"Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) technology is at the core of the partnership, and the alliance seeks to "standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of OpenUSD" into a global collaboration."

"We reached out to colorists from studios such as Warner Bros., Marvel, and more to find out what their color pipelines are like, how they prefer to work, and films and shows inspire them."

(video) Marc Wielage comments, "Noted DP Lawrence Sher has a terrific speech that goes over the relationship between a cinematographer and their colorist, over on the Filmlight website: He has some interesting things to say, and harkens back to the time of film labs and the old Hazeltine color analyzer (which very few people remember)."

"Hollywood Professional Association warns of "dire" impact of strike in open letter that expresses "concern for the survival of the media creation supply chain."

"The cash purchase price represents a premium of 32.1% over the Company’s unaffected closing share price on May 23, 2023, the last full trading day prior to media speculation regarding a potential sale of the Company." The good news: It allows Avid to focus more on their users than their stockholders. The bad news: Digital video editors (and finishers) may not be their primary focus, post-sale. I wish management (and their customers) good luck & fortune in this new iteration of Avid.

Resolve 18.5 is out of beta. Typically, on BMD's forum, they detail the changes from the previous version, in this case, Beta 5. Not so much for the final release. But if you want to see the headline features for this release cycle, click through.

(video) "Davinci Resolve 18.5 is here (as you already know!) and a lot has been spoken about the big mega updates like the auto subtitles and transcription tools but here's some of the smaller, super useful new additionals in a little more details. The new Multimerge is going to be a life saver!"

(video) "Create custom mattes in conjunction with the built-in 'Patch Replacer' OFX to save time and get a cleaner clone effect!"

(video) Like the headline says.

(video) "How to use sidechain and compressor in the Davinci Resolve Fairlight page to properly mix music and SFX in your video or film." (via Rich Rodman)

(video) "With Fusion’s powerful expressions, you can reference a tracked point’s position in any other node."

(video) Colorist Cullen Kelly, "This week's live is covering questions around what color science is good for and its limits."

"Breakdown of an animation technique using Mijourney 5.2 Zoom renders and Adobe After Effects."

(video) "Which is the best desktop based 360 video editing software? In this IN-DEPTH comparison, I’ll compare Adobe Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro & Insta360 Studio, to see which the best options are for both 360 video reframing AND editing 360 videos for VR."

"In our topsy-turvy world, it’s becoming more common to see social media videos shot and delivered entirely in HDR — because it’s on by default. Just like Calibri in Word, the default colours in InDesign and the desktop wallpaper that shipped on your Mac, nobody bothered to change the settings. Revolution through apathy."

(video) Because still photography techniques can be applied to moving images, "Learning how to leverage contrast and all the factors that influence contrast in the frame is crucial. This fantastic video tutorial discusses contrast and a variety of different ways to use it in your images."

"Let’s take a closer look at why and how timecode is created and how it’s used in later post-production activities, to better understand the importance of having a unique identifier per frame."

"Robinson discovered the new owners changed NightOwl’s terms of service: Now, the app automatically adds your computer to a botnet for 'market research.' "

(video) "Colorist CJ Dobson shares her journey from freelancing to owning a boutique Color shop, offering unique solutions for modern post workflows."

"Sony recently disclosed pricing and availability details for its highly anticipated 2023 QD-OLED television, the Bravia XR A95L. It will be offered in 55-inch, 65-inch, and 77-inch models."

"One product line—two different types of panels." Samsung will offer WRGB OLEDs in its 77" and 89" panels. But doing so under the same premium moniker of their QD-OLED series. Confusing. Or, you could just skip the whole thing and buy the Sony QD-OLED - which Samsung manufactures.

"These are [many] applications that would benefit from GPU expansion via PCIe, something the previous generation Mac Pro, powered by Intel’s Xeon CPU, did support. So why doesn’t the new Mac Pro support it? In short, it’s all the M2 Ultra’s fault."

"The AMD Radeon PRO W7600 and W7500 offer solid generational improvements over the W6600 and perform well compared to the NVIDIA RTX A2000 and NVIDIA T1000. In particular, the W7500 offers a compelling, all-around better alternative to the T1000." Click through for more details.

"Puget Systems debuted a custom generative AI and machine learning server at SIGGRAPH 2023. The specialized new AI Training and Inference server is configured with four Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada graphics cards to handle intensive generative AI and machine learning and to manage real-time rendering, graphics, AR/MR/VR/XR, compute and deep learning processing."

"Mood-ring paint, also known as thermochromic paint, will react to temperature just like the rings do. You can use it on any paintable surface to get a nostalgic, heat-activated, color-changing result."

(video) This is neat: "70 years ago, the National Film Board of Canada produced a short film on hand painting SFX onto celluloid film, then compositing them on top of hand-painted animation. Very avant grade." It's also fun. (via Arthur Ditner)