Until the end of the month, you can watch all the SIGGRAPH sessions for free at siggraph.org. There are many, many sessions worth watching, including Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing (previously mentioned here by Jaymis and vade). You can’t link directly to a particular session so here are a few titles to search the page for:
- Advanced Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games
- Practical Motion Capture in Everyday Surroundings
- Visualizing Quaternions
- Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs
- Line Drawings Via Abstracted Shading (and many similar sessions on toon shading)
- Interactive Cutaway Illustrations of Complex 3D Models
- An Interactive Introduction to OpenGL Programming
…And many more. Unfortunately all the ones I’ve watched have been audio and Power Point only — no video of the presenters.
NB: Some unscrupulous people might download the videos for later viewing with Firefox by hitting Cmd/Ctrl + I, going to the Media tab, selecting the Quicktime movie from the list (Type: Embed) and clicking Save As. I would never suggest such a thing, of course. $10 is a perfectly reasonable price for a 25 minute video.
(I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw this posted. Thanks to whomever did so.)