Time to mark your calendars yet again, good Portland VFX’ers.  The winter meeting is shaping up to be a veritable pixel bonfire!

Bent Image Lab’s go-to colorist Jalal Jemison is teaming with Blackmagic Design to show us the ins and outs of DaVinci Resolve, which has a great track record and, with it’s most recent release, is fast becoming the gold standard for color grading.   We’ll have the Blackmagic team on hand and the full tri-panel Blackmagic Control Surface in front of Jalal.  He’ll load us up with plenty of eye-popping before & afters from Bent’s recent work, and then show us step by step exactly how he gets those images to pop.  Usually his hands are a blur as he dials in the precise color values across the trackballs, but using the miracle of slow motion photography and instant replay, we may actually be able to make sense of what he’s doing!  The tricks up his sleeves that he usually reserves for clients.   Be careful, you just might learn something about the black art of color correction and image sweetening before he’s done.

But that’s not all.  This is a full on double bill and we’re equally excited to also have Hive-FX’s Lead Compositor James Chick presenting.  2012 was a big year for the Hivers and the momentum continues to build, as they pound out amazing work with their AE/Maya/C4D pipeline.  James has especially formidable on-the-box skills when it comes to After Effects, and has been carving a name out for himself as a prolific and gifted filmmaker.  To top it all off, Hive-FX has been building up it’s sister company Pinata Post and offers – yep, you guessed it – a fully functional DaVinci Resolve suite.  And now we’ve come full circle.  As Hannibal from the A-Team once said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Between James and Jalal, this is a can’t miss meeting!

As if that wasn’t enough – J. Bills will also be showing a brief demo of the newly released roto & paint powerhouse Silhouette v5.0.   You thought they’d done about everything there is to do when it came to speeding up labor intensive paint & roto tasks?  v5 brings a gigantic list of new features, including Mocha tracking integration, a warper, and a full suite of stereo conversion tools.  We’ll run through the highlights at the start of the meeting and get everyone up to speed.

Happy to announce that following the meeting, we’ll have a raffle with some big prizes worth $$$ thousands, including a license of DaVinci Resolve, a license of Silhouette v5, as well as a $500 credit from Artbeats Stock Footage, and some great books & door prizes from other sponsors.  Speaking of, special thanks to Autodesk and 3DPDX for covering our winter meeting costs.  Our meetings are always free, but the raffle will help raise some funds to cover costs for our upcoming spring meeting featuring presentations from ILM and LAIKA.  Big plans!

Meeting details – save the date!

Monday February 11th, 2013

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Clinton St. Theater

2522 SE Clinton St.

Hope to see you all there!