Autodesk Announces Shipping Of Extension 1 For Effects And Editing Systems

Extension 1 for Autodesk’s visual effects and editing and finishing solutions offers improved workflows through various features and additions such as Quicktime support for the Linux platform, enhanced timeline editing, and Autodesk Burn directly within modules.
This release also provides a new core competency in colour calibration with Lustre Colour Management, major improvements to conform, as well as two new effects tools.
Inferno, Flame and Flint will benefit from a series of new tools:

• Lens Distortion: Developed by Autodesk’s Image Science Group, this tool allows artists to achieve or match a cinematographic look by removing, modifying, or adding lens distortion to an image.
• Redesigned Automatic 3D Tracker: Available in Inferno and Flame, the Autodesk Image Science Group’s new 3D tracker provides fast and accurate camera tracking. This feature compliments the existing manual tracker, which can be used when manual flexibility is required. Together these tools allow the artist to convincingly integrate 2D and 3D imagery into existing footage.
• Mute Action Layer Effects: Makes designing effects easier as the artist can choose to view or hide colour correction and keying effects for each layer in Action.
• Rotating Paint Canvas: This feature allows the artist more physical comfort while using the Layer-based Paint module (Linux platform only).
• Lustre Colour Management: Ensures that everyone across the Autodesk Systems products pipeline is working with and approving images with the same colour values. (This feature is not supported in Autodesk Flint.)

Autodesk Fire, Autodesk Smoke & Autodesk Backdraft Conform get major enhancements: Improved conform performance and speed through features such as support for keycode data and transition wipes on imported AAF files, file browser enhancement to accelerate file import tasks, and additional methods for assigning a tape name to clips; Clip history source replacement offers the ability to replace source clips in a history pipeline - artists can quickly rebuild effects as footage gets updated, or build different versions at multiple resolutions; Lustre Colour Management: Ensures that everyone across the Autodesk Systems products pipeline is working with and approving images with the same colour values.
Also Autodesk Toxik 2007 Extension 2 provide new creative tools for film visual effects and enhanced features include:

• Retimer: Based on research completed by Autodesk’s Image Science Group, this feature allows artists to change the speed of a clip, making the action appear faster or slower.
• Grain Management: Developed by Autodesk’s Image Science Group, grain simulation lets artists add and remove grain characteristics to or from live and computer-generated footage.
• GMask Enhancements: Enables artists to add multiple garbage masks for complex rotoscoping tasks. This tool also offers advanced gradient technology from Autodesk Combustion and Autodesk Lustre.
• Blur Tools: Add realistic camera effects such as directional blur and radial blur to a composition. This tool lets artists add depth of field and motion blur to computer-generated footage rendered from Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.
• Publish to Stone: Artists can now automatically soft-import rendered images into Autodesk Flame and Autodesk Smoke.

Also added is Lustre Colour Management ensuring that all Autodesk Systems work with images in the same relative colour space.
(SP)