Nice article by Mike Seymour about Lego Batman over at FXGuide
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-batman-movie-keeping-it-real/
ACES in VFX - Siggraph 2015
This is a talk I've done a couple of times for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. At NAB 2014, ACES Day at the Academy, and finally at Siggraph 2015. It's about ACES in VFX and Animation, specifically on the original Lego Movie at Animal Logic.
Pure Nuke ACES RRT & ODT
As part of the process of chasing down some technical gremlins in an ACES colour pipeline, I've recently had the need to develop a pure Nuke implementation of the ACES RRT and P3D60 ODT. This is a line by line reimplentation of the CTL code in ACES 1.0.3.
These nodes serve two purposes. They provide a way to render code based versions of the RRT and ODT in Nuke, with a 100% match to a pure CTL implementation. And provide a much easier way to visualise and understand the guts of the ACES Display Transform system.
They're not as fast or flexible as using the LUTs within the OCIO config, but they're a few orders of magnitude faster than ctlrender, and much easier to integrate into a Nuke workflow.
With normally exposed images, especially from live action cameras, you're unlikely to see any values that render differently to the OCIO config, but with CG images containing extreme intensity and saturation you will see more pleasing roll off and desaturation.
Right now I've only implemented the RRT and P3D60 ODT, and only in the forward direction. But in the future I may implement more.
UTS Data Arena
FXGuide.com have done a write up on the Stereo 360 project I worked on at Animal Logic last year.
http://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/animal-logic-goes-360/
The Lego Movie - Anamorphic Virtual Cinematography
Criag Welsh, Lighting Supervisor and my immediate Boss on the Lego Movie, was interviewed about the cinematography of the Lego Movie. There are some details about one of my proudest contributions to the film, LegoLens, which was the optical effects package I put together that was applied to pretty much every CG shot in the film.
Nuke 9 Live
The Foundry brought me to London to talk a little bit about Nuke Studio at their live launch event. I run through some hypothetical colour workflows, mainly about pulling grade data back up the pipe, and waffle a little bit on dealing with spherical video for VR. The video can be found below.
NUKE 9, including the eagerly anticipated NUKE STUDIO and major updates to NUKE and NUKEX, is the result of two years and countless man hours of development reworking NUKE from its very core to build a faster, more powerful, broader range of unique tools to help you get the job done. For more information about NUKE, visit: http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/ 3:16 Introducing the new NUKE Family 7:52 New Features 24:35 Certified Hardware for 4K realtime playback 30:36 Grant Miller, Ingenuity Engine 52:45 Alex Fry, Compositing & Colour Supervisor 01:11:00 Pricing of NUKE, NUKEX & NUKE STUDIO 01:12:36 HIERO Customers 01:13:32 Production COLLECTIVE update 01:14:07 New to NUKE price 01:15:32 12 month NUKE payment plan 01:17:37 FREE for non-commercial NUKE, NUKEX, NUKE STUDIO 01:25:12 Panel of experts Thank you for joining us in person and online, please keep an eye on the events page: http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/events/
Nuke Yxy Primaries to XYZ
Something that comes up a lot in Colour work is using 3x3 matricies to convert from one RGB colourspace to another RGB space, or more commonly to XYZ space.
Typically these matricies come from a technical document, or from a tool like Nuke's Colorspace node. But sometimes, for whatever reason, you need to convert from some new arbitray space, and working out what that matrix should be is a bit of a pain.
Luckly, Ryan Juckett put up some excellent documentation on how to do it. Previously I'd just filed it under "black art practiced by dudes who use MatLab". By Ryan's walk through was nice and clear.
http://www.ryanjuckett.com/programming/rgb-color-space-conversion
So, I've bolted together a little Nuke node with a callback to automatically take a set of RGB & W Yxy primaries and create a 3x3 matrix to convert from an RGB image with those primaries and whitepoint to XYZ. Or from XYZ back to an RGB image.
I may add a graphical mode at some point, but for now just manually punch the values in.
Just copy grab the script below, and let me know if you find it useful (or if you run into any bugs). PrimariesToXYZ_v001.nk