FX Tutorials for the masses
I thought "oh no not another site that collects tutorials" and my worst fear came to true. pixel2life.com is sporting a web 2.0 interface to more tutorials of popular animation and still visual FX application then you can read in all of your life. Why I think its bad? Because there are about a million of them out there already and finding just the special trick is already like looking for that needle in the haystack - well the haystack has just outgrown the barn and you have to look for the needle in the rain now. While more information on anything is always welcome I think as long as a somehow standardized tagging across all those tutorial sites springing up everywhere is in place it adds to confusion for the users looking for a quality tutorial on anything. I would love a proposal by those companies selling those nice software to have an open (source) api that those websites can use to aggregate tutorials - but in the competetive world we live in everyone cooks its own soup and you have to spend the tight minutes in the production environment searching through another site for a solution that was caused by a bug in the programm in the first place. Anyway I still consider the HighEnd3D.com and HighEnd2D.com sites the best around for the true professional fxlers - the most knowledgable people working in this field (also outside "the industry") hang out there and the scripts, tutorials and message boards are the place to flock for the advanced interests. As for the hobby and casual user pixel2life will probably appeal with their flashy rainbow interface and lots of icons that suggest lots of content.