VFX Industry Influencers to Participate on Panel of Judges; Winner Takes Home $10,000 VFX Tool Kit

GUILDFORD, UK (July 8, 2008) Imagineer Systems (www.imagineersystems.com), creators of next-generation VFX tools, today announced it is extending a challenge to Imagineer Systems customers and the entire VFX, content creation and post production community, to create the next great series of video tutorials for Imagineer Systems VFX tools. Continuing its spirit of listening to, and learning from its customers, the Company is challenging users to create video tutorials that best educate new users of Imagineer VFX solutions on the workflow features of its tools.

The winners will be judged on content, video quality, technical quality of audio and video and instructional clarity and completeness. Additionally, the top winner will receive a comprehensive Imagineer Systems VFX software suite valued at $10,000. Winners will be formally announced by the Company to the industry press, and the winning entry will be highlighted on www.imagineersystems.com.

As part of the contest, Imagineer Systems executives, as well as industry influencers and well-known VFX heavyweights such as Aharon Rabinowitz of Creative Cow and AENY, Chris Meyer of Cybermotion and Mark Christiansen of Pro Video Coalition, will participate on a panel of judges and will help decide on the winning entries.

"We have always been committed to listening to what our customers are saying about Imagineer Systems products, and we take their feedback very seriously," said Allan Jaenicke, chief executive officer of Imagineer Systems. "One of the resounding comments we hear from customers is, 'we want more tutorials.' As we thought about tackling this request, we realized that by challenging the community to share their ideas with us, we could ultimately deliver a series of tutorials with perspectives, tips and advice that are so valuable to users, and at the same time, generate a lot of excitement in the community. We're very excited to see what our users come up with!"

Contest Details

The Imagineer Systems Video Tutorial Contest is open to everyone, and participants must follow these guidelines:

Video Tutorial Topics/Products: Imagineer Systems' mocha, mocha-AE, motor, monet, mokey. Topics may cover motion tracking, rotoscoping, rig removals, stabilzation and can be designed for beginning or advanced users.

Format: Participants should use screen recording software, such as Camtasia or ishowu;

Files: Video files should be compressed for good viewing resolution, e.g., Quicktime H.264;

Deadline: All entries must be submitted to Imagineer Systems by July 31st, 2008

For detailed information on contest rules and technical specs please visit: http://www.imagineersystems.com/company/news/157

Winners will be announced August 15th, 2008.

About Imagineer Systems

Imagineer Systems Ltd innovates and markets next-generation visual effects solutions for film, video and broadcast post production markets. In response to a groundswell desire for a more innovative approach to VFX, Imagineer Systems has developed an entirely new VFX architecture, one that embraces better integration, collaboration, performance and feels like an extension of the creative thought process – mogul. Imagineer Systems has made its mark on such marquis Hollywood blockbuster productions as Casino Royale, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter. Imagineer's product line consists of monet^TM - placement station, mokey^TM - removal station, motor^TM - roto station, mocha^TM - tracking station and mofex^TM - plug-in for Shake. Imagineer Systems was founded in 2000 and its headquarters is located in Guildford, United Kingdom. For more information visit Imagineersystems.com For more information on mogul, please visit www.mogulvfx.com.

Labels: Contest, Imagineer mogul, Imagineer Systems

CE Raum, product designer for Imagineer Systems, demos the first part of company's new VFX architecture mogul, mogul review. At NAB, CE gave me a walk through of the product also. It is really going to change the way people work. Watch the video at Studio Daily.

Labels: Imagineer mogul, NAB, Studio Daily

Here I am at Denver International waiting for my connection and there's free wifi! I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell you about my experience at NAB 2008. I have about 10 minutes until I board, and I'll have to put up the photos later. Enjoy.

Sunday, April 13 - Arriving in Las Vegas

Alicia VanHeulen (fellow Toolfarmer) and I got into Vegas around 6pm and caught a taxi in the organized chaos outside the airport. I hate cabs. Hate em. I always get a weird cab driver who wants to come to my house or has some strange hobby he wants to tell me all about. This time, we got to spend 25 minutes hearing about how to prepare Lake Superior Whitefish.

We checked in at the Sahara, which was chosen souly on the fact that you don't have to walk through a casino to get to the monorail. We had plans to go to the FMC party on Sunday evening with John Kerr from Red Giant. It was $85 to get into the rooftop party at Pure at Caesar's Palace, however, RG was a sponsor, so we told them we were guests of John Kerr and they let us in with no problem. We had to walk through about a mile of corridors and stairways to get up to the roof where they had a small buffet of carved beef, shrimp on skewers and spring rolls, which were completely gone. We did have some refreshingly tasty drinks of vodka, cranberry, sprite, and grapefruit juice. There was a woman whose body was being painted on the patio, some people carrying around gobs of hula hoops, as well a big giveaway, that we didn't enter, unfortunately. We met some really cool people from Hawaii (Hi Shanti). We did finally meet up with John Kerr, Sean Safreed and Jeremy Hill from Red Giant, as well as our good friend Seth Hancock from ICVA and his lovely wife Lisa.

After the party, we headed to Mesa, Bobby Flay's restaurant, with the Red Giant guys and had a nice dinner. By the time we left, it was 3:00am our time, so we were tired, to say the least.

Monday, April 14 - Day one of the convention

7:45am - We took the monorail to the convention center. This was our first day on the convention center floor, and Alicia's first NAB ever. I took her to the doorway and pointed her to the Digieffects booth where she was starting her day, but I couldn't get in to the show floor due to the fact that I never received my badge! I had a printout receipt that I had registered in December. It took a while at registration but somehow they lost my registration. After 45 minutes, I was badged.

I headed over to Red Giant, where I had a presentation on Magic Bullet Looks at 10am. Looks is very easy to demo and lots of fun to use, and I have to say, the presentation went pretty well. I've just learned to get through the spiel within 10 minutes because people were standing and I wasn't giving a tutorial, but an overview. The Looks Theatre sold it for a lot of people. It was really great seeing everyone at the RG booth and meeting the new RG employees. Thanks for the nuts and popcorn, Beth! Delicious.

At 1:00pm each day I demoed Boris Continuum Complete and Boris Final Effects Complete at the Boris FX booth. This booth was on the middle aisle of the show floor in a highly trafficked area. Boris FX had a theatre set up with about 25 seats. It was the Motion Key plug-in for BCC that really seemed to get a lot of attention. I'll be putting together a tutorial for Motion Key in the next few weeks, because it really is an amazingly cool plug-in. It garnered lots of ooh's and aah's as a silver car driving across a busy street scene is removed from the shot with ease. I showed off the BCC UpRez plug-in, which converts SD to HD and uses a nifty feature called Magic Sharpen. I demoed the BCC Pan & Zoom which makes the Ken Burns style effects. I showed a few other BCC plug-ins and Final Effects Complete (FEC). Did you know all FEC plug-ins contain motion trackers and a feature called Pixel Chooser, which is a built-in masking tool? If you would've known that during the presentation, you could have won a Boris hat or training Class on Demand Boris Continuum Complete Training DVD.

Digieffects and Red Giant's booths were directly behind each other in the Plug-in Pavillion, which made things very nice for us. Digieffects was demoing the new Damage, as well as the Simulate and Natural Forces plug-ins for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Combusion and Boris Red, which will be out in 4-6 weeks. We hadn't seen the new plug-ins at all yet, so it was a big difficult to answer questions. We ended up setting up little comps with examples, but then found the best way to demo was by using the little blue button. What is this little blue button? It's the randomizer. Shin Kurokawa, the engineer at Digieffects explained that he put the button in for testing purposes so he could see the range of values for each parameter without having to change all of the sliders each time, and soon realized that it's brilliant for getting ideas and seeing what variety of looks that the plug-in can produce. Tim Kolb, David Vieria and Robert Sharp were also at the booth with us all week. Robert... smart move on the couch rental. You can't go wrong with a big comfy couch, especially after you've been on the show floor all day.

Monday night was the IMUG Media Motion Ball 2008 at the Sahara Hotel, which I've attended the last 4 years. The crowd is generally IMUG and AE-List people. Brian Maffitt of Total Training was the speaker and once again and he was hilarious! Brian is a collector of crazy movie memorabilia and marketing gimmicks from William Castle fims. The presentation was about brilliant marketing campaigns for these movies. Macabre with the tagline 'So Terrifying We Insure You For $1000 against Death By Fright! (Not valid for persons with heart or nervous conditions)'. He showed us an original Tingler (filmed in "Percepto"). The best film of all, The House on Haunted Hill, filmed in "Emergo", in which an inflatable skeleton would pop out over the scene. Well, Brian had one of these inflatable skeletons with him at the dinner! We laughed, we cried, it was better than The Tingler.

Dinner at the Media Motion Ball was delicious as always. It was antipasto, salad and several Italian dishes. The highlight was definitely the dessert. Steve Kahn had arranged a surprise for everyone and that was Bananas (and strawberries) Foster over ice cream. Fabulous. I think overall I gained 5 pounds in Las Vegas, but I probably walked it off.

Alicia and I dined with Mark Spencer, author of Apple Pro Training Series: Motion 3, which I highly recommend. Also at the table was Niclas Bahn of Noise Industries on crutches, Niclas' girlfriend, Peter Wiggins and a few others from Noise Industries. Straight across from me was the guy who looks like Andy Samberg from SNL (who incedently ended up winning a Boris Training DVD during my presentation).

It was great to see everyone again at the MMB - it's kind of like a reunion every year. I get to meet up with Keith and Alan, the Plugged-in Podcast guys, Jim Kanter, who is one of our forum experts, a lot of the plug-in developers and those wild and crazy guys from Anchorage. They had gobs of giveaways, including several donated by Toolfarm. I didn't win anything, but I got to go on stage and draw a few names. The first name I drew was Lisa Hancock, who took home Maxon Cinema 4D. Toolfarm did give away lots of prizes, including several bundles of Professional Video Templates, Harry Frank's Expressions Training and his Trapcode Form Training, and two copies of Digieffects Damage.

We cabbed over to the party with Harry Frank and left the MMB early to go to Peder Norrby's party (Peder Norrby is the man behind Trapcode). Sadly, Ko Maruyama told us that not long after we left the MMB, Harry Frank's name was drawn for the big prize of the night, but since he left, he couldn't claim it. Bummer.

Peder threw yet another swanky party! The suite was very modern and silver and on one of the top floors of the hotel. From the main room you could see in the bathroom through a window and there was even a stripper pole in the shower! Crazy stuff. I have a feeling Paris Hilton had stayed in that very room last weekend. There were lots of people from the plug-in industry in attendance and a DJ spinning some great house music. Peder has a new product coming out called Trapcode Horizon, which helps AE users work in 3D space. He presented it at the Red Giant booth, but unfortunately, I missed his presentations. He wasn't showing anything at the party, just socializing. Horizon will be out near the end of summer, so stay tuned.

Tuesday, April 15

The second day on the show floor was busier than the first. I did another presentation for both Red Giant and Boris FX and each went smoother the second time around. Alicia and I also worked at the Digieffects booth showing the new plug-ins. I caught a couple of great presentations at the Adobe Booth - one about After Effects, presented by Steve Holmes, and one about working with video in Photoshop, presented by Richard Harrington. I use these programs day in and day out and they both managed to show me new things about the software. I took notes during both presentations and both really got the wheels in my head spinning.

I walked around and got a nice demo of GridIron Flow from Jim Geduldick. The GridIron booth was freakin' huge. Andrew Kramer, Aharon Rabinowitz and Mark Coleran were also hanging around the booth, demoing the GridIron goods. They were also giving away cool GridIron yo-yo's. You know the first yo-yo's were used as weapons? I learned that one from a tv commercial.

Pete from RE:Vision Effects gave us a nice demo on DE:Noise and Shade/Shape, and we also spent a some time with Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy, as he walked us through ToonIt and some of their other offerings.

I also sat in on an awesome presentation by Harry Frank at the Red Giant booth. He showed off some cool projects that he did using Trapcode Form and Trapcode Particular. He broke down his technique into little bit-sized pieces. It was really amazing work. Harry is just so darn talented.

Colin and Jason Sharp from Toolfarm flew in Tuesday and the Toolfarm crew went to a fabulous dinner at B&B, Mario Batali's place. I tried the most amazing octopus appetizer, and had sweet potato ravioli with sage butter, as well as squab with beet risotto. Did I mentioned I think I gained weight? :-) Afterward we met up with some friends from Boris FX/Channel Wolves and walked a bit around the Venetian.

Wednesday, April 16

Another day on the show floor and boy, are my dogs tired! More presentations for Red Giant, Digieffects and Boris FX. By this time, I'm pretty good with the presentations. Also, this is Alicia's birthday. Happy Birthday! What did Alicia do on her birthday? Presented Magic Bullet Frames at Red Giant's booth. Now how many people get to do that on their birthday!? Haha. I also met Bert Kish at the RG booth. Bert was the winner of the MyToolfarm Red Giant NAB contest. He presented his winning video and also showed what went into the project.

On Wednesday night I ended up going out with Boris and his crew. We ate at an Italian place in the Venetian. I ate some really interesting pear ravioli with a bechemel sauce and some asparagus. Yummo. I just love the guys from Boris. They are all such nice guys. The food was fantastic as well.

Thursday, April 17

It's the last day of the show, so we got up nice and early and met Kevin Bourke who handles PR for the likes of Automatic Duck and Imagineer Systems for breakfast at the EGO Cafe, right outside the convention center. He told me about Imagineer mogul so as soon as I got into the show I went in to check it out. It was a private screening room and the presentation was given by CE and Alan Jaenicke of Imagineer. I am not entirely sure what information they'd like to be shared about this product, but I can tell you it's a subscription based product that includes software and hardware and is something that is in dire need. This product is going to be massive. Huge.

I also stopped by to see the GenArts booth and talked with Anish and Laurie. Lastly, we sat in on a private demo of Nuke at The Foundry's booth. It's awesome. I want it. We did get some free training DVDs on Nuke and we can download the demo. Too bad I am not doing any work that requires such a splendid piece of software. I didn't have much time to see anything else because we had to get to the airport.

What I learned at NAB 2008

I've learned a few tricks over the past few years at NAB that I think are worth sharing.

1. Avoid cabs if at all possible, unless you're looking for Lake Superior whitefish recipes and restaurant recommendations for Beverly Hills. Trust me. So, you ask, if you're avoiding cabs, how do you get around? There is a shuttle that goes between the convention center and the aiport that is free. That will save you $25 right there.
2. There is also a monorail. We bought monorail passes before the show and had them mailed to us. It was cheaper to buy 3 single day passes than it was to buy a three day pass. Weird. Now here's a great from Alicia. If you have single day passes, they are good for 24 hours. To maximize your usage, get to the station a few minutes earlier each day. If you use your card for the first time at 8:26am on Monday, you can use it at 8:23am the next day. You can start your next single day pass on the way back.
3. When registering for your NAB pass, it doesn't hurt to register twice! NAB will hate me for saying so, but I would have saved myself 45 minutes at registration on Monday morning if I would have registered again when I didn't receive my badge by mail.
4. Wear comfortable shoes and bring bandaids. Sunglasses are also mandatory, as well as a little bottle of vitamin E to rub on chapped hands and lips. The desert is incredibly dry and flying doesn't help matters.
5. Keep a pen with you to make notes on the back of people's business cards. This will help you keep them straight when you get back.
6. Free wifi is a bit hard to come by in Las Vegas. If they can make money off of something in Vegas, they will. One place you can get free wifi, or even check your email at one of their computers, is the Sprint Center at the monorail station at the convention center. Las Vegas' McCarran Airport (and Denver Airport which we flew through) also has free wifi. I love free wifi, but I'm Dutch, so I like anything free. :-)

Time to recover. A massage sounds really good right now.

Labels: Boris, Continuum Complete, Damage, DE:Noise, DigiEffects, Imagineer mogul, Imagineer Systems, NAB, Particular, Red Giant, Total Training, Trapcode, Trapcode Form, Trapcode Horizon

Highly Anticipated mogul Debuts at NAB Press Conference; mocha-AE Debuts in Adobe's Booth; mocha Now Exports to Nuke 5

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - April 7, 2008) - Imagineer Systems (www.imagineersystems.com), creators of next-generation VFX tools, will leverage its presence at NAB 2008 in Las Vegas (April 14 - 17, 2008) to showcase the culmination of a number of strategic initiatives aimed at the visual effects software industry, including the launch of major new collaborative VFX architecture. Imagineer Systems will also highlight a number of initiatives designed to support its customers and partners, including a strategic relationship with The Foundry, and demonstrations of mocha-AE in the Adobe booth #SL3220, signalling a new level of collaboration with the creators of Adobe After Effects.

The following summarizes Imagineer Systems' activities throughout NAB 2008:

mogul Press Conference
When: Monday, April 14 2008 at 12:30 p.m.
Where: Imagineer Systems Booth #SL12405
Who: Imagineer Systems' CEO, Allan Jaenicke
Why: The press, analyst and influencer community are invited to join Imagineer Systems as Mr. Jaenicke unveils the Company's newest initiative in the VFX industry; mogul, an entirely new and open, collaborative VFX architecture. Following a brief presentation from management, a mogul demonstration and Q&A session will follow.

Private briefings for customers and partners are also available and can be arranged in advance by visiting www.mogulvfx.com.

mocha-AE in the Adobe Booth

mocha-AE, Imagineer's powerful planar tracking tool designed for Adobe After Effects artists, will be available for demonstration in Adobe's booth #SL3220. mocha-AE is a stand alone 2D tracking tool for the After Effects community based on Imagineer Systems' unique 2.5D Planar Tracking technology.

The Foundry

Imagineer Systems is also announcing it has teamed up with another leader in the VFX software development marketplace, The Foundry UK (www.thefoundry.co.uk), to provide visual effects artists with a streamlined, efficient solution to move planar tracking data between two of the industry's most powerful tools -- Imagineer Systems' mocha and recently-announced Nuke 5 from The Foundry. The two companies have also entered into a marketing partnership agreement, in which The Foundry will offer a specially priced bundled version of Nuke 5 with mocha. Executives from Imagineer Systems will be on hand at NAB to demonstrate the benefits of this new agreement.

About Imagineer Systems

Imagineer Systems Ltd innovates and markets next-generation visual effects solutions for film, video and broadcast post production and have made their mark on such marquis Hollywood blockbuster productions as Casino Royale, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter. Imagineer's product line consists of monet^TM -- placement station, mokey^TM -- removal station, motor^TM -- roto station, mocha^TM -- tracking station and mofex^TM -- plug-in for Shake. Imagineer Systems was founded in 2000 and its headquarters is located in Guildford, United Kingdom. For more information visit www.imagineersystems.com

Labels: Imagineer mogul, Imagineer Systems, Mocha AE, NAB, Nuke, The Foundry