fxphd

Red Giant discount for AFX217 course members

John Montgomery — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:17:57 +0000

We’re happy to announce that members of our AFX217 course can receive a 50% discount off products Harry is using in the course:

By using a discount code, you can get 50% off the following products:

Trapcode Suite
Magic Bullet Looks
Knoll Light Factory
Psunami

AFX217 members — check your email for the discount code. If you didn’t get the email, please fill out a support request using the “contact” link.

You must purchase the products individually on the Red Giant store. In other words, there is no “bundle”. It’s not difficult though….add these products separately into the shopping cart, apply the discount code and BOOM 50% off will apply.

Offer expires May 17th.

Thanks to Red Giant for offering this discount!

Professor Profile: Eran Dinur

Mike Seymour — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:55:27 +0000

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Nuke, Vue and digital environment expert Eran Dinur talks about his work and career.

Studio Profile : Mirada

Mike Seymour — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:52:38 +0000

As part of continuing series of Studio Profiles: we look at Los Angeles based Mirada Studios: A studio designed for Story Tellers.

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fxphDOD – May 03, 2012

David Hamner — Fri, 04 May 2012 02:59:14 +0000

John preps for his upcoming trip to FMX and chats with Mike about the range of exciting panels at the show.

fxphd at FMX 2012

John Montgomery — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:52:29 +0000

Ian Failes and I are really looking forward to FMX in Stuttgart and know that a lot of fxphd members are attending. For those of you that aren’t attending, Autodesk has been kind enough to sponsor us at the event so we’ll be posting daily recaps from the show. In addition, we’ll have several fxguidetv eps with content from the show — the first coming out late in the week of FMX.

For those of you attending, here’s a listing of informal plans for the week as well as other information you might find useful.

Meetups

A big thanks to Germany-based Alexander Kucera, who has led much of this effort. There are two meet ups scheduled at this point, the first on Monday evening before the show and then Wednesday where you can have a pint or two on fxphd.

“Kick-off” Meetup: Monday, 7:00 pm at Amadeus

Amadeus web site | Google Maps

“Official” Meetup: Wednesady, 7:30 pm at Mash

Mash web site | Google Maps

Twitter

Alex has kindly created a Twitter list, which should make impromptu conversations easier. At the moment it includes people Alex knows are coming, but if anyone feels they are missing, please send Alex a message on Twitter (@AlexK)

Notes on Recruitment

Based upon his experiences, Alex has also kindly shared some tips regarding recruiting at the show

The recruiting desks are not open in the morning, but there are usually company members at the desks prepping the booth, etc. Instead of waiting for hours in the afternoon to talk to people, just swing by in the morning for a casual chat or help a lonely employee out with prepping their desk. They will appreciate it and you get to talk to someone from the company. Not quite the same as showing them your reel, but sometimes even more valuable. It goes without saying that this is supposed to be a casual contact. Don’t be pushy or you get the opposite effect.

And of course, it is usually advisable to make reservations for the recruiting desk if you want to show your reel, etc. Otherwise you risk waiting for hours in line.

I look forward to seeing you in Stuttgart — should be an absolute blast.

fxphDOD – April 27, 2012

David Hamner — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:28:54 +0000

Recovering from Las Vegas, the guys have new shoots to plan for upcoming classes and get into the future paths of Smoke and Flame in post.

Just how good is the iPad’s color?

Jeff Heusser — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:58:30 +0000

We often hear industry professionals complain that their work ends up being viewed on smaller and smaller screens. At the same time we increasing hear that clients want dailies delivered on iPads and we know they frequently use such devices to review work in progress. As Apple released the third generation iPad we saw two different reports suggesting that this new device had very accurate color – even describing it as being close to a professional broadcast monitor. That claim seemed like something we should check out so we loaded up an iPad 3 with normal test images and borrowed a Photo Research PR-650 SpectraScan Colorimeter to test it. Testing a $500 consumer device that has only a brightness control with a $12,000 Colorimeter – Hey why not?

We started by adjusting the brightness control to have the display produce close to 30 footlamberts and found that with the brightness set to about 50% we were close. We then set out to measure values using images of 100% white, 50% and 10%. Here are the target values for rec 709 along with what we measured:

revised vaules (fixed typo)

That is remarkable.

And if we measure the red, green and blue bars in SMPTE color bars:

We attended a web seminar by Datacolor about their Spyder4 monitor calibration system and they mentioned they have a means of calibrating iPads and iPhones. With clients often working remotely it may not be possible to calibrate their devices – so we wanted to know just how the new iPad was right out of the box. We didn’t do this in a scientific manner especially as we used a sample size of only one iPad, but we were impressed by what we observed.

Where does this leave us? We are impressed by the color on our iPad, just looking at images tells us a lot and comparing them visually to a calibrated client monitor is what made us want to do these tests. On a laptop there are many adjustments that can be fiddled with that can affect the image, one advantage on the iPad is there is no user accessible color control, except brightness. As you can see from the above data the iPad is remarkably close to what we would expect and we now feel a whole lot less nervous about clients judging work on them.

Special thanks to Marcus Hutchinson for his assistance with this testing.

fxphDOD – April 23, 2012

David Hamner — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:54:47 +0000

With a busy week at NAB, John and Mike find some time to discuss the new term.

Professor Profile: Tim Clapham

matgraham — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:01:28 +0000

In this profile of people teaching at fxphd.com we speak to designer, VFX supervisor and TD: Tim Clapham. Tim is one of the most popular ‘Professors’ at fxphd – he discuss art, giant projectors and UK beer with fxphd’s Mike Seymour.

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Please check your auto-renewal setting

John Montgomery — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:38:54 +0000

We just announced our new term today and will be starting auto-renewals shortly. Please check your profile page here to make sure it’s set the way you want:

/autorenew

The orientation week video will be out on Friday, April 6th (possibly on Thursday). We have a lot of great new courses this term and are really psyched about it. We’ve also added even more courses to The Vault…and you can still include one of these courses as part of your membership.

We still have a few courses that are working on their final classes for the January term. They’re just a bit behind…and they’ll have them all completed shortly. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks again for being a member.