Iridas announced that Industrial Light & Magic has purchased universal site licenses of FrameCycler Professional 3.5 for its facility in the Letterman Center in San Francisco, Lucasfilm Animation in Singapore and the Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael. Now artists at all three locations will have immediate access to uncompressed frame-based playback for review and analysis of their work on every workstation.
FrameCycler Professional 3.5 uses advanced RAM-buffering for playback, reads and writes virtually all file formats in the industry, and offers powerful playback and image analysis tools for animators, compositors and other artists. FrameCycler Professional also allows users to apply LUTs in combination with Iridas.Look files for calibrated and/or color graded playback. FrameCycler Professional is the only uncompressed playback application to run on the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
"We chose FrameCycler because it's reliable, works across all of our platforms and has a proven track record in the industry," stated Lucasfilm cto Cliff Plumer. "Having a common viewing tool for both digital artists and our production staff greatly improves communication which benefits the entire production process."
"Industrial Light & Magic pioneered modern visual effects," said Lin Kayser, Iridas ceo. "We've been enjoying their work in theaters for years now. It's an honor to be working with them."
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is a Lucasfilm Ltd. company serving the digital needs of the entertainment industry for visual effects. ILM has been awarded 14 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and received 17 Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards. Lucasfilm Ltd. is one of the world's leading film and entertainment companies. Founded by George Lucas in 1971, it is a privately held, fully integrated entertainment company. In addition to its motion picture and television production operations, the company's global activities include Skywalker Sound, serving the digital needs of the entertainment industry for audio post-production; LucasArts, a leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software for videogame console systems and PC; as well as Lucas Licensing, which manages the global merchandising activities for Lucasfilm's entertainment properties. Additionally, Lucas Online creates Internet-based content for Lucasfilm's entertainment properties and businesses. Lucasfilm's motion picture productions include five of the 20 biggest box-office hits of all time and have received 19 Oscars and 53 Academy Award nominations. Lucasfilm's television projects have won 12 Emmy Awards. Lucasfilm Ltd. is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Iridas (www.iridas.com) pioneered desktop film-resolution playback in 2001. Its FrameCycler products are now the industry standard for frame-based image review. In 2003 Iridas introduced the first non-destructive color correction application. Today, SpeedGrade and FrameCycler provide a complete, end-to-end pipeline for uncompressed content and color data. Iridas applications are used by most major animation and post-production houses, including Warner Bros. Feature Animation, Industrial Light & Magic, The Moving Picture Co., ReelFX, Lowry Digital (DTS) and many others. IRIDAS is an independent, privately held company headquartered in Munich, Germany.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
