it is published on the official pricing page for the Cloud plans. Background Remover is listed at 1 credit per second of video, and 1 credit per image. VFX Pass Generator is listed at 3 credits per second of video, and 3 credits per image. That is the math behind the one-third claim.

Plan details and credit bundles live on the Cloud pricing page, including per-plan limits. Note that Background remover is not included in the free tier.

Limits that matter when you are on a deadline

Image and image-sequence uploads have a maximum of 100 MB per file. Resolution supports up to 2K at 2048 pixels, and larger files are rejected. Video uploads support up to 2K, with larger video downscaled. Video duration supports up to 60 seconds and frame rates up to 30 fps, with higher rates reduced.

Bulk handling exists too. The tool supports bulk downloading multiple completed results at once. For anybody juggling variants, alt takes, or multiple elements, that avoids the classic cloud workflow of clicking download until your wrist files a complaint.

Where it fits in the larger toolset

Background Remover sits as a focused subset next to the broader pass workflows. If you only need a matte, it keeps you out of the heavier multi-pass path. If you need more, the pass generator remains the place for depth, normals, and other map outputs that support relighting and downstream work in 2.5D and 3D contexts.

https://app.beeble.ai/

The post Beeble Background Remover hits Cloud app first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Lost Bus is a 2025 survival-drama directed by Paul Greengrass for Blumhouse Productions in association with Comet Pictures and Apple Original Films. The film is based on the non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by journalist Lizzie Johnson. Set against the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, it follows a school-bus driver and a teacher who fight to guide 22 children to safety through an encroaching inferno. Combining Greengrass’s documentary-style direction with large-scale visual effects and environmental reconstruction by RISE FX, the film depicts one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history with stark realism.

Supervising the inferno: Oliver Schulz (IMDB | Linkedin) is a senior Visual Effects Supervisor at RISE FX, the Berlin-based VFX studio. Over more than a decade at RISE he has guided VFX supervision on major international productions including Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Blue Beetle and Megalopolis, among many others.

His background spans concept art, digital matte painting and 3D environments; skills that helped him to take the creative lead on blockbuster-scale environment and FX heavy shows. In this interview he reveals how he and his team at RISE tackled the challenge of recreating a burning landscape for The Lost Bus, combining procedural geography, wind-driven vegetation, deep-rendered volumetrics, and machine-learning techniques for depth integration, to bring the inferno to life on screen.

DP: How did you get onto the Lost Bus? 

Oliver Schulz: I came on board after wrapping up on Megalopolis and jumped onto the very first meeting with Charlie Noble and Gavin Round, Production VFX Supervisor and Producer. The project was already awarded at that time so we directly started talking about the Sequences and the scope of the Rise portion of work.

Luckily or better sad tragically this was a real event so in regards of look, there were many references and documentation of this day. So our first meeting was looking through a lot of real world footage from all available sources. Charlie had been prepping reference reels from the very beginning, so we could hone in on a lot of specific ones for each portion of the work because he had references for all of them!

DP: Roughly how big was the RISE team on The Lost Bus, and how long did you spend from first build to final comp?

Oliver Schulz: We started with a very small core team in May 24 and delivered the last shots at the beginning of 25.  I think around 50-60 people worked on the show in total during the production with up- and downramping based on specific project needs like temp deliveries for example.

DP: The antagonist of the movie is the geography of a very particular area, and the fact that it is on fire – how did you make sure that it was recognizably that specific part of the world? 

Oliver Schulz: We started with real world data derived from elevation models. That gave us a pretty good grounding in reality. We got lidar scans for very specific locations like the Pulga Bridges for example which was invaluable as this is usually something one doesn’t get from any publicly available sources. We spent quite a bit of time to get us a very good foundation of all key locations, which meant that everything had a geometrical base until the very last mountain you see on the horizon.

Our Lidar Supervisor David Salamon was instrumental in setting up this base. He used some maps imagery to give a rough base color to all those individual geometries that served as a rough guide later on in layout and surfacing for distributions of materials or assets. One has to keep in mind that most data was post 2018 so for instance vegetation had to be recreated from mostly photographic references shot before the fire. We tried to stay as true as possible to real world geography, but later on of course things had to be changed for storytelling reasons. 

DP: When merging New Mexico plates into your California canyon builds, how did you maintain scale and geological continuity?

Oliver Schulz: As production did not have access or in case of some very sketchy roads didn’t shoot at the original location for safety reasons, they did some scouting through the US and chose some New Mexico locations as stand ins for some of our sequences. The most prominent was the Pulga road for sure. In the film, the first responding firefighters trying to get to the origin of the camp fire first get sight when they are on top of the Pulga Highway bridge crossing the Feather River Canyon.

Without any better option they decide their best shot is to try and get to the fire following a very narrow road on the slope of the canyon. All shots on Pulga Bridge were shot on a Studio Backlot featuring full CG Environments including the FG bridge. This narrow path however was all shot on the New Mexico location with two big fire engines driving a slightly wider road. 

In production that meant that we replaced most of the visible Environment due to a couple of reasons. First of course it needed to have the right roadwidth and the correct canyon in the background. Second we needed to have very windy vegetation everywhere. Third in case all of that worked in camera which was pretty rare we still needed to put FX Elements into every shot consisting of dust, debris, smoke and later also embers. With those guidelines in place probably 90% of the shots became full CG exteriors only keeping small bits of photography for fire engines and some road pieces.

Once all those went into layout we made sure to keep a senseful progression to those shots meaning having the firefighters travel along the road during those shots in cutorder. The topography of the shooting location though was pretty different from the storypoint progression on the pulga road, so was the framing in camera when pointing at the fire from the fire engine interiors.

That of course meant as good and real our base was, it needed to be heavily augmented to make sense with storytelling and framing choices. Most shots feature the correct BG canyon but the midground is totally made up to allow for good view to the fire origin. All of this had to be understandable even with very frenetically moving handheld cameras.

DP: Let’s talk vegetation: How much botanical creative freedom did you have? 

Oliver Schulz: Vegetation was a big part of the environment and one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the fire. All FVX vendors had to tackle it in one way or the other which meant all were contributing to the research for which plant goes where. The foundation was once again the research and material collection from Charlie and his team.

We focused on the most common species found in this region of CA and made sure the level of dryness and the distribution made sense. So in this sense there was not too much freedom here as everyone tried to make this as real as possible from this point of view. For the build we actually just used the most common ground which is Speedtree with some augmentations done in Houdini. Part of the assets were also shares from other vendors which just needed ingestion and rigging in FX.

DP: You mentioned building a hierarchical “ecosystem” in Houdini. How modular was this system, and how much hand-authoring did artists still need to do per shot?

Oliver Schulz: This was something we actually invested a bit of time in at the very beginning and was overseen by CG Supervisor David Schulz and Layout Lead Mareike Loges / Senior Layout Artist Björn Markgraf. The core idea is nothing new and hierarchical just means that you start from the biggest Elements in your kit and than go smaller and smaller based on the previous distribution of Elements. First step is to either scatter or handplace big trees for example, following this you end up with a certain distribution. 

Based on this the system places smaller entities like younger trees or seedlings and smaller shrubs and bushes around or between the big trees. This distribution is based on simple rules like distance or terrain steepness. In case of the Pulga road we divided it up in two categories: mountains and roads. Both had similar procedures. We would always start with the rough blocking geometries matching either scan data, elevation data or sometimes just made up. From there we would generate the base coverage of rock cliffs which would hold out trees mostly in those areas. Following this we created the trees and bigger vegetation which would determine the ground coverage of rocks vs more pepply ground.

Roads were pretty similar but less complex as they mostly feature small stones. Again here we used some manually created maps to drive the distribution of small vs bigger pebbles that mostly accumulate on the side for example.

The toolset itself worked pretty well and as it was applicable as a template we could have a fully laid out shot in a day. Shot specific adjustments were applied on almost every shot though, mostly for continuity, visibility or art direction purpose. 

DP: Vegetation, environment, and FX were all dependent on one another. How did you keep versioning sane between departments?

Oliver Schulz:  That was a big topic indeed and it only is possible with two things: a rigorous approval system and a good pipeline that helps you track those approved layouts. We rely on our usd pipeline to do exactly that for us, it makes it somewhat easy (Im sure layout and production will hit me for this) to track department versioning. For each layout update we`d always get automatic QC renders that run through our inhouse “slapstick” system which is our inhouse auto comp engine.

When Layout would do a specific change it would publish this either on a shot or on an Sequence/Environment level. This will trigger a QC render from the shotcam of the affected shots. Once the rendering is done it will have a postjob that combines it with the prepped plate in nuke and runs another renderjob that will give you the layout reviewable which is than checked and can be approved and pushed into the pipeline from RV. This Layout than becomes available to the FX department which would run all needed simulations and hand off another QC reviewable for approval. Without those systems in place it would have been a nightmare to stay on top of all these versions!

DP: You said the layout department drove wind direction and strength instead of FX. How did that change your creative workflow?

Oliver Schulz: Yes that was indeed true and one of our early conversations we had internally to determine the approach all Environment builds would share. It was a practical decision based on two factors: We would simulate all vegetation on the asset level in different windspeeds for efficiency reasons and we wanted to keep iteration loops to a minimum.

This meant that I wanted to look at layout versions with moving vegetation as the strong directional wind would make it necessary to consider this already while layouting trees. As the direction is clearly visible you cant rely on spinning a tree 360 deg free in Y to create variations as the direction is “baked” in, so you need to see it moving in order to determine if an environment looks good!

The second reason is that FX needed to take care of vegetation simulation only once and when approved never needed to come back. This system worked really well and was accessible to the layout artists down to the single blade of grass, meaning one could really art direct where and how much specific things should move.

DP: You divided smoke into “hero” and “residual” categories. How did you manage density and readability without losing visual clarity?

Oliver Schulz: These two categories were simply based on the fact that we needed to deal with smoke in almost every shot. The ever present residual smoke needed to inherit a direction, needed to be art directable and also needed to render as fast as possible. Its pretty much the equivalent of atmospheric perspective in a wildfire scenario. Our Fx Supervisor Akin Göcmenli came up with a system of instanced presimulated caches that sometimes could consist of thousands of individual ones.

We started by doing simulations of smoke with a constant wind direction and speed that had a hidden source of emission and diffused pretty soon. That gave us a very soft falloff to the edges of the simulation grid which made these simulations perfect to overlap and look as one big single instance of smoke. On top due to those aspects it was quite easy to remove single containers and punch holes into the wall of smoke for visibility. We also invested a bit of time to develop shaders and render efficiencies to cut down on notoriously long volumetric rendertimes for this element.

Hero smoke was the category which either had a visible emission source in frame or simply had a hero storytelling element. These were usually shot or sequence simulations as they were mostly much denser and most of the time also much closer to camera. We also spend a good amount of time matching shading and simulation to real world references.  The secret to readability also lies in relentless QCing of outputs to make sure once you kickoff the expensive lighting renders, you are as certain as possible all elements are going to work. 

DP: The ember work looks incredibly detailed. How did you simulate believable motion in strong winds without visible repetition or looping patterns?

Oliver Schulz: Embers were a big part of the equations so by now you might guess…. Yes we spend a bit of time in asset prep to build some solid foundations. The first thing is of course the driving factor for all fx aspect: the wind.

FX developed hero wind forces that we used to simulate all elements with. A good amount of chaos and variance is key to not run into issues with readable patterns in any simulation. Another factor is collision. Embers will behave a certain way when they collide and thats what we tried to replicate. Also the ground plays a big role especially with the heavier emberclumps that slide over it.

Reality is unbeaten when it comes to little quirks and anomalies especially for something as complex as this. As no one is able to have a ground as detailed as the real world we also sometimes had a collision geometry that had slightly more displacement in order to have more detailed collisions happening. 

DP: Lighting and volumetrics are natural enemies. How did you maintain physically plausible lighting through that much smoke and fire?

Oliver Schulz: That was one of the biggest questions going into this project, considering that what was shot on set sometimes had very little to do with what ended up on screen, especially in terms of atmospherics. The best base for something to look real is to match the real thing. We did so in our asset phase and made sure our shaders and lightrigs were physically plausible, especially the ones only used to develop assets. 

We would match greyballs and reference macbeth charts in order to make sure scene lighting was correct in terms of lightbalancing. Then from there we developed shaders for all aspects.One of the most common issues I see is that volume and surface renders aren’t lookdeved in conjunction. What you end up having to do is to grade surface and volume render differently. This leads to very unrealistic renders very fast because there is no ground truth you can come back to.

We tried to make sure all our shaders worked with each other to have exactly this common base. Also when dealing with dozens of light sources and those issues on top that’s definitely a position you don’t want to be in when time is running…. All volumetrics do have very different properties to them where one of the biggest is how they scatter light. Back to front scattering can take a volume from being ultrabright to consuming all lighting energy and being pitchblack. So once you matched the real thing, use those tools wisely to deviate from there and support the story. 

We tried to always start with a balancing pass usually done still in lighting. This goes to comp as the foundation to do all the finetuning with. Still there was a lot of tuning left for comp and also we needed to break reality more than once to make sure that what you wanted to read in a frame remained readable when tons of smoke and fire went in front. Sometimes we needed to go as far as use the deep data to pull things in and out of the smoke to make them visible. Still the most valuable tool you have is the artist’s eye to determine the sweet spot of good vs real.

DP: You mentioned deep rendering bottlenecks, like OIIO running out of patience with too many AoVs. What exactly went wrong first?

Oliver Schulz: Haha yes that was one of the issues that came when switching to full deep with our renders. That means you have each component of each lightgroup rendered with deep data to put it back together in comp. That resulted in a lot of channels that apparently were too much for OIIO to handle. Thank god that was fixed otherwise I wouldn’t write this story now ;)

DP: Rendering holdouts took up to an hour per frame. Did you develop any automation or optimisation to make deep rendering less painful?

Oliver Schulz: Indeed rendering times for deep holdouts were quite painful and nothing to speed up really. With so many volumetric elements you need to deep hold out everything with everything to make sure its accurate. If you multiply this with the number of separate elements rendered and with the amount of light Aovs times the amount of components you end up with a staggering number of renders.

Plus in the end you need to denoise all frames so the best solution was try to plan out delivery dates as good as possible to have time for all those thousands prerenders to run on the farm. Still our compositing Supervisor Oliver Hohn and Lead Nicolas Burgers had some longer evenings ensuring all renders were there the next morning to be picked up by the compositing Artists.

DP: You used machine-learning depth generators to create deep data from plates. What tools powered that, and how reliable were the results?

Oliver Schulz: We started testing tools quite early in anticipation of very challenging compositing work. DepthAnything v2 was what we ended up using as a default prerender pass. The results were a mixed bag considering the wide range of plates we worked with, although it proved to be valuable to have. Comp remapped the relative value output of the depth passes to absolute values from deep data with help of lidarscans or renders and was able to create some good integration especially with more wispy type of smoke.

For denser smoke and more accurate holdouts especially for actors we still needed to rely on a lot of manual roto for good integration. The AI passes proved to be pretty successful though for fast temp work as you get something going in no time. Issues were mostly the missing good temporal stability and also the lack of precision. 

 DP: Before deploying new tech like ML depth generators or procedural ecosystems, how do you test them safely inside production?

Oliver Schulz: We implemented those during production directly on our project infrastructure, so developed, tested and used simultaneously. 

DP: Were there any spectacular ML depth map failures, like smoke reading as solid or background cliffs collapsing?

Oliver Schulz: Depth popping or lost shapes were the most common ones. But as none of these passes were used without correction in comp I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them!

DP: With so many volumetric layers, how did compositors manage complexity without drowning in passes?

Oliver Schulz: We have standard workflows for loading CG renders into nuke which do provide a basic level of organization. However the more elements you have the bigger the compscripts and we had some good ones for sure!

DP: Fire colouration is tricky. Did you use any spectral rendering or rely purely on LUTs to match on-set lighting and heat distortion?

Oliver Schulz: That is very true.. Luckily production tried to shoot everything with a practical fire which provided a good level of references in camera. If you than try to render as physically plausible as possible and have something in frame that you can match exposure to you are already halfway there. We didn’t use any spectral rendering here and rendered everything through Houdinis Karma in RGB.

DP: You switched to full motion-blur sampling for embers instead of faked streaks. How much did that impact render time, and was it worth it?

Oliver Schulz: Oh that was worth every minute of rendertime.. Real Motionblur for an element which is mainly visible in motionblur is a good investment. Plus the rendertimes weren’t actually that bad and took only a couple of minutes as you are not dealing with an expensive shading as well. The biggest benefit is getting nice curved and very interesting blurs especially with collisions.  The trick actually is to only invest time where its needed and render other elements with less costly settings. Deep compositing allows for it as you are not bound to any holdouts and you can combine differently rendered motion blur without any problems.

DP: How crucial was RiseFlow for distributing simulations and maintaining consistency across all sequences?

Oliver Schulz: We started implementing RiseFlow at the very beginning once we had our initial workflow for distributing elements figured out. The development was done by our Head of Pipeline Paul Schweizer and the implementation on the show was spearheaded by Jonas Sorgenfrei.

It actually is a very versatile framework that we use for a variety of tasks here at Rise. Its a modular node based System that can take arbitrary inputs and execute them in a chained workflow. FX built templates for various scenarios that got exposed variables like wind direction, speed, inputs for collision geometry etc. These could than be varied per shot and sent to the farm for execution. Once all those Sims were done, QC renders were submitted to the Farm and when completed, auto comped in Slapstick.

That meant that one artist could do changes on a big number of shots by adjusting the template and than resimming and rendering them over night. All render elements were deepcomped with our deep plate workflow and reviewed the next morning. This allowed for rapid adjustments and turnarounds which was a very crucial aspect of this fast paced production. 

DP: How did RiseFlow and Slapstick communicate between departments for reviews and dailies?

Oliver Schulz: RiseFlow and Slapstick are two different things really. The point where they communicate is that Riseflow might trigger a farmjob where Slapstick is hooked in as a post process that gets triggered after completion of the render. Slapstick again is a modular node based system implemented in Nuke that allows for a generalized template to be created. These inputs could take for instance all general elements that comp might use to layer a shot like mainplates, rotos, colorcorrections, lensdistortions etc and comp them together. We use Slapstick in all departments to create automatic reviewables for assetbuild like turntables with reference images, lighting slaps,fx slaps and so on.

DP: You’ve called The Lost Bus the toughest matchmove job you’ve ever seen. How did you solve the handheld, wet, low-light camera challenge?

Oliver Schulz: That was a tough one indeed. To solve this it really just comes down to the excellence of all individual artists that created those matchmoves. So there is no magic recipe to get through so many challenging matchmoves…

DP: Greengrass loves long, continuous takes. How did you manage to iterate and render efficiently on such heavy, unbroken shots?

Oliver Schulz: I guess it is really to choose your battles wisely… Invest into a good foundation early on and make sure to be as precise as possible in prep phase. Once the show is running and you are in full delivery mode there is no time to go back and redevelop anything.

Render optimization as much as possible and then relying on everything that was set up in the beginning is key to not have to think about accuracy anymore when you are trying to finish the shots. We did this and it really paid off, though having a couple of long shots with lots of elements to render we never ran into the issue of having to fear a render didn’t get finished in time.

There were some challenging shots for all departments involved but again the prep phase paid off and we managed to deliver everything in time. It’s really a Situation in which the Production team led by Michelle Cullen and Production Manager Androniki Nikolaou outdid themselves by planning and scheduling every milestone in production to make sure we had what we needed to finish shots in time. Of course that also means adjusting and revising this schedule each and every day based on client comments and changes.. It’s a tough job to make sure the whole production runs like a well oiled machine!

DP: Deep compositing only works if all layers align perfectly in space. Did you use diagnostic tools or pure visual QC to verify deep accuracy?

Oliver Schulz: The good thing about deep is that it’s pretty accurate as long as the sampling increments in depth are small enough for certain elements. It’s a game of keeping error thresholds low enough so you don’t pick them up actually. The balancing is precision versus filesize. Surface renders aren’t an issue really as you are dealing with front and backsides of hard surface objects really.

The fun starts with volumetric elements and this is where you need to tweak the settings a bit to make sure you don’t end up having 5GB per frame in volumetric renders. Still frames could grow to well over 1GB on bigger shots with all elements included, so we needed to do some rough calculations beforehand to make sure we weren’t running out of allocated serverspace.

DP: How did you maintain consistency for fire behaviour across sequences? Was there a single reference look, or did it evolve shot by shot?

Oliver Schulz: One of the big topics obviously here as the quality of the fire not only needed to remain consistent but also serve the story in how it behaves. When you look at fires in reality they all have very different qualities to them depending on a ton of external factors like what is burning, where it burns, what is the actual heat it produces and what is the influence of the wind and so on. So yes it’s crucial to pick a reference and not try to incorporate them all. The initial tactic we used was to create asset based fires with all components.

The two types that production defined as assets were “spotfires” and “forestfires”. Pretty generalized in description though mostly divided up by scale. So we took those two types into asset development and created a little scene with them. Forestfire in the background and spotfires in the foreground. This scene actually was the same one we used to lookdev all assets in. So we had a common ground for all assets really and the fx ones were not different.

We picked a general reference we felt was working well for each category and supplemented that with references that production had shot on set. The shot element though were mostly run by gas so wouldnt really emit any smoke but were a general ref in terms of breakup and edge qualities. Also those would come in native resolution where most of the actual refs are cellphone captures of much poorer quality.

So with all those references in place we started matching the fires again in different windspeeds. We tried to also implement all little details especially on the bigger forest fire like flambursts on dry wood, falling burning pieces of wood etc. Once fire was in place we hooked it up with all secondary elements like smoke and embers. We had already pretty robust setups developed for each of them individually so we could already build on a solid foundation using those as a base.

Once this little scene was successfully approved by production to go into shots we splitted out the individual components as assets again. These had all elements attached like smoke emission, ember emission, lots of different masks for heat distortion and were ready to be dropped into shots.

Using this technique we had a very solid foundation of very similar looking and behaving fires. Of course for hero shots we would need to resim those, but with setups in place and our template system it was mostly straightforward. Of course there are shots that need to tell a certain story like a fire coming right at you towards camera. Solving a problem like reading a perspective of a selfilluminating matter coming right towards camera is a different beast though you can’t prep for! This just takes a lot of creativity and trial and error to get right…

DP: What’s the single biggest creative takeaway from The Lost Bus you’d carry into your next show?

Oliver Schulz:  Don’t try to put out all the fires at once….

DP: Which shot makes you proudest or gives you flashbacks?

Oliver Schulz: Oh there are so many good ones really, honestly when I was watching all shots in a row I was so happy about the overall level of quality the team achieved in every aspect. So hard to pick singles but the Embercam full CG shots looked amazing on the big screen and were pretty spectacular… but getting them to the state we delivered them in was quite a journey…

DP: Finally, if you had to redo The Lost Bus from scratch, what would you rebuild first? Vegetation tools, compositing templates, or your caffeine reserves?

Oliver Schulz: Myself :)

The post Rendering the Inferno at RiseFX: The Lost Bus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The September 2025 update of Adobe Photoshop (version 26.11) is modest in scope but introduces a structural change: cross-app cloud projects. Alongside that, Adobe has added Firefly asset import and vector rendering for CJK text. The typography and Firefly updates are clear feature upgrades. The cloud projects, however, touch the way teams manage and share assets across applications.

From Libraries to Projects: what changed?

Creative Cloud has offered “Libraries” for years: shared collections of colours, brushes, symbols, and logos. Libraries are lightweight, designed to pass assets around quickly. But they do not handle project-level structure or permissions.

Photoshop 26.11 introduces cloud projects as containers for multiple file types and assets across Illustrator, Photoshop, and Adobe Express. Unlike Libraries, cloud projects can: Group full files (not just swatches or elements) into a single unit. They also can Assign user roles: editors can change content, while commenters can only review and annotate. So to Keep project-wide organisation, rather than loose collections of items.

In essence, a cloud project is Adobe’s attempt at a collaborative folder, integrated directly into Creative Cloud apps.

Collaboration: practical gains and limits

For freelancers and small studios, cloud projects could simplify version control. Instead of shuttling Illustrator vectors, Photoshop comps, and Express exports back and forth via email or cloud drives, everything lives in one Adobe-managed container.

For larger pipelines, the situation is less straightforward. Many VFX, post, and design studios already rely on dedicated asset management (ShotGrid, ftrack, or in-house DAMs). These systems support pathing, metadata, and automation in ways Creative Cloud has historically struggled with.

Questions remain open:

• How are conflicts handled if two editors open the same file?
• Does Adobe keep a file history or only the latest save?
• How are large binary files (e.g. layered PSDs >1 GB) treated inside projects?

Adobe has not provided detailed technical documentation on these points. Until clarified, projects should be considered convenience features rather than replacements for established pipeline tools.

Permissions: useful, but basic

Role-based access in cloud projects is limited to two tiers: edit and comment. Unlike enterprise DAM systems, there is no granular control over layers, linked assets, or export rights. For example, a user with “comment” rights cannot modify a PSD, but they can still see full-resolution assets. This may raise concerns in projects with strict confidentiality requirements. For teams needing more controlled distribution (for instance, advertising agencies under NDA), traditional controlled file-sharing may remain preferable.

The Firefly angle

The new Firefly integration is deliberately narrow. Firefly-generated images can be imported into Photoshop for refinement, but Firefly remains a standalone app. Edits are non-destructive, meaning the Firefly original is preserved while Photoshop creates a modified copy. This workflow may fit well with cloud projects. Teams could keep Firefly outputs and Photoshop refinements in the same shared project container, reducing file duplication across drives and emails. Still, without in-app generation, the workflow remains split across two applications.

CJK text: better previews, fewer headaches

Typography in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) has long been one of Photoshop’s weaker areas. Raster-based previews made text appear jagged and inconsistent, especially when shared across machines. Photoshop 26.11 replaces this with vector-based rendering. On-screen previews should now match Illustrator’s fidelity, giving artists sharper results and reducing misalignment in multilingual layouts. In cloud projects, where documents may be passed between different Creative Cloud versions, this could cut down on errors.

Adoption strategy: cautious roll-out

Photoshop 26.11 is available via Creative Cloud subscriptions at no extra cost. Version rollout may vary by OS and region. For individual users, cloud projects and Firefly import may improve daily efficiency. For studios, adoption should be cautious. Cross-app projects may not play well with custom pipeline scripts or local render automation.

As always: test before deploying to production.

The post Photoshop 26.11: Firefly hops in, CJK text sharpens up first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K with a massive 65mm image sensor and 17K resolution is now available for pre-order, priced at $29,995. Deliveries are set for later this year.

The Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K marks a step beyond the already impressive URSA 12K models. This camera is aimed squarely at high-end productions requiring extreme detail for large format screens or immersive environments – with a 65mm image sensor measuring 50,808×23,316mm and a resolution of 17,520×8,040 pixels (140MP per frame). Each pixel measures 2.8 microns, contributing to the camera’s reported 16 stops of dynamic range.

Physically, the URSA Cine 17K is nearly identical to its predecessor, the URSA Cine 12K, featuring the same magnesium alloy body with carbon fiber polycarbonate skin. The camera also supports interchangeable ARRI LPL and Hasselblad lens mounts, allowing flexibility in lens choices for different production needs.

Blackmagic’s emphasis on modularity is evident in the URSA Cine 17K. It comes equipped with an 8TB internal media module, providing four hours of 17K footage recording in RAW format. The camera also supports 10G Ethernet for uploads and direct access to files over a network, eliminating the need for transfers between devices. Dual CFexpress card slots offer additional flexibility for different types of media recording. The media can be transferred directly into DaVinci Resolve for real-time editing via high-speed Ethernet, reducing downtime between shoots.

Cloud and Streaming Integration

In an effort to modernize on-set workflows, the URSA Cine 17K introduces live streaming capabilities, allowing users to stream directly to clients or platforms via RTMP and SRT protocols. Whether connecting through Ethernet, high-speed Wi-Fi, or even mobile data, this camera can stream live from sets, making it ideal for remote monitoring.

For those working outdoors or in handheld configurations, the optional URSA Cine EVF offers a 1920×1080 OLED display with focus-assist tools, enhancing accuracy during filming. The camera’s extensive connectivity includes Lemo and Fischer connectors for lens motors and accessories, alongside 12G-SDI output, 10G Ethernet, and XLR audio inputs. The fold-out 5” HDR touchscreen provides essential monitoring options, while an additional touchscreen aids focus pullers or other crew members working on set.

Storage and Workflow Enhancements

Blackmagic’s new Cloud Store technology, built into the URSA Cine 17K, allows syncing of footage to Blackmagic Cloud. This feature simplifies on-set workflows. With high-speed networking and Blackmagic’s Media Dock, up to three cameras can be synchronized, providing faster access to recorded media and immediate availability for editing.

For proxy workflows, the camera creates H.264 files that upload quickly to Blackmagic Cloud, further enabling remote collaboration. This integration into the cloud and the ease of syncing media directly into DaVinci Resolve ensures a streamlined workflow from acquisition to post-production.

Pricing and Availability

The Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K is priced at $29,995, with an EVF package priced at $31,495. Both models are available for pre-order, with delivery scheduled for later this year. The camera will also be showcased at Blackmagic’s booth at the IBC 2024 in Amsterdam, providing attendees with a hands-on experience of this product.

Licensing and Compatibility

The URSA Cine 17K ships with DaVinci Resolve Studio, ensuring compatibility with the post-production suite right out of the box. Licensing for additional Blackmagic Cloud services is separate, though media recorded in Blackmagic RAW format seamlessly integrates into DaVinci Resolve without further conversion.

While Blackmagic is clearly excited about the potential of this camera, users should evaluate its features within the context of their own projects. Each new feature, from sensor size to post-production integration, should be thoroughly tested in the specific workflows you’re using.

Conclusion

The URSA Cine 17K is positioned as a premium tool for filmmakers and VFX professionals working on cutting-edge projects that demand the highest possible resolution. At nearly $30,000, it is a investment, but its feature set justifies the price for productions that require unparalleled image quality. Just make sure your data storage solution can handle the output—this camera will fill up your drives faster than you can say “post-production.”

Want to learn more? Check out the full specs and documentation on the Blackmagic Design website and the official product documentation.

The post 17K Camera from Blackmagic Design on Preorder first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Every collaboration begins with the exchange of media. DaVinci Resolve supports this with a proxy workflow, which has been supplemented with an external proxy generator in version 18. In this article, we look at the entire collaboration process – from media exchange to joint work with editing, VFX, colour correction and audio.

Application scenarios

Blackmagic Cloud can be used in a wide range of different application scenarios. Here are three examples with increasing complexity:

Example 1: Solo operator with multiple workstations
If I have one computer in the studio and a second at home or mobile, I can continue working on cloud projects from any workstation without interruption. I don’t have to worry about project import/export or any special IT infrastructure.

Example 2: Outsourcing video editing based on proxies
An external video editor handles the editing independently, based on proxy media that can be quickly shared online. If required, I can open the project read-only and view the current status without intervening. Once the edit is complete, I take over the project, make corrections in the timeline myself as required or do the colour correction based on the original files. Blackmagic Cloud guarantees that I am working on the latest version of the project. No export/import of project files and no confusion with version numbers.

Example 3: Comprehensive multi-user collaboration
During a shoot lasting several days, media is added to a DaVinci Resolve project on a daily basis. Clips are pre-sorted into bins on set and initial metadata is entered manually or via CSV upload. Dailies are created from the project or reviewed directly in Resolve. Proxies are created and automatically synchronised overnight with a cloud service. An editor working remotely starts editing in parallel based on the proxies. It uses the created bins and metadata for orientation. Towards the end of the cut, VFX artists, colourists and sound mixers come on board and work completely in parallel on the original media. If necessary, several VFX artists or colourists work simultaneously on different shots in the timeline. The progress can be viewed live by everyone.

Requirement for network or cloud storage

DaVinci Resolve is agnostic towards the storage solution used. Blackmagic Cloud does not change this. This means that how I store and transfer my media is up to me. From cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc.) to the classic in-house FTP server to the hard drive in the package dispatch, everything is possible – and (as soon as the data is available) has practically no influence on further work.
Blackmagic Design now offers its own storage solutions under the Cloud Store or Cloud Pod. These are on-site network storage solutions with a built-in option for synchronisation via external cloud services. Google Cloud and Dropbox are currently supported. For a more detailed look, see also the article “Teamwork in Resolve 18” by Prof. Uli Plank, which can be found on p. 40 of DP 05:22.

For this article, I carried out tests with the smallest version, the Cloud Pod, to see whether a storage solution from Blackmagic Design brings fundamental advantages to the workflow. This is only partially the case. The device’s internal integration with Dropbox and Google Drive allows media synchronisation without a computer. Anyone who uses these services and wants to synchronise overnight when the computer is switched off will welcome this.

However, this is also possible with storage solutions from other providers. One advantage of the Blackmagic Design solution is that proxies created with the Blackmagic Design Proxy Generator are automatically recognised. These proxies are transferred with priority or synchronisation can also be restricted to proxies only. However, the Proxy Generator is not the best solution for every workflow and a restriction to proxy media is not always sufficient, as we will see below.

Proxy workflow with generator

Despite a broadband connection, sending large quantities of video material is often difficult. Very often, however, the exchange of smaller proxy files is initially sufficient for editing. Original media is later used for VFX and colour correction and only for the material actually used.

Proxy media can be created in various ways in Resolve or externally. Blackmagic Design automatically includes the Blackmagic Proxy Generator with DaVinci Resolve 18. This is a simplified tool for proxy creation with few configuration options. The user selects one or more watch folders for the original media. One of the preset 1080p proxy formats is then selected. Under Windows, two H.264 and one H.265 preset are currently available – under Mac, there is also a ProRes variant.

There are no further setting options. Click on Start and the tool creates proxy files for all videos in the folders and subfolders listed under Watch Folder. As long as the tool is running, it continues to monitor the folders and new videos that are added are automatically picked up. This makes the Proxy Generator very easy to use and it can also run in the background or even on several computers in the network in parallel. For parallel proxy creation with several computers, it is sufficient if they all have access to the same network storage. No further configuration is required. The app is simple and robust, but also not very flexible. One of the main problems is the storage location of the proxies. These end up in “proxy” subfolders of the original folder structure.

This allows DaVinci Resolve to automatically recognise the proxies and make them available in Resolve without additional linking. However, it also means that additional files end up in the original folder structure, which are handled differently from the point of view of backup, archive and online synchronisation with cloud services. Users of the Blackmagic Cloud Store or Cloud Pods have an advantage in the last point. In the settings for synchronisation with the cloud, synchronisation can be restricted to proxy media.

Otherwise, the proxy generator only offers the option of exporting the proxies after stopping the proxy creation. This creates a copy of all proxies from the watch folders in a different location. The original proxies can then be deleted using Delete Proxies. However, if video files are to be added continuously and proxies are to be created repeatedly, this procedure is hardly suitable. Previously exported proxies are copied again (or overwritten) when exporting a second time. Deleted proxies are recreated as soon as the generator is restarted on the same watch folder.

If you still want to use the proxy generator in this situation, you must either manually fish out the proxy subfolders in the file system and copy them yourself or create new folders each time you add new media – and create separate watch folders. There is another catch to mixing proxy files and original media: other files often have to be passed on for collaboration in addition to proxy videos. For example, graphics, photos or separate audio recordings. Even with the Blackmagic Cloud Store, I have to separate these files from the original data in the file path or copy them out in order to be able to transfer them with the proxies but without the original videos.

So it seems logical to create the proxies and any copies of other files in a separate folder right from the start. This folder does not require a backup, can be shared in any way and can be deleted without hesitation once the collaboration has ended.

Proxy workflow within DaVinci Resolve

The proxy workflow within DaVinci Resolve makes exactly this possible. In the project settings, I can set both the format and the resolution of the proxies in the “Master Settings” under “Optimised Media and Render Cache”. All ProRes variants are also available here under Mac and the comparable DNxHR options under Windows. Under the “Working Folders” I can determine the storage location for the
Proxies and, for example, specify a folder here that is synchronised with my preferred cloud solution. I then select all the clips in the media pool for which proxies are to be created and can start the generation by right-clicking “Generate Proxy Media”.

Working with proxies

If I have created proxies using one of the above methods, they are immediately available in DaVinci Resolve. If I have created proxies externally, I must then link them in Resolve. To do this, I select all the media in the Media Pool for which proxies are available and right-click on “Relink Proxy Media”.
Once the proxies have been linked in the project, they are also available to all employees in the cloud project, provided the files have been exchanged and the path mapping has been taken into account (see left). I can see which proxies are available via the List View in the Media Pool. The “Proxy” column shows the resolution of the linked proxy file or “None” if there is no proxy. The “Proxy Media Path” column points to the file on the hard drive. (I can configure the column display by right-clicking on the title bar of the List View). Proxies can be necessary, helpful or undesirable in different phases of the project. In DaVinci Resolve, I can choose between three options under “Playback -> Proxy Handling”:

i select “Disable All Proxies” when I need to be absolutely sure that I am working with the best quality, for example during colour grading or before final rendering. If original files are missing at that time, the corresponding clips are displayed with “Media Offline” and are therefore easily recognisable.

“Prefer Proxys” is recommended for editing if the computer is not powerful enough to work smoothly with the originals.

“Prefer Camera Originals” is particularly helpful if original data arrives with a delay in the remote collaboration. This allows me to start working based on proxies while the original data is being downloaded in the background. As soon as new clips are available in the original, Resolve automatically switches to the original during the next playback.

When proxies are active, Resolve indicates that proxies are being used with a small preview icon in the timeline, in the Media Pool and in the clips bar (Colour, Fusion).

Set up cloud project

Firstly, all project members set up a free account at cloud.blackmagicdesign.com. The accounts remain free of charge and do not require any means of payment. Only the creation of a project library is subject to a fee and is currently charged at USD 5 per month.

Project Library

After logging into the Blackmagic Cloud in the browser, I select “Project Server”. Project Libraries are now created and managed here. A project library in Resolve is a database in which projects are created or loaded. This can be any number of Resolve projects, but it should be noted that only the entire library can be shared in a cloud library and there are no access restrictions within the library. The number of users is also currently limited to 10. A single library should be sufficient for most users. However, if you want to work in parallel with different teams on different projects, you may need several libraries to separate the projects and teams. Libraries can be deactivated at any time (even temporarily); in this case, the remaining monthly credit will be credited.

The Project Library can only be registered and created via the web browser. However, I can also log in directly from the Resolve Project Manager under “Cloud” and manage, share and add projects to the library from there. If necessary, I can use the “Show/Hide Project Libraries” button to expand the Project Libraries on the left. Clicking on “Details” shows details about the library and gives me the option of inviting other employees via “Share”. To share, I only need the e-mail address with which the employee has previously registered. The members of the library receive an email notification and can now also access the library via their Resolve Project Manager.

Cloud Project

A cloud project is essentially nothing more than a regular DaVinci Resolve project that is stored in a cloud library for synchronisation purposes. It can be exported and copied in the same way as other projects. This makes it easy to move a project from “Local” to “Cloud” or vice versa. For example, I can create a project locally and only move it to the cloud later for collaboration. To do this, I select the project under “Local”, click on the “Copy Project to” button – and select the Cloud Library in the dialogue.
Once the collaboration is finished, I copy the project back and can remove the Cloud Library without hesitation – and save the monthly fee. Alternatively, I can also continue to use a library for completely different projects by removing completed projects from the library and then removing or adding members according to new project requirements.

Working in the cloud project: Relinking and path mapping

When working locally, as well as in the cloud, DaVinci Resolve must have linked the media used in the project. This means that Resolve knows the corresponding file path for each clip in the media pool. When new projects are loaded or file paths change, media initially appears as “Media Offline” and can be reassigned by clicking on “Relink Media”. The same procedure now also works in the cloud, but local paths are now created for each user in the path mapping. In our tests, this has always worked without any problems, but we have received isolated reports of problems with proxies. If there is a problem, we recommend the following:

Initially, we limit ourselves to a few “main folders”. For example, a “Media” folder and a “Proxies” folder and agree within the team that the substructure below these main folders will never be changed when exchanging data. This means that a file “Media/Videos/Landscape/0001.mov” also ends up on all computers under the same sub-path of the “Media” folder (i.e. “/Videos/Landscape/”) as soon as it is downloaded.

In the project manager under “Path Mapping” we should now find exactly this “main folder” with the corresponding local path. If something goes wrong, we can change the local paths here again. If you want to be absolutely sure, you can switch off the automatic linking from the start. In this case, I add my “main folders” via “Add” on the computer on which I created the project. I then ask all employees to enter the local paths via “Browse”. The “Relink Media” function is not required.

Not all media must be available when creating the paths. If the data exchange has not yet been completed, media that are not available remain offline until they are available in the paths specified in the path mapping. In this way, an employee can start with the existing media or proxies – and recognise in the media bin as soon as further clips become available.

Single User Project

Regardless of whether I copy an existing project to the cloud or create a new project there via “New Project”: In both cases, the project initially starts as a single user project. This means that it can only be edited by one person at a time. All members of the library have access to the project, but only the first employee who regularly opens the project has write access. If the project is already being edited by another member, a lock symbol appears and the project can only be opened read-only.

If team members are not working on the project in parallel, the single user project has advantages. Everyone has access to the current status at all times if required; there is no risk of versions getting mixed up during handover. At the same time, the person working on the project has full access – and the certainty that no one will change anything in the meantime.

Multi-user collaboration

For closer collaboration, the project can be released for editing by all team members via “File -> Multi User Collaboration” while it is being edited. From now on, all members
Access to all functions in Resolve. A locking mechanism ensures that employees do not get in each other’s way.

Locking mechanism

True to the motto “first come, first served”, DaVinci Resolve allows the user who tackles an object (timeline, bin, …) first to edit it. This object is temporarily blocked for other users. This means that they only have read authorisation and can see the progress. In detail, this works as follows.

Bin

If I click on a bin in the Media Pool that is not being edited by another employee, I automatically receive a lock on this bin. I can edit the bin and, for example, rename clips or create subfolders. Other users see my thumbnail next to the bin name. This allows users to recognise that the bin is locked for editing. If I don’t want to edit it, I can unlock the bin for others by right-clicking via “Unlock Bins”.

Attention: The bin remains locked even if I close the media pool. This makes it very easy to accidentally lock a bin in which another employee wants to work. Unfortunately, Resolve does not show me in the Media Pool whether I have already unlocked a bin manually or not. One solution could be to create a dummy bin with your own name – and get into the habit of always selecting this bin when I’m not doing anything else in the Media Pool. That way, I have a “Bernd_Unlock” bin and know that I’m not disturbing anyone as long as I have this bin selected.
Conversely, if I am organising media while other members are active in the project, it is advisable to lock all relevant bins manually by right-clicking “Lock Bins” at the start of the work. This way, I can be sure that no one will interfere with me in the future. However, the manual lock is cancelled as soon as I close the project.

Timeline

The timeline is also locked as soon as I open it first from the Edit Page, Cut Page or Fairlight. The lock applies to editing and audio, but not to work in the Colour or Fusion workspaces. This means that only one editor or sound mixer can work in a timeline at the same time. If editing assistants or several editors are in the project, they should either work one after the other or on separate timelines in parallel – and merge them later.

However, a locked timeline can be viewed by everyone at any time without editing rights. If I close the timeline, it is automatically unlocked. Alternatively, I can right-click in the Media Pool to manually unlock the timeline via “Timeline -> Unlock Timeline” – and keep it open without editing rights.

Fusion and Colour

If I switch to the Fusion or Colour workspace, all existing timeline locks are automatically removed. Instead, the lock is now at clip level. This means that the clip on which I am in Fusion or in the colour page is locked for editing. This means that several VFX artists and colourists can easily work on different clips in a timeline at the same time. Working on VFX, colour and sound in parallel also generally works smoothly.

Working in parallel with editing is also technically possible, but should be carefully considered and coordinated if at all necessary. It is technically possible for the editor to shorten or remove a clip that the VFX artist or colourist is currently working on.

A problem arises when an employee inadvertently locks timelines or bins. As long as the employee has the Resolve project open, only they can remove the lock. If the employee is not available, there is no way for even the administrator of the Project Library to remove it. Even if I remove the employee from the library, the lock remains active as long as the project is still open. The only way out is to copy the corresponding timeline, the bin or, in the worst case, the entire project – and continue working on the copy. Improvements would be desirable at this point. An administrator unlock and possibly a timeout on inactivity would be useful.

Updates

If I have an object (bin, timeline, clip) open while a colleague is making changes, a small refresh icon appears to indicate that the object has been changed in the meantime. If I click on this icon, the object is refreshed. Otherwise, I always get the current version when I open a new object. This update mechanism is good and simple. It prevents automatic updates, for example during playback, from causing confusing jumps; at the same time, it is easy to stay up to date.

Communication

Communication is the be-all and end-all of any team project. This is where Resolve is only of limited help. The in-built chat function is rudimentary. There is a shared chat for all employees who have opened the project. When a colleague sends a message, a speech bubble lights up red in the bottom right-hand corner of the page navigation. This is easy to overlook or even not visible at all if the page navigation is hidden. The chat is also not saved; it is not possible to write to individual team members privately; there is no status display for members – and no sharing of screenshots.

In the following, I can use the marker function in DaVinci Resolve very well to ask specific questions about individual clips in the timeline or to make comments. Markers can contain “annotations”, i.e. markings directly on the image. Team members can use different colours. In the index, I can see all markers at a glance and click on them to navigate.

Backups

With several employees, the risk of something going wrong increases. DaVinci Resolve does not have a cross-user editing history. In addition, the locking mechanism described above only works as long as I have the project open. This means that there is no way to save your own work progress in the project. If I leave the project, any member of the library can change my work or even delete the entire project without leaving a trace.
Of course, basic trust and discipline should be a matter of course when working in a team. Nevertheless, I want to protect myself from the worst-case scenario. Regular project backups are the best way to do this. Unfortunately, the automatic backups currently (version 18.1.2) do not work for Cloud Library projects. Hopefully Blackmagic Design will improve this soon. If the worst comes to the worst, I would like to be able to view an earlier version of the project, compare it and go back if necessary – or extract and re-import individual older timelines.

If you have the right programming skills, you can automate local backups of your cloud projects using Python script. Otherwise, the only way out is to manually export or copy projects from the project manager; preferably at least daily and definitely after important milestones, such as after the review with the customer.

Another alternative is to use the backup at library level. In the details of the cloud library, I can use “Back Up” to back up the current status of the entire library with all projects in the cloud
back up. However, if I want to view this backup later, I have to restore it as an additional library. This also incurs the monthly fee for the second library. In practice, this is not dramatic, as I can deactivate the additional library again after a short time (the remaining amount of the monthly fee is credited). Nevertheless, the process seems unnecessarily cumbersome and this backup option cannot currently be automated either. No matter what my backup procedure looks like, I should test it once before the worst comes to the worst!

Cloud vs Network

The collaborative elements offered by Blackmagic Cloud are also all available when working together via an in-house network. So if all employees can work in the same network (for example via VPN), then I can set up a network library as a Postgres database on a local server instead of a cloud library. This saves the monthly costs for Blackmagic Cloud and may make sense if the corresponding IT infrastructure with support is available anyway or is also used for other purposes. For smaller companies and freelancers who otherwise do not need a VPN connection and do not operate a server 24 hours a day, the costs of an in-house network solution will probably exceed the costs of Blackmagic Cloud.

Conclusion

Collaboration via Blackmagic Cloud offers many advantages for collaboration over the Internet. It makes teamwork in DaVinci Resolve much easier and also enables parallel work on a joint project without a special network setup. The improved proxy workflow in version 18, with and without proxy generator, also works well in principle; this can be integrated into your own workflow as required. Storage solutions from Blackmagic Design (Cloud Pod, Cloud Store) can be used, but only improve the workflow in certain situations.

If a new storage solution is planned, I would also take a critical look at the Blackmagic Design products independently of DaVinci Resolve from an IT perspective and compare them with alternatives.

Even in the beta phase, Blackmagic Cloud is already productive and useful for me. In my opinion, the lack of automatic backup in the cloud is the biggest stumbling block. For the time being, every project should have a reliable alternative. Other difficulties, such as accidental locks of timelines or bins, can be annoying but won’t stop the project; this should be avoidable with a bit of practice in the team. Good communication within the team is always crucial and that doesn’t change with Blackmagic Cloud. However, it does facilitate handovers between different areas
in post-production – and, above all, enables real parallel work without major overheads.

The post Collaboration with Blackmagic Cloud first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bernd Klimm.

In nuce: Colorfront, a developer of on-set dailies and transcoding systems for Hollywood studios, showcased the new features of its Express Dailies, On-Set Dailies and Transcoding product lines at this year’s IBC (International Broadcast Convention). The new functions mainly relate to connectivity and image processing.

In toto: Below are some of the most interesting innovations that Colorfront presented for its product lines at IBC 2022. For a complete list of the new functions, please refer to the sources at the end of this message.

• Integration into NDI and IMF component-based media workflows: The developer’s Express Dailies, On-Set Dailies and Transcoders mentioned above all offer 16-bit NDI video output. Network Device Interface(NDI) is a royalty-free software specification developed by NewTek that enables video-compatible products to deliver and receive frame-accurate, low-latency video over a local area network. With regard to IMF media-related workflows, validation tools provide important information during packing and quality testing processes. This includes incorrect Dolby Vision metadata, which is recognised, as well as volume issues or inconsistent letterboxing/frame line settings. IMF (Interoperable Master Format) “is a file-based media format that simplifies the delivery and storage of audiovisual masters intended for multiple territories and platforms.” (Source for the IMF definition: imfug.com)
• Support for AWS cloud storage (Amazon Web Services) and digital camera/audio formats: For cloud-based operations, Colorfront offers accelerated importing and faster uploading of media to AWS S3 cloud storage. Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) is used by customers to store data volumes for various use cases – including: Websites, archiving, enterprise applications. (Source for AWS S3 definition: doc.aws.amazon.com).
• Tools regarding timeline editorials and user interface: This includes an improved timeline for multi-channel audio editing, a spatial audio workflow, a hot-key editor, and an improved user experience.

Click further: Digital Production last reported on Colorfront on 2.09.2022 – at that time in connection with the release of the ColorBox from AJA Video System.

Sources: postproperspective.com, colorfront.com, YouTube video Colorfront Streaming Player – Introductory Video ( see minute 1:25 for the lead image above)

The post Colorfront presents new functions of its product line first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: The US company Otoy announces its collaboration with the German company UX3D. This is the result of a recent press release. UX3D is a German-based company that offers software solutions for interactive 3D real-time graphics. UX3D was also involved in the development of gITF, the JPEG equivalent for 3D (Digital Production reported on 10 August 2022). Otoy specialises in cloud graphics, which are increasingly being used in the visual effects industry.

In toto: As part of the collaboration, the UX3D glTF Scene Toolkit will be integrated into the Otoy marketplace. As a result, the Otoys ecosystem will offer 100 per cent native glTF support. The aim of the cooperating companies is to offer a toolkit that is a module for artists – for example, to support multi-engine and similar possibilities along the Octane and render roadmaps. The possibilities mentioned include gITF distillers from OrBX and ITMF. According to the same press release, the UX3D glTF Scene Toolkit will thus be integrated for over 200 Digital Content Creation Tool (DCC) – including: Cinema 4D, Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine and Unity3D. The Scene Tookit is made available via the Render Network.

Speeches: In the press release, UX3D founder and managing director Norbert Nopper describes the cooperation as an important building block for the Metaverse Gesamtkunstwerk. Jules Urbach, founder and chairman of Otoy, agrees with this assessment, describing the cooperation as an important breakthrough “in the development of the open metaverse.”

And what else? The support is intended to help artists on the path between working with DCCs and playing out their 3D scenes. The press release also states that individual assets can be viewed, checked, edited, optimised and merged via glTF. In addition, Otoy is active in the Khronos 3D Formats working group to expand the gITF specifications together with other members – including: UX3D, Cesium, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Adobe or Autodesk.

Click further: to the press release. To the websites of Otoy and UX3D.

The post The glTF Scene Toolkit on Otoys Marketplace? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Blackmagic raw files (.braw) can now be transcoded natively via the cloud with Alteon.io. This was recently announced by the developer Alteon.io. The new feature should save creative professionals many hours of work. The manufacturer is advertising further time savings if users utilise the free Alteon Accelerate application. Alteon.io is described on the manufacturer’s website as an all-in-one hub solution for creative professionals, but also as a content management system. Alteon.io works with cloud storage, Web3 integration – and places a high value on security. In addition to .braw, Alteon.io also supports .mxf, .avi, .mov and .mp4. Support for the .r3d and .ari file formats is planned for the future. Once files have been uploaded to Alteon.io, users can access either transcoded proxies or the original files.

Further information: The company Blackmagic Design, which offers 12K cameras at an attractive price-performance ratio, has become an important hardware provider in the broadcasting sector in recent years. Alteon announces that it wants to follow Blackmagic Design’s example of offering equipment for content producers at affordable prices. Matt Cimaglia, co-founder of Alteon, notes overlaps between the users of Blackmagic Design and Alteon, and emphasises an awareness of cost-conscious budgeting, while at the same time taking into account the quality of productions, as a unique selling point for the clientele of Blackmagic Design and Alteon.

Click to continue: all further information on alteon.io One of the cameras that delivers high-resolution (moving) images, whose users could benefit from Alteon.io, is the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 (Digital Production reported on 4 July 2022). Another relevant camera from Blackmagic Design is the Ursa Mini Pro 12K (see our report from 29 October 2021 and our corresponding product test “Eye to eye with the pixel monster” by Prof. Uli Plank on page 92 of issue DP 06 : 2021). For this report, we have used a corresponding online entry on provideocoalition.com. We would like to thank our colleagues there.

The post Off to the cloud with Blackmagic raw files? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: In the detailed article “Frame.io Brings FiLMiC Pro to the Cloud – Testing the Workflow”, published by our friendly colleagues at Provideo Coalition, the experienced editor-slash-colourist Oliver Peters explains the possibilities that open up for users with the “Filmic Pro” app.

An overview: Below is an outline of what you can expect when reading the article. Does filmmaking in the cloud with Filmic Pro sparkle like pearl wine – or is the C2C dream bursting?

• How does the integration with Filmic Pro work? After you have finished your recording, the app encrypts the proxy file. Both low-res and high-res files are saved on your handset – within Filmic’s clip library.
• The workflow in a practical test: Can the filmmaker’s work prove itself in a use case? To find out, Oliver distributes his producer, his editor and his videographer in three different cities – purely hypothetically.
• Part 1 – Production on location: Here Oliver explains which settings you need to make in the app, which setting modes he chose for his shoot, and which upload settings you should select
• Part 2 – Offline editing: In his experimental set-up, Oliver parks his producer in a café to get to grips with offline editing using proxy files. Oliver also explains how to juggle footage in Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.
• Part 3 – Online editing: At his workplace, the videographer transfers the footage from his iPhone to his laptop at home. To test online editing with Filmic Pro, Oliver uses Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Da Vinci Resolves. How will the editing tools fare in the endurance test?
• Conclusion: Was the cloud-to-cloud workflow able to convince professional Oliver – or does the integration between Frame.io and Filmic Pro fall flat? Find out in the course of this useful read!

Click further: You can browse through the complete article with our expert colleagues at provideocoalition.com.

Clicked back: We already told you on 28 April 2022 that Filmic and Frame.io have joined forces to make the Filmic Pro Cinema camera app available within Frame.io’s cloud services.

The post Practical test of the Filmic Pro app with Frame.io! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Filmic and Frame.io have joined forces. The result: The Filmic Pro Cinema camera app is now also available within Frame.io’s cloud services and is designed to fully support Frame.io’s workflow. This makes Filmic the first camera app to support Frame.io. Frame.io will also be supported for the Filmic Pro Cinemagorapher Kit, a purchasable additional content within the Filmic app. Filmic Pro Cinema is an app for the mobile operating systems iOS and Android and has therefore been released in the new version 6.19.0.

More about Frame.io: We reported on Frame.io back on 22 April 2022 , when the video collaboration platform was integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud – a logical development for all those who were informed about it on 23 August 2021 , when Adobe acquired the Camera-to-Cloud platform.

Availability: Filmic Pro is available on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store for €14.99. The Filmic Pro Cinemagorapher Kit is available on top for 13.99 euros.

Click further: The video below provides information about the merger of Filmic and Frame.io, demonstrating how the handling works. The second video promotes the fusion of the app and the camera-to-cloud platform.

FiLMiC Pro Camera to Cloud Frame.io Integration | Advanced Preview

FiLMiC Pro | Announcing Frame.io Camera to Cloud (C2C) Support

The post Filmic camera app for Frame.io available! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Autodesk’s Flame product family now runs via the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud. According to the associated press release, the combination of Flame and AWS should enable creative professionals to send professionally created content quickly and securely at the same time – worldwide. But that’s not all: In the same press release, Autodesk also announced new features for Flame, Flare and Flame Assist. You can find out exactly what these are below.

Autodesk via AWS: According to Steve McNeill, Head of Engineering at Autodesk, the networking of Flame with AWS Cloud supports creative teams, especially at critical stages in the work process – for example during crunch time, “without the need to purchase additional hardware”, as stated in the press release.

What’s new with Flame: What’s changing with the Flame update? Find out using the key points below:

• Flame with AWS: Autodesk’s Flame product family now also works in the AWS Cloud, which means a wide range of computing and storage services. According to the press release, this gives creative teams access to high-performance hardware. This would eliminate the need for teams to purchase new, expensive hardware.
• Access Flame worldwide: Thanks to AWS, artists around the world can connect to Flame, for example via Teradici’s CAS Manager, which enables remote working in a matter of minutes. In addition, data storage via Weka should function securely and in real time.
• Improved animation editor: The updated animation editor panel provides artists with many new options for editing curves. In addition, framing and filtering should now be more intuitive. In other words, fine-tuning, even of points within complex graphs, should now work better. The labelling of drop-down menus and buttons has also been simplified.
• Improved HDR user interface: Autodesk has responded to the increasing demand for HDR workflows and has therefore added an option that aligns Flame’s user interface specifically to HDR monitors.
• Support for Apple’s M-series processors – works via Rosetta 2: This should improve performance when working with M-processors.
• Compatibility with Rocky Linux 8.5: As part of this, the RAW camera formats such as RED, Blackmagic RAW and Sony X-OCN of the VENICE 2 6K and 8K cameras have also been updated.

Click further: If you want to find out more, it may be helpful to click on the corresponding release note – or visit newpossible.autodesk.com/flame . The video, right here below, shows you the new features in sound and vision. The latest version of Flame, Flare and Flame Assisst is available free of charge for existing customers. You can find out about the prices for new customers at autodesk.com.

Flame, Where You Need It | Introducing Autodesk Flame on the Cloud

The post Access Flame, Flare & Flame Assist via the AWS cloud! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: During the four-day Nvidia GTC conference, numerous topics relating to the future of technology were discussed. Below we would like to introduce you to three of the thematic conference focal points that are important for the VFX industry.

• New Approach to Fashion Design with Adobe Substance 3D & Omniverse (in German: “Neuer Ansatz für Modedesgin mit Adobe Substance 3D & Omniverse”)
• Omniverse Cloud: New suite of cloud services that enables creatives to collaborate via the Omniverse platform
• New features and services are added to the Nvidia Ecosystem: new Omniverse connections, including 3D design and rendering (especially support for the Hydra Render Delegate)

New Approach to Fashion Design with Adobe Substance 3D & Omniverse

The aim is to provide insights into which tools and techniques will make working with digital textiles easier in the future. The presentation will be led by Rob Bryant Jr, Senior 3D Artist at Nvidia, and Pierre Maheut, Head of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships at Adobe. The main focus of the presentation will be on the release of the Substance 3D material extension. This Material Extension is designed to make it easier for artists to create the right materials or to add the right textures to their 3D objects. Naturally, Substance 3D’s tools are now connected to Nvidia’s Omniverse.

Rob will demonstrate how to create materials and visualisations close to the real world. Rob’s demonstration will be set in the context of the fashion industry.

On the other hand, Pierre will discuss the collaboration with Nvidia and explain how to use Substance 3D – for example, he will answer questions such as: How do I scan fabrics? How do I remove seams? How do I add details such as pleats to my fabric?

In the video below, Rob Bryant gives you an insight into what you can expect from his and Pierre’s programme:

Omniverse Cloud

Omniverse Cloud is a cloud-based platform designed to enable creative professionals to collaborate comfortably on 3D projects – no matter where in the world your project participants are located.

Omniverse Cloud is joined by Nucleus Cloud, a small tool that allows artists to access and edit 3D scenes with just a few clicks. The great advantage of Nucleus Cloud is that it does not require the transfer of large data sets. You can find much more information about Omniverse Cloud in the corresponding press release in Nvidia’s newsroom.

Another component is the Omniverse Create app, which is aimed at artists who want to create interactive 3D worlds in real time.

Nvidia is also launching Omniverse View , an app for users with which scenarios created in Omniverse can be viewed via Nvidia’s GeForce Now platform – with full simulation and rendering functionality, as stated on the website.

Nvidia Ecosystem: New connections for 3D design and rendering

With Nvidia’s Omniverse, artists around the world are putting their heads together to collaborate on 3D designs. The new versions and updates for Omniverse that Nvidia has now announced are therefore particularly important for artists.

In order to further promote synergies with 3D designers and rendering professionals, there are now new Omniverse connectors and libraries that are intended to expand the platform in a meaningful way, making the platform accessible to artists and designers, among others. If you want to find out more about the innovations in Nvidia’s ecosystem, you can read the corresponding blog post by Richard Kerris, Managing Director of Media and Entertainment at Nvidia.

Support for Hydra Render Delegate

The improvement in terms of rendering primarily concerns support for the Hydra Render Delegate. This allows users to switch back and forth between Hydra Renderer and Omniverse RTX Renderer within the Omniverse app. This function is currently in the beta phase for the following renderers: Chaos V-Ra, Maxon Redshift and Otoy Octane. Blender Cycles and Autodesk Arnold will also be supported soon.

Integration for asset libraries

Content from the asset libraries of TurboSquid, Sketchfab and Reallusion ActorCore is now available directly in the asset browsers of the Omniverse apps. Here you can choose from around one million Omniverse-compatible 3D assets. New Omniverse-compatible 3D assets, materials, textures, avatars and animations are now also available on the A23D asset library.

Click further: For more information on the GTC conference, which runs until tomorrow, visit nvidia.com/gtc .

The post Music of the future at Nvidia’s GTC conference first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Tutorial trilogy

This trio of tutorials will crown you mistress of the elements: With Rebelway you learn volume rendering (79 US dollars), with VFX Grace you paddle towards waterfall simulation (280 US dollars) – or learn to float above the clouds (450 US dollars).

Ready for Takeoff

If that’s too expensive for you, you can still dance on clouds – and for free: with VFX Assets Cloud VDB Set.

Volume Rendering Using Houdini And Mantra

Houdini waterfall tutorial | FLIP Fluids Simulation

Houdini Tutorial | Realistic Dynamic Clouds

The post Houdini | Tutorials first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

VFX Assets recently released a free cloud VDB in three different voxel resolutions. The whole thing was tested with Houdini, 3ds Max and Maya. The cloud is available for download on Gumroad.

This Cloud VDB is an extract from a 60-part cloud collection, which is also available on Gumroad for 25 Canadian dollars.

The post Free Cloud VDB first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

The GPU renderer Octane has just received new test versions for Nuke and After Effects. Otoy is releasing the downloads to all OctaneVR subscribers as a free download. You can download the Nuke and After Effects versions from the download section of your Otoy account on the Otoy website.

OctaneVR and Cloud Rendering

OctaneVR is Otoy’s subscription model for the Octane Renderer. For the equivalent of €17 per month, you can choose a subscription in combination with your respective DCC tool. You can choose from 3Ds Max, Maya, Revit, Blender, C4D, Houdini, Modo and others. If you want to use several 3D software tools with Octane, you will need to purchase the corresponding licence for an additional €17/month. Further information on prices and plug-ins can be found here.

The ORC platform for cloud rendering

With the cloud rendering platform “ORC”, Otoy now also offers its own cloud rendering services. The service requires an OctaneVR account and costs €17 per month, as do additional licences for other tools.

• Each render minute with 100 OctaBench points (equivalent to a GTX 980) costs €0.02
• The upper limit is 48000 OctaBench for the equivalent of €9.40 per minute

You can read an overview of the prices and performance here. Otoy also provides you with a step-by-step guide to using ORC on this page.

Differences to the permanent licence

The subscription model comes with a few restrictions compared to the permanent standalone version. With the subscription, the software can only be used with an internet connection and allows a maximum of two GPUs for rendering. This also means that network rendering is not possible.

The post OctaneVR for After Effects and Nuke! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Siggraph 2017 was a few days ago, but content from the conference is still being published. Foundry has now also uploaded the presentations from Siggraph.

Elara – Cloud Pipeline

With the announcement at NAB 2017, Foundry has set high expectations for the new pipeline infrastructure. Elara is a service for post-production that centralises the entire VFX pipeline in the cloud. Users should have fast and flexible access to organisation, VFX tools, storage and cloud rendering functions via a web browser. This presentation will introduce the features of Elara and show an example project from Inverse Normal. A limited release is expected at the end of 2017, with a full release in early 2018. Exact dates for this are not yet known. You can find more information about Elara here.

Nuke 11 – Feature Demo

Several new features have been added with the release of Nuke and Hiero 11. These include LiveGroups, updates for the VFX Reference Platform, new Lens Distortion, Smartvector and more. Juan Salazar presents the new features in this live demo. Further information on the new release can be found here.

More presentations from Foundry, including AR/VR Research, CARA VR and more can be found here on the Youtube channel.

The post Foundry SIGGRAPH contributions online first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Rise did a lot of VFX and visual effects studio work at the beginning and in some scenes at the end with the “book thief”: At the beginning, the camera flies through a cloud formation and then lands in a moving train. At the end of the film, Rise made houses explode. Rise has been using Houdini in its pipeline since the Hollywood production “Cloud Atlas” (see also DP issue 02/13) in 2012. Oliver Schulz was responsible for the cloud scene prologue.

DP: What tips do you have for artists to create perfect cumulus clouds?

Oliver Schulz: Many factors are decisive for the right look. Firstly, of course, the shape itself: With cumulus clouds, a basic approach with the distribution of small spheres on a base mesh is certainly not wrong. But the decisive criterion here is the variance in the structure: you should not have uniform edges and create many differently opaque parts. If artists look closely at such clouds, they will realise how many different parts a single cloud contains. The other part is the shading and the light. What a cloud looks like depends on where the light is coming from and how big the water droplets in it are.

DP: Real cloud formations are versatile and multi-faceted. What guidelines did you have to achieve which mood with the clouds at the beginning of the film?

Oliver Schulz: This variety is precisely the difficulty when you want to create a convincing sky in 3D. Basically, our only requirements were that the camera should fly between two layers of clouds at the beginning and that we had to create a seamless transition to the real helicopter plateau with the train in the snowy landscape. At an early stage of production, I did the pre-vis and concept design for our shots. The first step was to create value sketches to develop the general composition, cloud types and lighting moods with our VFX supervisor Florian Gellinger and director Brian Percival. Once it was clear which elements of the design matched the production’s vision, many more concepts followed – this time in colour to further refine the lighting direction and mood. We then projected the concept painting onto geometry in Maya and the camera was blocked out in it. This gave us a relatively precise idea of what the final shot would look like right from the start.

DP: What did your cloud workflow look like step by step?

Oliver Schulz: We did the layout, polygon modelling and animation in Maya. We built the clouds as low-poly geometry so that we could precisely determine the shape of the clouds. We exported the rough geometry from Maya as an Alembic cache and imported it into Houdini. There we converted them into volumes and modified them procedurally. Depending on the type of cloud, we also distributed spheres on the geometry via the cloud node to achieve a “puffier” look. The team then converted the geometries into VDB volumes, which allow a very high voxel resolution. Depending on the type of cloud, this volume was then saved with noise displacement or directly as a .bgeo file. We were then able to use these files in procedural CVex shaders to add finer details. The background of the scene is a projected matte painting.

DP: What are the advantages of Houdini?

Oliver Schulz: The setups can be set up procedurally and it is sufficient to simply replace the input geometry in an existing setup and rewrite the volume. This enables relatively simple and, above all, very fast handling in the event of any changes.

DP: What did you use to render and what settings did you make?

Oliver Schulz: The clouds were rendered in Houdini Mantra. Originally we wanted to raytrace the clouds in PBR mode with HDR Lighting, but we had to abandon this relatively quickly after the first render tests. The render times exploded with so many volumes and were up to 25 hours per frame. As the micropolygon renderer produces a very clean and fast result with volumes, we finally decided in favour of it. The disadvantage is that you can’t render physical light natively with this renderer. However, as the look of clouds is largely based on indirect light and scattering, it was precisely these effects that were important to us.

DP: How did you solve the problem?

Oliver Schulz: With a light setup in which a photon map was generated using simple distant lights with depthmap shadows in PBR mode. This could be read into the shader to be used there as indirect light information in the Micropoplygon renderer. The advantage of this was that effects such as 3DMotionblur are free or even render faster. The final render times were around two to three hours per frame in 2K.

DP: How did you arrive at 3,000 frames in the scene?

Oliver Schulz: The length of the shot was due to the monologue that the narrator gives at the beginning.

DP: What was the resolution of the cloud scene?

Oliver Schulz: We rendered the previews at half resolution in order to keep the render times short for the time being. The final shots were rendered in 2.8K, which corresponded to the delivery format.

DP: How many artists worked on the cloud sequences?

Oliver Schulz: The compositors working on the shots were Oliver Hohn for the first shot and Jonathan Weber for the last shot. I was responsible for 3D and matte painting, with a lot of support from our Houdini TD Simon Ohler.

DP: How long did it take to work on the scenes?

Oliver Schulz: Basically for the entire duration of the production. It was very long at the beginning when we had to set up the 3D scene. Towards the end, we realised the compositing and matte painting. As it always took some time to get feedback from production and the editing room, I had time to work on other shots in parallel during this phase.

DP: What is your opinion on Vue for sky and clouds?

Oliver Schulz: I haven’t worked with it very much yet, but my first impression is that Vue has a very good atmosphere engine that makes it relatively easy to create realistic skies.

DP: Did you also use Houdini to enhance the smoke from the train chimney?

Oliver Schulz: The train was shot from a helicopter, just as it appears in the film. We didn’t add any additional smoke.

DP: And the snow that can be seen in many scenes?

Oliver Schulz: In some shots, the snowfall was enhanced with particle systems from Houdini. Other shots were enhanced with snow using matte painting.

The post Cloudy with a view of Houdini first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.