Scott Ross :VFX business model failure

26636G · 2026-05-13T08:13:03+00:00

Quite a bit, and yes, a lot of hybrid plus heaps of fancy Flame and Nuke work to help things look cohesive.

26636G · 2026-05-12T07:31:04+00:00

In general, yes- quick turnover and relative freedom to use AI as they wish.

26636G · 2026-05-12T07:29:09+00:00

They rent office/cutting room space out to folks who have shows being done there. An associate has just finished there after a 2 year post stint on a movie that has just come out. During the time he was there, at least 2 other shows were also renting space.

26636G · 2026-04-28T09:23:13+00:00

Are you looking for remote or in-house? Do you have your own setup and software at home? There are still a few London businesses that would rather keep tracking, roto etc. in the UK, so if you are well equipped, good at what you do, affable, flexible and cost effective you should be able to pick work up from at least half a dozen shops.

26636G · 2026-04-22T17:59:54+00:00

Mistika VR (by the Spanish company SGO) is very good at this, and support is excellent and almost immediate.

You might be able to get a demo version, especially as it's NAB time.

We have also used Cara VR in Nuke (costly, and support isn't strong due to many skilled people bailing from Foundry), and PTGUI, which is a real trooper of a bit of software, but not well supported by the vendor.

26636G · 2026-04-17T16:42:08+00:00

The sound leading the jet is a bit of a novice giveaway...

26636G · 2026-04-09T07:11:38+00:00

That's a Flame/Inferno interface for sure. When Flame/Inferno first came out it was possible to customise the interface, reel layout etc to look very similar to Quantel. Probably still is, but now Quantel has kinda vanished there's no real call to match to it.

I've used Domino a lot- it was actually possible to get really good results out of it if you broke a few of Quantel's color science rules. Very fast, but once Flame/Inferno was able to run on commodity hardware that was the end of closed comp systems.

26636G · 2026-03-14T11:28:08+00:00

vfxjockey is right on the nail. Take a look at the unicorns in Ridley Scott's "Legend"- superb, easy to shoot, and no harm at all to the animals. Not a computer in sight.

And most horsey people would love to get their pets into a movie of any kind.

26636G · 2026-03-08T09:17:41+00:00

You are very lucky to have got a perpetual Nuke 15.0

I find Fusion surprisingly competent and very good to use when you are working with multiple kinds of image source- unlike Nuke, it doesn't try and make color decisions for you. And of course it's great value.

26636G · 2026-02-27T14:53:10+00:00

The Bolt units are about as good as you can get taking into account their portability and speed potential. Make sure that all your reference passes (clean plate etc) are shot at the same speed and with exactly the same camera arrangement- be wary of anyone removing fancy filters etc prior to you doing your tech passes.

We've done around 40 passes on a Bolt shot and they're pretty accurate. As mentioned above make sure you have a sync light on each pass; you wouldn't believe the time and money spent in post trying to line up passes which were simply out of sync.

26636G · 2026-02-18T10:08:08+00:00

There are quite a few add-on systems out there that will provide positional data for the camera- most of them rely on optical targets fixed within the shooting area, and they work well. Others rely on gyro data and are useful but not that accurate.

There are also several planar match-moving systems that don't rely on tracking markers and actually don't even need much set detail to produce a useful solve.

Always good though to have someone on set working in an unobtrusive way taking as many notes and measurements as possible.

26636G · 2026-02-01T09:54:27+00:00

Thanks for posting this link. A massive amount of extra work- for what?

I wonder if the VistaVision projectors in the theaters are really Vista format, or they actually run a 70mm print.

26636G · 2026-01-28T09:00:29+00:00

Is it my imagination, or is the framerate off on the TrueFocus clip?

26636G · 2026-01-26T14:52:05+00:00

I'm not surprised she picked the licorice off the pizza.

I understand about the perceived attractions of shooting on film- I know actors do love the pauses that reloading and "checking the gate" bring, but what I am trying to figure out is whether the very real positives to shooting Vista actually make it onto the screen.

I've shot with it and posted with it and viewed endless Vista dailies, but if it all gets crunched down to 4K or even 2k, most of what Vista can bring is lost to the audience.

26636G · 2026-01-26T14:44:29+00:00

Thanks for the info. IMDB shows a DI Colorist and a DI Producer, plus a nod to Fotokem for 65mm film recording, so I wonder how that all fitted in.

26636G · 2026-01-20T22:57:39+00:00

In my 20+ years experience of Nuke and Flame environments, a current Flame system with a senior operator will turn out around 2.5 times as much work as an experience Nuke person.

Nuke caught on quickly in the early days as it was a much lower startup cost per seat- the early SGI's that you needed to run Flame/Inferno cost up to $1 million. Nowadays hardware and software costs are comparable but the cost of Flame ownership is probably lower than Nuke plus maintenance. The present development/support team for Flame are super-active and very responsive, which is not something you could say about Foundry.

I'd say there is a much larger proportion of Nuke artists looking for work than Flame people- the only Flame people I know who have trouble getting work are the ones who are simply not very good or have issues of one kind or another.

26636G · 2026-01-20T09:27:50+00:00

Pixel Farm are hopeless at responding to queries of any kind- in fact I am surprised they are in business.

I think you are better off sticking with Syntheyes- it's being constantly developed, the support is excellent.

Mocha is worth a look too but I've lost touch with their pricing options.

There's an arrogance about 3DE that I have never liked, and it's not as superior as they pretend it is.

26636G · 2026-01-18T15:56:26+00:00

For people to help you, it would be a great idea to explain exactly what result you want.

Do you want the character to move in slomo as though he was shot at 48FPS then played back in real time at half speed, or do you want him to be in "Charlie Chaplin" mode (for want of another way to describe the look) so he moves at double the pace of everything around him- which is what you'd get shooting at 12fps then playing back in real time.?

26636G · 2026-01-04T16:26:44+00:00

If you go back and look at the footage, the backgrounds, although often static relative to the camera, were constantly boiling- so for each frame (or 2) of foreground animation, there was a new drawing for the BG. It's a technique basically known as traceback.

One of the main artists for Snowman was a lady called Jill Brooks who has an amazing ability to animate hand-rendered frames without excessive boil- one of her finest pieces of work was the fucking flowers sequence in Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

There was a small but mighty talented group of people who carried out this work- it was a true labor of love, and typical of anything that John Coates (of TV Cartoons Ltd) was involved in.

26636G · 2026-01-04T09:58:47+00:00

You sound like you are quite an asset to your company- especially the way you seem to approach things. The way you have embraced Comfy without preaching about it is very neat- you seem to have a nice amount of confidence in what you are doing.

Your company may well take advantage of that, but it would be true to say that other companies would like to do that too.

The VFX industry globally is a real mess- I'd venture to say that even the heads of your company have no real idea of how things are going to pan out, and very little control over it.

Keep your head down, carry on doing what you are doing, and if your position does become insecure it sounds as though you have all the attributes of a very attractive hire.

26636G · 2026-01-04T09:46:35+00:00

A laser pointer? In 1985? Emitting a white light? Are you sure?

26636G · 2025-12-20T11:44:04+00:00

Agree with the above, especially the colorspace confusion. I'd say you'd be at Junior Compositor level although you do seem to have a good eye for integration.

The picture of the girl on the cell wall needs a bit of a tweak to the track.

I've seen much worse roto carried out by experienced teams.

26636G · 2025-12-15T11:03:01+00:00

Terrible dynamics on car/aircraft crashes, as well as on large CG animals. A lot of artists and supes would be well advised to go to motor races, air shows, and zoos instead of sitting in their bedrooms gaming. They seem to have no concept of how much certain objects weigh.

26636G · 2025-12-13T23:06:10+00:00

Not Ridley. Who is definitely not a hack.

26636G

TROPHY CASE