Mike is back in Sydney, Jeff in LA, and me in Chicago after a week in Vegas. The last thing we did is get up predawn on Thursday morning — with maybe a bit of hangover — and head out to the Neon Boneyard near Fremont street in downtown Las Vegas. It’s effectively the place where giant neon signs head out to pasture. Ones from the Sahara, Jack Binyon’s Horseshoe, Algier’s Hotel, and more. We were taping a class for this term’s Digital Photography: Photoshop and the Photographer course and figured that a giant lot filled with rusting neon would be a great place for a Nikon v. Canon western shootout. Look for that coming out soon at fxphd.

The best thing about Thursday? Heading home. It was an exhausting week providing coverage from Vegas. To find out more about what we did — as well as my ramblings about the Autodesk user group meeting — click through to the rest of the article….

Friday

We landed around noon — me via the air from Chicago and Jeff & Mike via the freeway from Los Angeles. Checked into our suite at the Wynn and headed over to the LVCC to check out the RED presentation during a DOP session. In addition to the RED folks (where we taped an interview with Graeme Nattress for later use), I ran into fellow chicagoans Tom Fletcher (who runs the great Fletcher Chicago rental house) and Gary Adcock

Saturday

This was mainly prep day for our flame master class presentation on Sunday morning. We had all the footage loaded, but still needed to run through our program to practice it. We used to run these sessions ourselves in the past and all of us agreed it was great to not have to worry about all the “plumbing” that goes into the session — things like registration, making sure we had security, technical setup, etc. All we had to do is concentrate on the presentation.

We also had several meetings with manufacturers working out things for current and future terms at fxphd. The rest of the crew from Australia arrived later in the day — having Jimmy in town to help us edit and get things out makes a huge difference for us.

Sunday

Up bright and early to do final prep for the master class, which started at 9am. Tim Crean from Suspect lead off and had a fantastic presentation about a job he did for the NFL. He had a lot of cool techniques to show, including using the camera tracker in flame to do object tracking. Jeff, Mike, and I had a blast doing the presentation as well….showing off some old favorites as well as the new flame 2009 software. If you haven’t seen it, check out my Quick Take post about what is new in the 2009 releases.

After the master class, we had a good internal meeting about fxphd. With the Australians in town, it’s much easier to sit down together to talk about our current status and future plans. Especially when it is outside in the sun by the pool. For a Chicagoan tired of winter…NAB signals the start of spring.

Next, on to the Autodesk user group meeting. This event has definitely changed over the years and is now much slicker and more polished. In the early days, it was a 5 hour meeting going over the flame software with artists and users. Now, it is very much a marketing style user group meeting to inform both current customers and a wider audience. In a way, this is probably necessary since the product line has expanded so greatly. It’s one reason that years ago Mike, Jeff, and I started doing the fxguide live events at NAB — to really target the audience. It is nice that Autodesk has carried on the tradition with the master classes. At the user group, Marc Hammacher did a brilliant job of hosting the event and keeping it flowing — overall I thought it was well done. My friend Toba-san from Tokyo and his helmet cam was very Japanese…and the graphics showing workflow were quite cool.

Many users reacted negatively to the fact that there was no new technology demo at the event. We knew this ahead of time, and helped out our friends at autodesk with a humorous video making light of the fact that the legal department wouldn’t let lead designer Philippe Soeiro talk about new features. (By the way….we didn’t do the finishing…so the horrid interlacing wasn’t our fault.) What do I think about this (and these views are my personal ones..not fxphd or Mike’s)? I love the idea of the technology demo. But after my initial shock that they weren’t doing the demos, I’m not sure that I truly will miss them.

I bet that many at 10 Rue Duke were disappointed to not be able to show new cool stuff they’ve been experimenting with up in Montreal. But it was also enlightening to find out from Marc Petit that not having the new tech demos wasn’t fully a legal issue, but an internal decision to not show them (see our first fxpodcast from NAB). There’s been an interesting discussion on flame-news about this — and some developers in Montreal posted that they were relieved that their efforts in developing the software was not sidetracked before NAB. In the past, they’d have to spend a considerable amount of time to come up with things that might not even make it into the software. Their situation and perspective is understandable to me.

So do I want to see things shown like Mental Ray in Action or 3D relighting in Lustre that never make it into the software? Kinda yea….kinda not. What I guess interests me about this is that the tech demos showed that they were doing experimentation into cool new things up in Montreal. But is it worth having them waste their time simply preparing for NAB instead of getting out stable software? Not so much. In past user group meetings, I also liked hearing directly from the software engineers. Sure, their presentations weren’t the slickest…and sometimes hard to understand. But seeing the faces behind the software was really nice…and as artists we’d feel a closer connection with those working on the software.

What are my thoughts moving forward about the user group meeting? I liked what Marc, Bill, Toba-san, Paul, and the crew came up with. It conveyed a ton of information about where the products were at and after watching the event I felt I didn’t need to waste valuable time on the show floor hanging out at the Autodesk booth. It was obvious the crew spent a tremendous amount of time prepping for the event. But I did want some more stuff that in depth and detailed for current users. For example, how about including a 15 to 20 minute section for the R&D crew to address current users. I’d love to hear from Philippe or Fr