Siggraph 2008 drew to a close with a bang Thursday night as ILM hosted a screening of its new Star Wars: Clone Wars animated feature at the Nokia Theater following the final run of the Electronic Theater. The screening featured an intro with the film’s director, Dave Filoni, being interviewed by ILM Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor (and co-inventor of Adobe Photoshop), John Knoll, about their Star Wars experiences. At the private ILM party before the screening, millimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman had the chance to have a quick chat with Knoll about his impressions of Siggraph 2008 and what parts of the show interested him the most. Hear their conversation.

LoiLo, today introduced LoiLoScope at Siggraph, their breakthrough video editing software that redefines the video editing experience with speed, sophistication and playfulness never before seen in video editing software. LoiLoScope introduces an entirely new user interface based on an unconstrained, infinitely zoom-able workspace. Their pioneering direct interface with the graphic processing unit (GPU) lets users create and manipulate HD videos freely with one-touch operation and without time-consuming rendering. Read on at The Briefing Room

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SPEC’s Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) announced a wide range of upcoming benchmarks at the Siggraph 2008 conference in Los Angeles.

The new offerings will include a power-performance benchmark for workstations, a new version of SPECviewperf, and new and updated application benchmarks. All are slated for release before spring of next year.

“Under our expanded charter announced last year, we are branching out in new directions such as power consumption, while continuing to move ahead with our graphics and workstation application benchmarks,” says George Chaltas, SPEC/GWPG chair. “The overriding objective is to apply SPEC’s expertise and proven methodologies in areas that provide the most value to users, vendors and testing labs worldwide.” Read on at The Briefing Room

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SPHERON-VR AG has attracted one of the UK’s VFX industry leaders, The Mill London, an Oscar and multi-award winning company with offices in L.A and New York. The Mill selected the innovative SpheroCam HDR.

Jordi Bares, Joint Head of 3D at The Mill, said “The Mill has invested in the SpheroCam HDR to further improve the output of our work by bringing the latest photographic technology to our projects, which will benefit on all aspects of lighting.” Read on at The Briefing Room

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mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools, unveiled RealityServer 2.2, the server-based, highly-scalable 3D web application and services platform available to developers and system integrators. The new version is particularly geared towards providers of 3D web application services, including Software-as-a-Service solutions.

RealityServer software platform was designed from the ground up to be the web application services platform for achieving the highest-quality renderings for large large-model visualization in 3D. It allows users to create and deploy 3D interactive web services and applications across numerous disciplines including aerospace, automotive, architecture, product design, product showcasing and product configuration. Ideal for geographically dispersed collaboration, RealityServer enables real-time viewing and interaction with high image quality across the web without the need for downloads or client side viewer applications. Read on at The Briefing Room

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IRIDAS, the world leader in RAW playback technologies, is drawing crowds to the PNY booth (#747) at Siggraph 2008. Visitors are experiencing first-hand the image fidelity of IRIDAS’ RealTime RAW 2.0 in SpeedGrade and FrameCycler. By leveraging the power of the new graphics cards from NVIDIA by PNY, IRIDAS provides real-time de-Bayering of RAW content allowing filmmakers to review and color correct content at up to 4K resolution straight from the digital cinema camera. Read on at The Briefing Room

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Winners of FJORG!, the second annual “iron-animator” style competition were announced during Siggraph 2008, the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques taking place this week in Los Angeles. Team Grojf was chosen as the FJORG! winner for their animated reel, “The Red Truck”, comprised of Jacob Patrick, John Nguyen, and Kevin Rucker, were chosen from a field of 16, three-member teams that competed for 32 straight hours to create character-driven animations under extreme pressure and multiple staged distractions. Read on at The Briefing Room

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mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools today announced that the latest version of their industry-leading rendering software, mental ray 3.7, is now integrated as part of the recently announced Autodesk Maya 2009 software digital content creation package. The release of Maya 2009 will mark the first availability of mental ray 3.7, which will subsequently be integrated by other key mental images customers.

Many of the new features and improvements in Maya 2009 and mental ray 3.7 are intended to provide considerable speed and memory usage performance gains over previous versions. Read on at The Briefing Room

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Autodesk announced Autodesk Toxik 2009 procedural compositing software. Toxik 2009 offers high-performance compositing and visual effects capabilities, particularly for large-format digital film and television projects. When combined with the new Autodesk Maya 2009 modeling software, the two products provide an accelerated and iterative 3D-to-2D workflow. Both products are being showcased at Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles, California, August 12-14 at Autodesk booth #501. Read on at The Briefing Room

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Sony Electronics is unveiling a new workflow solution for faster processing of high-resolution effects and computer graphics. This new technology platform, named ZEGO, is based on the Cell/B.E. (Cell Broadband Engine) and RSX technologies, and is designed to eliminate bottlenecks that can occur during post production, especially during the creation and rendering of visual effects. Read on at The Briefing Room

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