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Despite The Dark Knight double fisting awards like John Barrymore used to double fist booze, many people still speculated whether it would get any serious respect at the Academy Awards.  While only January 22 will finally settle that debate, Batman's hopes of a date with Oscar had to be boosted with the Producers Guild of America nominations announced on Monday.  Add to that equation the American Society of Cinematographers nominations announced yesterday and the Directors Guild of America nominations announced today and it seems a safe bet that you'll see Nolan in a tux next February.

Advertising agency Famous delivers a memorable New Years wish with 300,000 stop motion animated candles for Belgium based-energy corporation, Electrabel. 

Tech Talk is a blog series featuring revelations from industry professionals about the creative and technical decisions they made to craft their latest productions and why. This week's guest is Nacho Vigalando, the writer, director, and co-star of the Spanish language sci-fi film, Timecrimes, which made a splash at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in limited release in the U.S.

To experience the full digital curmudgeon experience, be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2

RED brags about test charts. "Oh sure, the actually real (as in you can buy it in a store with money) Canon 5D Mark II shoots 1080p video and costs about the same as our theoretical, 3D-rendered, constantly changing low-end Scarlet, but don't try shooting venetian blinds with it. You see that pattern on the test chart? Yeah you don't want that." Like a car salesman questioning your masculinity when you ask to test drive the Prius, in recent days RED has been using the buzz around cameras which are not their own to highlight the ways in which they totally rock. And how their cameras will get you tons of babes.

If you are revulsed, then you're in the right place. Because today we're going to talk about filmmaking solutions so incomparable to RED that using them might qualify as filmmaking for spite. Like anything done for spite, you will start out ashamed and uncomfortable. But you will emerge victorious and avenged. It's a good cause. We have some literature if you're interested. And a mailing list.

 Withdrawal can be an unholy demon (redundance intended for emphasis). Dry heaves, cold sweats, hallucinations of zombie babies: all are appropriate reactions to the aftermath of last week's announcements from RED, heirs to the reality distortion field successfully employed by the likes of Steve Jobs in the past. But in the cold light of morning we are forced to realize one very important fact: not one of the announced cameras (there are 9 of them, by the way) is available now. In fact, some of them won't even be on sale for another 2 years. And as we said before, even if these cameras were just a maxed-out credit card away from your grubby hands, they might not be the right tool for the thrifty filmmaker. So in Part 2 of our series on tools for the budget conscious, we'll be looking at some solutions that at least mimic the most drool-worthy features of those theoretical cameras that exist (for now) only as 3D renders. Not that I have anything against 3D renders: I was crying like a baby within the first 8 minutes of Wall-E.

For a long time, it was thought impossible to produce a Standards Conversion plugin for Final Cut Pro due to various technical challenges; when you drop a clip onto a timeline in FCP it is automatically adjusted to fit the timeline's frame rate. This poses the main technical challenge because any filter will act upon the clip after FCP has had its go of altering its frame rate. This would not be so terrible, but FCP does a really bad job of changing the frame rate - it drops and duplicates frames to make the frame rates match and this looks stuttery. What is worse, is that not only does FCP do this automatic conversion, but that it denies access to the original source media creating another technical barrier.  With the Standards Conversion plug-in from Nattress, conversion from NTSC to PAL and vice-versa is no longer a problem.

When I was at Vassar in the earlier part of this millennium, my film professors loved to tell the story of an early Lumiere brothers screening in 1895. The film at the center of that event, "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat", is remembered to have had such an effect on the audience that people fled the room in fear, worrying that the train approaching in the film would somehow break through the screen and crush them all.

So by now you have probably heard the multitudes and masses beginning to pick apart today announcement of the modular insanity that will be the RED Scarlet and Epic cameras. A company that is fueled by rampant speculation and crazy approaches to classic ideas, RED never ceases to be interesting, and often times mind blowing (28K video...wait, what?).

Premiere Pro CS4 is a major upgrade from CS3, which includes enhanced integration between other CS4 applications, the new automatic text transcription Speech Search function, and a redesigned OnLocation for recording direct to disk and laptop monitoring.

Upgraded Photoshop Support

Our friend Matt Jeppsen over at FreshDV was kind enough to clue us in on some killer coverage of new cameras, work flows and other hot happenings at NAB 2008. Check out their videos from the floor:

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