JJ Chalupnik • Artist Portfolio: NAB 2012! Pictures and Info!

Ok, so I don't have a ton of info, but I will mention what I did get to see while I was there for Monday/Tuesday. One of my biggest regrets while I was there was not seeing the Andrew Kramer "Demo" on Tuesday. I missed it by a few minutes... :( Anyway, I did get to see a lot of great stuff. Including After Effects CS6 and what it will do for the next iteration of users. AE CS6 now offers an onboard 3D tracker for less complex 3D solves. The demo they showed worked almost flawlessly out of the box, and as I'm certain that other more robust trackers are better suited for complex moves, this addition is much needed and I for one am very grateful. AE also now has an option to use a Ray Tracing Renderer to add additional controls to things like text in 3D. You can now extrude objects (text specifically) and possibly other flat objects that are using the AE 3D. So this will save some time in dealing with plugins like the invigorator, etc... And last but not least, CS6 AE comes with a global cache system, which if you aren't aware, is a much loved addition and something that users have wanted in AE performance for a long time. Basically what this new feature does, is allow each layer to be rendered independently in RAM preview. It keeps the other layers render data stored in a cache on the disk, effectively giving you MUCH less overhead when you render. Now it only needs to render each layer you tamper with, while the others remain untouched. This will hopefully provide some huge time saving opportunities when building complex comps. Here are a bunch pics!

The entrance! Full of bustling photo geeks and sales people! Booths, Booths, and more Booths!

One of my regrets ^^^^ above. I didn't get to spend much time at the Foundry booth. I wanted to learn much more about their software like Nuke.

Autodesk had a big showing of course. They made a lot of announcements for Smoke. Looked like a lot of interesting developments, coming out of it, but I was more interested in the new features of Maya 2013. In the above image you can see a new feature for Maya at work. A camera-less motion capture system that links up and retargets on custom character rigs in realtime. She can animate that character on the screen, in realtime, by simply walking around the stage. No cameras necessary the suit communicates via wifi. Really awesome stuff!

Black Magic had a very interesting booth. It not only had all its really cool DaVinci Software/Hardware, but also a brand new camera that shoots RAW 13 stop 2.5k Video. It is a very sleek looking camera, with a fairly simple interface. It uses a CMOS sensor so there is some notable Rolling Shutter but significantly less than the 5D Mark II or the 7D. It is a pretty nice looking camera. They had 3 on display for people to try out, including a mock set built for the occasion.

Giovanni Ribisi was at the RED booth promoting the short film LOOM, directed by Ridley Scott's son, Luke. LOOM was a Stereoscopic 3D film created with 2 simultaneous 2k progressive images instead of interlaced. I believe that it was shot on 2 RED EPICs, but please leave me a comment and let me know if I am wrong.