The design agency Daquar received first price in the Motion Graphics category of the “Kolla! Grafisk design & illustration 2009” contest. Daquar won with a loop made for fLiM, the ambient and vj oriented club at Nordic Light Hotel.

Ben Cook from Radio Design, the british member of the swedish VJ Crew Instructions, received awards in The Best Audio Visual category and The Best Work of The Year in The RAD Awards (Recruitment Advertising Awards) for his animation commissioned by Work Communications. Check the award winning video here. It’s the “Josh’s video” that won the the awards.

Typophile is calling for entries to the 5th edition of their film festival. The deadline is March 31.

“The film festival is wide open to anything relevant to typography, design history, and/or type design.
It can be educational, experimental, inspiring or humorous.

Examples include (but are not limited to):
– Film Titling
– Promotional pieces showcasing a typeface
– Motion Picture Studio work
– Studio reels showing a strength in typography or motion type
– Experimental or animated fonts
– Documentaries
– Mockumentaries
– Short stories or animations
– Client work
– Student work”

Get the all the info here!

Resolume is finally out of beta, version 3.0.0 was released on friday (the guerilla marketing scam in the Modul8 forum confirmed, see previous post). There has been a lot of bug fixes and small improvements. The biggest news seems to be that the audio analysis is back and the hardware accellerated codec we mentioned earlier. Still no support for Flash.

Read all the details here.

There was an interesting discussion today regarding the Sheer video codec on the Modul8 forum where Dave from Vidvox (the creators of VDMX) and Bart from Resolume jumped in on the thread.

Sheer is a commercial codec that looks a bit better than Photo JPEG but results in slightly bigger files. Sheer also has support for alpha channel. The question is – is it worth $149?

Bart from Resolume was saying that the Sheer codec was not that great and accusing David from Vidvox of promoting the codec out of commercial reasons. David already denied any money being involved in his first post.

[Edit] This thread was started in 2005 so the initial posts are pretty old (like Daves and Barts comments), but the last posts with comparison of codecs is from a recent date. [/Edit]

In the same thread you could learn that you could swap the Animation codec for the more modern, faster, smaller PNG codec to get that nice alpha channel.

Read the whole thread here.

Some good news for Resolume users: Resolume has develeoped a new video codec called DXV toghter with The Pixel Addicts and UnitedVisualArtists. DXV is hardware accellerated and will decompress the frames using the video card’s GPU which is faster than using the computer’s CPU as conventional codecs does. This will result in the abillity to mix more video layers with higher resolution.

The codec is cross-platform and will work in all Quicktime enabled applications but the hardware accelleration will only be enabled in Resolume. And best of all, it’s for free. Read more and download the plugin on Resolumes home page.