In four hours you need to be at West Hall Room 503 for the World Wide User Group. Pizza, Kai Pedersen and Rick Barrett giving tips and tricks on 11. A CEO guy from Maxon Germany and one of the four core original programmers of Cinema 4D doing a developer Q&A.

Robert Baker product marketing manager commercial notebooks is here with HP’s new line of Elitebook mobile workstatsions–you might remember the splashy Elite brand launch in Berlin earlier this year. For me, the design does live up to the Elite marketing, but I have very pragmatic, mid-century-modern tastes. The brushed/anodized aluminum aircrafty-design feel that HP has pursued appeals to me, as do little touches like keypad coatings that prevent shiny spots. I like the two-pin locking system, because there’s something classy and solid about not having the cover wiggle around when you close your laptop.

Baker wants me to say that the design comes with “the tangible asset of durability” and supports that statement with a few additional features. So, I’m willing to share his assertion on the chance that my IT department is reading this post. They don’t decide based on my design tastes, but they understand durability, especially after years of watching how we beat the crap out of our laptops. more

I have to wait at the Siggraph Cine-tal booth while some guys from Tippett drill president Rob Carroll about the Cinespace software, etc. Once his real job is done, Carroll turns to me with one of the simpler high level messages you’ll hear at this year’s Siggraph (more than a monitor company).

The Siggraph news for Cine-tal is the acqusition of Cinespace and the integration of the respected Cinespace color-management system with the popular Cine-tal hardware (integrated displays, display processing engines). more

Tomorrow there will be a panel worth getting up early for. At 8:30, room 408 AB at Siggraph, you’ll find that Jeff Lander, Steve Sullivan, Martin Walker, Lyle Hall, and Steve Theodore will already be awake and bringing their combined wisdom to the subject of rapidly evolving pipelines for games production. For those who don’t know these guys, here’s the bio lineup.

-Jeff Lander: Technical Director at Electronic Arts. Runs his own R&D company of his own (Darwin 3D); journalist for Game Developer Magazine.

-Steve Sullivan: Director of R&D at Lucasfilm and two-time Sci-Tech Oscar winner. Charged with unifying ILM film technologies and LucasArts game technologies.

-Martin Walker: CTO of Canada’s A2M. Big game developer

-Lyle Hall: VP and Executive Producer of THQ; oversees THQ subsidiary Heavy Iron Studios. Exec producer on The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Wall.E.

-Steve Theodore: Technical Art Director at Bungie Studios where he designs the content tools for the Halo engine.

If you’re running late, it goes to 10:15.

And here’s the panel description and discussion points c/o the organizer. more

While I was going over the HP new product releases with a trio of product managers, it was mentioned that a small number of people can leave Siggraph with a DreamColor Display for $1999.

There are a very limited number of discount coupons (in the hundreds) available at the HP booth (739). The reference-grade monitor, developed in conjunction with DreamWorks, is already for sale at the disruptive price of $3K.

Tomorrow 2:40 at the Vicon booth (1101), find out what one of Sony’s most prolific motion-capture veterans is doing with his facial capture product FacePro.

Hauck (Beowulf, Monster House, and Polar Express) and partner Steven Ilous (Polar Express) started Digital Concepts Group last year to address motion capture pipeline gaps, looking for ways to simplify various tasks. First up: facial capture. more

What makes a VP of Production happy? This morning, for Brian Rausch of Vicon/House of Moves it was onboard trajectory building. Vicon is here with the new MX T-Series 160 camera system based on their proprietary 16 megapixel 10-bit Avalon sensor (it runs full res at 120fps; it can do 240fps at half res). Quick math says this is a big jump in performance from the 4 megapixel sensors that established Vicon’s business and reputation.

But back to trajectories. In the not-too-distant past, Rausch explains, each frame was an island; trajectory really meant snapshot (which is hardly the true spirit of trajectory). Now onboard trajectory building is additive, and a successful trajectory can be built from a single camera when other cameras lose sight of markers. “We’ll get fewer labeling issues, markers aren’t going to swap as much, the trajectories will persist and markers will remember where they were, not just where they are.” For how long? Ah, who knows? Depends on movement, occlusion, how many actors. “How long will the trajectory will allow us to be part of its life? We don’t know,” Rausch says fondly, even wistfully. However brief or persistant it’s all an improvement on precision and clarity. more

Talking mid-century modern with Chris Bond at the Frantic booth. He wants “big foam couches that look like a giant puzzle” for his period house in Palm Springs. Who wouldn’t?

Back on the work track, Frantic Visual Effects (now part of the Prime Focus conglomerate) was this week awarded the effects on Oliver Stone’s upcoming take on W. The mind reels.

In other news Golden Compass/Tropic Thunder supe Mike Fink is here on day #12 of his employment as Frantic’s senior visual effects supervisor and president of visual effects worldwide. more

Why does a visual effects company sell plug ins? Frantic Films made their reputation with the huge bullet-time shot on Swordfish and their Emmy-nominated work on Storm of the Century. More recently: the VES-nominated Superman Returns and Poseidon, and currently Eric Brevig‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

From the start, says Bond, Frantic was conceived as a collaborative company both internally among their three offices and in their relationships with industry peers. To that end, they wanted to share the fruits of their painstaking R&D.

“A lot of companies keep the stuff proprietary. But for us, there‘s nothing to gain from being closed.” he says. But as it turned out, sharing wasn‘t so easy. At first, Frantic simply gave code from their products away for free. But the purpose-built code didn‘t translate one-to-one into new situations. more

IBM originally envisioned the new HC-10 Workstation Blade as a workstation replacement, say IBM’s Dave Laux and George Dolbier. It‘s a high density server with embedded GPU acceleration. “We found it also worked incredibly well as a headless render node,” Laux says a little wryly. Isn’t interesting when hardware reveals its own mission?

First let’s just say that a workstation blade is an interesting idea for those who can afford the infrastructure. It means that every seat in the house can share a common pool of workstations easily (in theory). more