A lot of focus this year at Siggraph has been on stereoscopic 3D and its emergence as a new language of filmmaking. If 3D is a new way of making movies, then the vast visual effects team that worked on Speed Racer discovered a reinvention of 2D filmmaking.

Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta calls the style pioneered on Speed Racer many things. Among them: “virtual cinematography,” “photo-anime,” and “2 1/2 D” layering. When he and Dan Glass first started working on the project, it was a liberating experience to force themselves to let go of the need for any kind of photorealistic element. This quality is something ingrained into any visual-effects artist worth his salt from the get go. Letting go of that instinct is like asking a cat to ignore a mouse. more

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

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

“Live-action 3D is the future/Teach it well and let it lead the way,” Whitney Houston once sang, I believe. Oops, wrong bad joke. The big joke among people who make 3D stereoscopic films is that it is way more work than making a regular 2D film because you have to make the same film twice.

This summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was shot in stereo with dual Sony HDC-950 HD cameras mounted on Pace Technologies‘ 3D HD rigs. The movie’s Visual-Effects Supervisor Christopher Townsend was on hand to explain that there is no cheating space when you’re filming live-action 3D. You can’t use any of the solutions normally associated with 2D movies, such as flat matte paintings for backgrounds, 2D compositing, or any 2D cueing traicks at all. Journey to the Center of the Earth is the directorial debut of longtime visual-effects supervisor Eric Brevig and the movie was the first ever full-length stereoscopic motion picture shot in HD to be released in digital 3D. more

Founded in Austin in 1998, BOXX Technologies is using this Siggraph to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a number of prize contests, giveaways, and special edition hot-rodded workstations, to name just some of the reasons why the booth seems to have a sense of excitement.

The company holds a special place in the hearts and minds of those creatives who spend their days in the trenches creating the effects seen in many top feature films and television commercials, says Francois Wolf, director of marketing at BOXX. “A lot of companies have fallen off the cliff,” says Wolf. “We haven’t, because we don’t try to offer everything, but choose to do a few things very well.” more

SupaCam, which is backed in part by Panasonic, is selling their popular DVi handheld, tapeless, digital movie recorder for only $328 over at their booth (booth #853)-about $500 less than you would pay at B&H or other resellers. Up for grabs are black, white, and silver models.

The camera, about the size of your hand, does 24 bit color at 30 fps at 720 x 480, both NTSC and PAL, in MPG 4 or dvx formats. It can also serve as a webcam, with a 25 ft. remote and 180 degree motion sensor triggered when activity occurs within it’s optic range–and can stream online in HD quality. For digital photographers, 12 megapixels.

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers. more

Pixellexis is gearing up for a new speedy rendering engine called Red Box. Aiming to launch the new processing solution by the end of the year, Pixellexis is clustering 16 or 32 floating point parallel processors to provide up to 8GB of raw I/O bandwidth–which they claim will significantly help rendering times for digital video and 2D or 3D imaging projects.

They’re currently setting up a few beta testers in the 2D broadcast market, which will help define the range of plug-in compatability. Pixellexis Prez Stefany Allaire says the Red Box will not only find a place in the 2D and 3D markets, but also in the HD realm–on digital cinema projects up to 4K. The high-end on just how many processing cores they’re going to build in their premium product is also yet to be determined–market, you will decide.

The Canadian-based company is still configuring what the first, basic offering will be (or be priced at) but any medium- to large-scale HD postproduction facility or animation studio should definitely stay tuned.