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Digital
Media FX News Archives
Thursday
- October 25, 2001
- Disney Begins Dismantling
The Secret Lab
- Snow White DVD
Playback Problems
- The Iron Giant Special Edition
DVD a Year Away
- News Link of the Day
- Waking Life: Dream On
Disney
Begins Dismantling The Secret Lab
(by digitalmediafx.com) Disney's FX unit, The Secret Lab,
is slowly being dismantled as Disney continues to outsource its
visual effects work to bigger FX facilities like Industrial Light
and Magic.
According
to Daily Variety, "Disney has become the latest studio to
quit the live action visual f/x business, shuttering its two-year-old
Secret Lab, and preparing to lay off several hundred employees."
The move comes
after Disney laid off hundreds of animators earlier this year
and slashed
the salaries remaining animators by up to 50%.
Thomas Schumacher,
president of Walt Disney Feature Animation is quoted in Daily
Variety as saying, "We're not actively soliciting outside
work under the banner of the Secret Lab anymore. If the studio
comes to me and says here's a movie that we have a special demand
for, then fantastic. But I don't need to set up a separate company
to do that. We're going to be reassigning our production capabilities."
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Snow White
DVD Playback Problems
(by digitalmediafx.com) Disney's biggest animated DVD release
ever, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is experiencing
problems with thousands of people who try to play the DVD on computers
running Windows 2000 or the new Windows XP.
InterActual,
which is in charge of DVD support for Disney's Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs DVD acknowledged that the DVD won't play
at all on some Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.
In a technical support document for the problem, InterActual says:
"The
Walt Disney Company and the Microsoft Corporation are jointly
addressing this matter, and expect to provide a resolution for
consumers shortly. Buena Vista Consumer Support and InterActual
would like to inform you and provide assistance when a solution
is made available...In the interim, we recommend trying the movie
through your main DVD decoder software, which should have been
provided by your computer manufacturer..."
In investigating
the problem, CNET quotes Microsoft spokesman Greg Sullivan as
saying that Disney didn't test the disk on Windows 2000 or Windows
XP.
The problem
seems to be isolated to those two operating systems, but there
is a possible workaround that can be found by clicking here.
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The Iron
Giant Special Edition DVD a Year Away
(by digitalmediafx.com) Warner Bros. continues to delay the
release of the special edition DVD of The Iron Giant. In
a recent chat with The Digital Bits, official Warner Bros. representatives
acknowledge that The Iron Giant Special Edition DVD won't ship
until the "Second half of 2002." This also marks the
first time that Warner Bros. has officially and widely acknowledged
the special edition DVD outside of past media reports relying
on "sources within the WB".
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News Link
of the Day - Waking Life: Dream On
According to The San Francisco Bay Guardian:
"It could
be a dream or a nightmare, depending on your perspective. But
Richard Linklater's latest push to the envelope is definitely
a nocturnal vision you'll have to shake off. Dazed and confused
and reveling in it, his animated Waking Life is both a return
to form and an intense break from it – a movie filmed entirely
in live-action is transformed into animation..."
Click
here for the full story.
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