September 28, 2006 --
Order it online or stop by this weekend's Fangoria Weekend of Horrors
and buy it at the Light & Dark Productions table.
Fear of the Dark will be available in wide release on October 3rd.
We will also have the latest Brain Damage Films and Pendulum Pictures
horror movie titles available at our table.
Be sure to check out Eugene Driscoll's coverage of Fangoria's Weekend of
Horrors on News Times Live's web site.
September 25, 2006 -- Two inmates from HBO'S "Oz" have escaped and
formed a band together! On September 30th, this Saturday night under the
aliases Sal Sirchia "The Mayor Of Rock and Roll" and Tatoo Mike, they will
be performing all the classic rock and roll songs from the days of Old. Rock
with them and have a few drinks!
Show Time 11pm at Austin's Steak & Ale House.
8270 Austin St
Jamaica, NY 11415-1413
(718) 849-3939
September 24, 2006 --
Visit us at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors next
weekend, 9/29 to 10/1, at the Crowne Plaza Meadowlands in Secaucus, New
Jersey.
Meet cast members from Fear of the Dark and
The Tenement including Michael Gingold (Managing editor of Fangoria
Magazine) and Mike Lane (King of Fighters 2006 videogame and cartoon).
Get your picture taken with the Joe Lauria, the Black Rose Killer!
The 5th Anniversary Special Edition of Fear of the
Dark (distributed by Brain Damage Films) goes on sale. This all new
director's cut is chock full of extras. Be the first on your street to
have it before it comes out on 10/3! Forget about buying X-Men: Last
Stand. Stand tall and support a true independent movie.
And, it that's not enough to get your blood pumping
then pick up the new hard cover limited edition book, The Anatomy of
Horror. Go behind the scenes with Light & Dark and award winning
special makeup effects artist, Brian Spears, as they dissect a number of
Light & Dark's horror movie scenes.
Brian will have the latest and greatest horror props
on-hand including full-body skeletons at the Light & Dark Productions
table.
Be sure to swing by the Media Blasters table and pick
up Shadow: Dead Riot the Unrated Edition featuring zombies and
makeup effects by Gerner and Spears Effects and written by Michael "the
Tenement" Gingold.
We will also be representing Brain Damage Films and
have their latest titles on-hand at the Light & Dark table.
So stop on by and check us out at the Fangoria
Weekend of Horrors. And remember, the convention starts at noon on
Friday.
September 22, 2006 --
After Effects Goes Nuclear with GridIron
Software’s Nucleo Pro
By Glen Baisley
Anyone who has ever worked
with an editing suite and rendered effects shares one major gripe. More
down time is spent waiting for renders to complete. Render times can
effectively cripple your work flow if you don’t happen to have another
system to work on. Now with GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro for After
Effects 7.0 the wait times just got better.
Nucleo Pro, for the
Mac or PC, introduces the concept of rendering and working at the same time
in Adobe After Effects 7.0 Standard or Professional - while still maximizing
your computers performance. It is designed to work with a multi-processor
or multi-core processor (e.g. Dual-Core AMD Opteron™, AMD Athlon™ 64 X2
Dual-Core processor, Intel® Pentium® D processor 840/830/820, Intel®
Pentium® processor Extreme Edition, Mac dual G4, or Mac dual or quad G5) and
requires 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended).
The system that it was
tested on was a Pentium 4 3 GHz Hyper-threading processor with 2 GB of RAM.
While you can set render queues for Nucleo Pro just as you can in
After Effects, the real advantage comes with its more advanced features.
First off, the aforementioned render queue runs in the background. Second,
Nucleo Pro introduces two of the greatest features yet. It has the
ability to render while you work with Spec Preview and Spec Render. These
features detect changes made while you work and update the frames as the
render continues. Considering the system that the software was tested on
was 3 years old (really old by market standards), the render time was
surprisingly fast and my work flow wasn’t really interrupted much at all.
The more sophisticated the edit was, the slower my computer started to run
though. Again, I chalk this up to it not being the latest and greatest in
computer technology that Nucleo Pro was running on. If you have a
faster system you’ll certain see a far better return on your render times.
I put the software to a
final test and decided not to touch it at all while it rendered from a
queue. The results were comparable and in some cases marginally faster than
After Effects’ built in render engine. I’m not sure if GridIron uses their
own render engine separate from After Effects but the results were pleasing
nonetheless leaving the user with no worries about Nucleo Pro’s
rendering being inferior.
Priced at $495, Nucleo
Pro is a must have for any After Effects user. It’s easy to use with
enough choices for ways to render and output that it will easily accommodate
most systems. Here’s hoping that GridIron comes out with a version for
Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro.
September 17, 2006 -- Preorder your copy now of the all new
Fear of the Dark Special Edition DVD
featured in the Video Chopping List of the September issue of
Fangoria magazine .
600 DVDs have already been preordered. See the movie that B-independent.com
calls "pure story-driven horror encased in the confines of raging insanity."
Or, join us at the Fangoria Weekend of
Horrors from September 29th to October 1st and get your copy before
it comes out on October 3rd. Be the first on your street to smash away
with the infamous gerbil smashing scene and other gloriously gory moments!
September 2, 2006 --
Shedding Some Light on Knoll Light Factory Pro
and Editors 2.5
By Glen Baisley
Knoll Light Factory Pro
2.5 and Knoll Light Factory Editors 2.5 are the latest products
to come out from Red Giant Software featuring new host support for many
popular applications. And, for the first time ever, they offer a 90 minute
companion 2 DVD set called Knoll Light Factory Pro & Editors Training
available separately for $79. The second DVD includes the training movies
in the form of high-res Quicktime files that can be copied to your hard
drive. I found this to be the best method of training especially if you
have a dual monitor configuration. I watched the movies as I played along
in Adobe After Effects. While the training is all performed on the Mac
edition of After Effects, it was similar enough to my PC version that I was
able to keep up with ease.
The Editors version
is available for Apple Final Cut Pro 4.5 (or later), Apple Motion 2.0, Adobe
Premiere Pro 1.5 (or later), Avid Media Composer and Avid Xpress (both AVX
1.5 plugin support), and Avid Xpress Pro 5.2 (or later). It retails for
$179.
The Pro version works
on all of the above including Adobe After Effects 6.0 (or later), Discreet
Combustion 3.0 (or later), and Digital Fusion 5.0 (or later). It retails
for as low as $349.
Both Pro and
Editors come with 70 preset lens flares. One of the main differences
between them is that Pro comes with an advanced flare. You can
effectively create whole new lens flares by customizing the packaged presets
and picking and choosing from 19 different effect elements. The editor
allows for numerous adjustments to be made to each effect element. There is
a workaround with Editors in that you can layer multiple flares one
on top of the other on your timeline. This is not nearly as efficient as it
is using the flare editor and does not allow the degree of fine tuning that
the Pro edition offers. Editors seems to be really targeted
at the user that does not have After Effects or simply wants to drop in a
flare with little or no adjustments.
Light Factory Spectacular is
another welcome addition to the Pro version. It can be used to track
an unlimited number of points. This is a great way to add shimmering
particle effects to your work. A number of examples and walkthroughs are
shown on the training DVD.
Just like Red Giant
Software’s recent upgrade to their Magic Bullet products, the Knoll Light
Factory products now take advantage of newer graphic cards by using their
onboard GPU. Higher end cards like the ATI 1900 XT or nVidia 7900 GTX are
capable of playing back effects in real time at 30 frames per second or
more.
Knoll Light Factory Pro
2.5 and Knoll Light Factory Editors 2.5’s lens flare effects
make a bigger impact over the standard flares found in After Effects and
most host applications. While the Pro version is more robust and the best
choice, it’s nice to see that Red Giant Software is not overlooking support
for editing software. And, Knoll Light Factory Pro & Editors Training
DVD will add a twinkle to your eye and get you up and running in no time.
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