With this first (and destined not to be the last) tech highlights overview, VirtualInnovations asked some technically savvy types from various areas of the industry to make their calls on the significant production technology moments from last year and to forecast the major issues of 1999 and beyond.

We sought opinion from an assortment of post/effects professionals on which facets of the vast technical arena made an impact: which products stood out (for better or worse), how the processes changed, what projects mattered and why.

Participants were also asked to provide their thoughts on what the near future of production technology holds – how the products, platforms and processes will continue to change and what it will mean to their own businesses and the industry.

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One of the best products to be implemented into Spin this year was Maya from Alias|Wavefront. This new 3D animation package provides a perfect character animation module that complements our very strong suite of Houdini Software. We found Maya to be extremely stable as a new release package and its functionality has helped us to streamline our production process in computer animation.

AfterEffects has to be one of the best products on the market to date, and it keeps improving with every release. This product has proven to be a significant design tool in both the Toronto and Atlanta offices of Spin. I anticipate that it will be increasingly more important to our way of working for the future.

Unfortunately, Jazz Media Network will not be making its presence known to the production industry unless a buyer for the software emerges.

Jazz offered a great gui for interactive transmission of video over high-bandwidth fiber lines. We wait!

Design and creativity has always been a leading strong point for Spin, with Steven Lewis at the creative lead. However, in ’98, we decided to launch to ’99 with an extensive new design team. We have added Craig Small and Stephanie Dudley to support Kathi Prosser in our graphic design division.

Spin has developed a unique strategic way of working. We design on a number of smaller compositing machines in a distributed network. This development allows us more time to explore our design options before heading up to the more powerful machines such as Henry and Inferno where we finish the production.

In 1998, we celebrated the first anniversary of our Spin Atlanta offices with our Atlanta partner, Keith Adams. We finished our first production year ahead of projections and have developed a client list such as The Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola usa, mci, J. Walter Thompson, and cnnsi.

Spin Toronto is also servicing a larger base of American clients, often driven north to take advantage of the u.s. dollar. Upon completion, they discover that the money saving was clearly made worthwhile by our strong production values and very service-oriented crew.

A project that Spin produced with Omaha Pictures’ Peter Goldschmidt and Third Floor’s Richard Unruh proved to be quite a revelation for me.

We were researching stock footage for international scenes required for the visual sequences in the MCI/Worldcom merger announcement last summer. Discovering that the live-action footage provided didn’t suit our creative or technical needs, we turned to stock stills photography.

I was skeptical about using stills at first, but as we planned to matte live-action sequences of actors into the photographic plates, I felt it was worth a go.

The discovery was that when using six-by-seven-centimeter or four-by-five-inch transparencies, there was an acute refinement from the image that actually felt like it was a locked-off motion picture shot, especially when we added film grain that matched the footage around these plates.

In contrast, transparencies shot on 35mm just didn’t have the leverage or resolution to hold up in the same way. By adding techniques such as Image Based Rendering, we could actually add parallax and depth to these shots as well, through limited camera movement.

The launch of the new sgi nt machines will certainly make this year very exciting. Hardware wars are sure to emerge, and I expect that in the graphics world, Intergraph and sgi will go head to head. Not to mention that many of the other computer manufacturers are producing very strongly contending machines. nt’s tools to aid integration with unix will help soften the transition to nt and allow for more integration with hybrid networks.

As in the past, we will still need the right formula for skilled talent.

The ideal artist has a strong technical bent that doesn’t impede their creativity and the ideal technician has a comfort working with their creative side. There will be a greater ratio of artists to technicians, but one area of growth for Spin is introducing more computer programming and technical direction.

Just as desktop computers gain speed and are capable of handling video production rather matter of factly, hdtv will emerge with its larger file sizes. This will cause a demand for even more computing horsepower, and on the creative side, due to the extreme quality of resolution, production challenges due to the high resolution (unforgiving) will emerge. Spin looks forward to meeting this challenge, we are hdtv ready and waiting.

Norm Stangl is president/executive producer at Spin Productions, Toronto.