In this tutorial, we take a look at my personal workflow on how to run Fusion on OSX. I use a wide variety of tools including Bootcamp, Parallels, NTFS-3G, and MacDrive to make this possible. If you have any comments or questions on this workflow, just let me know.

Thanks!

Fusion on OSX? | On many people’s wish lists | It *IS* possible

Bootcamp: This allows you to boot your Mac as a windows PC. It’s essentially the same as buying a PC with windows when you’re in boot camp. You have access to the full hardware, and your software can run to its full potential

Parallels: My tool of choice for running Fusion along side OSX. Parallels allows you to use your boot camp partition in a virtualized environment. This is extremely handy so you can boot into Bootcamp when you need full power to your PC apps, or use the same partition and run windows apps along side Mac OSX apps.

VMware Fusion: Another virtualization software similar to Parallels. I haven’t used this one, so I can’t tell you if it’s better for running Fusion or not. If anyone has any experience with it, let me know in the comments!

NTFS-3G: An system pref for OSX that allows OSX to read/write to NTFS partitions.

Mac Drive: A piece of Windows software that allows you to read/write to HFS and HFS+ formatted drives. Mac OSX drives are formatted with HFS+

Stabilization | From Shaky Beginnings | A Tranquility

In this tutorial, we use Adobe After Effects CS5 and take a look at stabilizing a piece of footage. Once the footage is stable, we “paint” out two unwanted objects from the shot using a quick and simple technique. We then complete the shot with some quick colour corrections.

Hope you enjoy it!

Old Thirty Five stock | A Plastic Revolution | Magical Photos

This is a thorough video review of the new Lomography Spinner 360.
http://microsites.lomography.com/spinner-360/

I spent about a week or so with this camera, and have blown through over 8 rolls so far, and I absolutely love it.

For some more detailed information about this camera, with links to high res film scans, check out my blog posting about it here:
http://blog.isotropy.ca/2010/06/lomography-spinner-360-review/

To see some shots taken with this camera, check out my flickr feed, or check out this flickr search.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgartner/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Lomo+360&m=text

If you have any comments or questions, just let me know!

Thanks!

A Puppet Master | Not through Strings, but a Keyboard | Making our Comps Dance

In this tutorial, we use Adobe After Effects CS4 and take a look at the wiggle expression, and show how it can be used with the Puppet tool to add some life to otherwise static objects.

Hope you enjoy it!

Here’s a link to the animation which is used in this tutorial:
http://blog.isotropy.ca/2010/06/i-could-jump-out-a-window/

A 3D Journey | Information Parity | Stereo Knowledge

This is a recording of a presentation I gave in October of 2008 on Frantic Films work on Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D.

There’s quite a few topics covered here including:

Post-vis, 3D tracking Stereo footage, Fluid Simulations, Creature design, Compositing Passes, Creature Rigs, Particle tests with Krakatoa, Cloth Simulations, 2D look Developlemt, and common problems with 3D Stereo Footage.

There’s a bunch of behind the scenes stuff here that normally doesn’t make it out of a VFX studio, so I hope you enjoy it!

Let me know if you have any comments of questions!

Thanks!

From Layers to Nodes | Mountain of Learning Awaits | Your Journey starts Here!

In this tutorial, we take a more in-depth look at node based compositing from the perspective of an After Effects user. If you are someone who has lots of experience with After Effects, and wants to get into using a program like Shake, Nuke, or Fusion, this will help you get on the right track.

In Part two of this tutorial, we take a look at an entire shot built in fusion, and break down the tools one by one, and replicate the shot in After Effects. Hopefully, by seeing how this shot is built in Fusion and in After Effects, it will help you to understand the workflow differences between working with layers and nodes.

Camera Disturbance | Not a Rhythmic Displacement | Shake is more Random

In this tutorial, we take a look at how to create realisitc looking camera shake. Rather than using the stock Camera Shake node, we create our own custom shake using a transform and the shake modifier on various properties.

In this 45 minute tutorial, we take a look at a final shot for the Open Cut 3.0 Challenge created with Fusion 5.3, and look at every tool involved in putting this shot together.

Compositing Love… | Every Single Node Explained | Details are the Key…

Here’s some links to topics and plugins that are refered to in this tutorial:

Hey all, You might be wondering what a tutorial like this is doing on a tutorial site for VFX artists. Well, I’ve decided that i’m going to start adding some Photography tutorials, since I feel that having a fundamental knowledge of photography is an important part of being a well rounded VFX Artist. There’s so many areas of Photography that cross over into VFX, it seems like a very natural fit. Everything from how lenses work, to how a camera records information, to film stocks, etc, are all things that, one way or another, you will encounter if you work in VFX.

Kodak EIR infrared film is a bit of an obscure topic to start with, but it’s something I’m very passionate about, and I think the look of this film really kicks ass. It’s the only reason I still have a 35mm film camera kicking around, and I’ve got 19 rolls left, so hopefully i’ll be shooting it for another 19 years or more

I’ve also scanned in all the pages from the UK version of the June 2001 Practical Photography magazine, and provided a link to it here: See a new world: Shoot Infrared! (13.7mb) This is a fantastic resource for people looking for more information on this kind of photography.

One thing I forgot to mention in the tutorial is that ALL of the images that I go over are being shot with the orange filter in my fisheye lens. In order to get that red/blue colour, you need to shoot with an Orange filter. If you want to go with something more purple, you can shoot with a yellow filter. It’s pretty cool as well, but I just prefer the look of the Orange filter.

Here’s a slideshow of my best Infrared shots in Flickr:

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

Thanks!

In this tutorial, we take a look at all of the photography equipment that I use on a regular basis. There’s quite a bit of gear covered here, so I’ve provided some external links for those of you who want to get some extra information.

If you have any questions about any of this stuff, just let me know!

Thanks!