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The first lot of photos from my school reunion are up thanks to Emily Cox…and another set from Liz Gosme! Surely that’s not me pretending to be drunk with Mick?!

The class of 1996.

It’s World Environment Day! Time to examine how big your environmental footprint is.

I got up extra early this morning to spend some time blogging as I’ve had to leave it on the back burner for the last couple of weeks but I’ve just had to spend the last 30 mins deleting spam comments. Literally hundreds of them. I’ve enabled registration for comments, something which I wanted to avoid but it seems like the only solution. Thank god for Wordpress “Mass Edit Mode”.

Scott Kirsner links to a Wall Street Journal video interview with Barry Sonnenfeld talking about digital intermediate, digital projection, digital distribution and digital cinema.

DCinemaToday: “Doremi Cinema has been selected by Deluxe Digital Cinema, Capital FX and EFILM London to provide its DMS-2000 DCI 1.0 JPEG2000 mastering station for encoding movies in 2K and 4K formats. The purchase also includes two Doremi DCP-2000 DCI JPEG2000 digital cinema servers”. I’ve been so busy I totally missed this press release. The Doremi server is in the building and hopefully I shall be able to play with it very soon.

Scott Kirsner: “My working thesis about the visual effects business is that, despite the growing number of big-budget movies relying on computer-generated imagery, the ability of “blue chip” visual effects firms (such as ILM, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Digital Domain, and Rhythm + Hues) to command premium prices will drop”.

Screen Digest: “On the back of the Hollywood studios releasing their technical specification for d-cinema in June 2005, there was explosive growth in the number of d-cinema screens globally during the second half of last year, with numbers doubling in a six month period”. Their report is pretty pricey at $2475 for print and get this, $4950 for an electronic copy.

Great superb article in CNNMoney about John Lasseter: “We have this precious entity that is Pixar. It’s like a living organism, like we had found out a way to grow life on a planet that had never supported it before. We wondered if a deal like this would ruin it all”.

Hollywood Reporter: “George Lucas has Industrial Light + Magic, Peter Jackson has Weta, and now Michael Bay has Digital Domain”.

The BBC is in Second Life: “The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties”.

Skype has announced free landline and mobile calls for people calling within the US and Canada. I wonder what this means for the net neutrality issue. Surely the big telcos aren’t going to like this. Will they start sniffing for VOIP packets? We shall have to wait and see.

Steve Garfield has an amuzingly geeky picture of himself inside second life, inside real life. Far out.

Mark Nelson: “Sony has caved in to the dominance of the iPod and started supporting AAC”.

CNNMoney: “Silicon Graphics Inc., a struggling maker of high-performance business computers, Monday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a round of restructuring measures failed, sending its shares plunging”.

Paul Kedrosky: “The PC companies nuked DEC and the minicomputer companies, and then Sun blew up SGI (sort of), and now Google is giving Microsoft fits. It’s very rare, however, that one of those incumbents successfully fights back, making Schwartz’s job at Sun look tough, and making the Microsoft’s struggles with Google all the more painful”.

The press release from SGI.

NewYorkTimes: “Warner Brothers plans to announce today that it will make hundreds of movies and television shows available for purchase over the Internet using BitTorrent software”.

The Warner Bros Bit Torrent news makes the top of Techmeme.

Computer Graphics World: “TruePlay works online to allow multiple participants to join the same 3D space. It can also be used in conjunction with trueSpace7, Caligari’s flagship real-time collaborative 3D authoring technology, to allow participants to not only view and share information, but also to create, manipulate, and edit 3D objects in real-time within the shared virtual workspace”.

If the current trend with massively parallel multiplayer online games such as Second Life, Entropia and World of War Craft continues then being able to collaborate in 3D space over the internet is going to be huge. Currently in these virtual worlds it is the programmers that rule, and often make all the money. Imagine what will happen when VFX artists start venturing in there. I’m sure there is lots of money to be made.

Adam Curry is looking for “animators, scripters and people involved in machinima” to work with him on making some cool stuff for second life. Sounds like its for money too. I heard this on Thursday’s DSC while on my way out to the final day of my Redhat course in Guilford (after I’d written the previous two paragraphs..funny how things go). Sounds interesting to me. I can think of quite a few great people who might be interested.

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.

Steve Gibby interviews Jim Jannard founder and chairman of Oakley and RED Digital Cinema about their new digital video camera called simply RED. The camera has been hotly anticipated. It can shoot at 2540p, 4K, 2K, 1080p and 720p.

Mike Curtis gives his thoughts on why this camera exists.

So if you can have a completely digital pipeline from capture to display what’s going to happen to digital intermediate companies? Are they going to have to some up with a new name for what they do?

This evening I’ll be at the CFX Short Film Awards. Looking forward to it.

Bre Pettis is officially a Rocketboom correspondant. Bre used to work for the Creature Shop here in London way before I did but we ended up meeting by chance over the interweb after the Shop closed down. When he came to London with his lovely girlfriend we met up with Kosso and Joe Twist whom I had by chance met previously. Bre is such an awesome guy and is one of the best video bloggers out there. I’m really happy for him!

Mark Nelson: “The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging”.

Mark is worried about people developing things around standards such as JPEG-2000. I don’t know enough about what he’s talking about but something to keep an eye on considering the DCI adoption of the format as its standard.

Lots of interesting digital cinema things happening at NAB. I’d love to be posting about them but I’m just too busy at work. Great coverage over at Digital Cinema Matters. Also daily podcasts from fxguide.

fxguide have anounced their fxphd beta, a sort of online university specifically geared towards the visual effects industry. After registration you become a post grad and attend 3 courses a term of which there are 4 a year. There is a background fundamentals which is compulsory and then you can choose from many courses covering a wide variety of subjects: Toxic, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Avid Express etc. You receive one 30 mins training video per week for each course.

“As you work through the video your professor is online to answer questions and guide you. There are practical files to download from real shots and projects- you can then compare your results with the final.
AND running along side fxphd is Creative Jobs Network recuitment - as you develop your reel and portfolio you have direct access to senior post recuiters the world over.”

Another interesting thing about it is that they are distributing the course material using Bit Torrent. It’s great to see some legal uses for this great technology and even better to see people actually trying to make money with it. Another Next Step for Bit Torrent. Class enrollement beguins 1st of May. It may be time to get a new pencil case.

One thing I note is that there do not seem to be any courses covering the more technical/engineering aspects of the industry. The sort of infrastructures that are required to support all the fabulous work that digial artists do are specialist and highly complex. Workflows and their implementation within a company and the management of enormous quantities of data are all very important aspects of the VFX world. It can be hard to find good people with the right skills for these roles.

Digitaler Film has an interesting flash movie thingy of how digital distribution works. It’s in German so no real clue as to what the guy is saying but liking the demo anyway. Here is his site through Google translate.

Avid anounce Avid Interplay: “The world’s first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size”. It looks seriously cool. The real question is how well it integrates with 3rd party software. If you end up getting locked into Avid products it wouldn’t be so good.

The “Curry Club” UK podcasters meet up on Sunday afternoon at the Bricklayers Arms was lots of fun. It was a pretty packed turn out. Photos have been posted here, here and here. Shout out to Dereck of Sundream Radio, Mini Paul, Kosso and Doctoe of the Blugcast. I also talked to the editors of the new Podcast User Magazine, which touts itseft as “the worlds first magazine dedicated to news, reviews and how-to’s - from newbies to gurus - online and in your hand”. Its available every month as a free pdf download and guess what: you can subscribe to it using RSS. You’d be crazy not to.

BBC News: “BBC executives believe that in the new digital, on-demand world, in which people consume news, sport and entertainment on computers and mobile phones as well as through radio and TV, Grandstand is associated with the past rather than the future”.

It’s a sad day. I’ll be humming the theme tune all day today and remembering all those lazy Sundays I spent watching Grandstand as a student when I really ought to have been studying.

CinemaTech reports on Amazon turning to the world of digital mastering for the masses. They do any format you require and then help you sell it.

Hey it’s Saint Mark’s day today! Cool.