The Foundry announces Furnace 4 plug-ins for Fusion
Leading visual effects software developer The Foundry has announced Furnace 4 plug-ins for eyeon Software‘s Fusion. The soon to be released toolset will be brand new to Fusion artists, giving them access to a host of advanced image processing tools that will enhance workflow and boost productivity in digital visual effects post production.
Thousands of leading digital artists worldwide already take advantage of Furnace to ease the routine processes involved with the creation of digital visual effects. With The Foundry‘s Furnace 4 for Fusion shipping soon, Fusion artists will, for the first time, be able to gain access to a broad range of The Foundry‘s sophisticated motion estimation technology.
The Furnace 4 for Fusion toolset is born from The Foundry‘s OFX initiative. Launched in 2004, OFX (Open FX) is free-of-charge, open source plug-in standard for developing 2D digital visual effects. OFX was instantly welcomed for its benefits to digital artists and their clients, and for allowing developers to focus more R&D time on new solutions to advance the art of digital effects. And The Foundry is delighted that eyeon has joined the growing list of supported OFX hosts.
Bruno Nicoletti, Chief Technology Officer, The Foundry commented “eyeon has supported the OFX initiative from very early on and we are thrilled that we will soon be able to add Fusion to our list of supported OFX hosts. The collaborative efforts of our development teams will soon culminate in a significant number of our Furnace plug-ins being available for Fusion artists, enabling a broader range of digital artists to take advantage of our advanced motion estimation technology on their compositing application of choice.”
“Fusion users have been asking for Furnace plug-in support for quite sometime now. Every single tool in this set can turn a very challenging post production problem in to a timely solution,” commented Isaac Guenard, Senior Product Manager at eyeon Software. “When you combine this fact with the wide ranging capabilities of Fusion 5.2, artists now have an unbelievably powerful weapon in the war against the ‘fix it in post‘ mentality.”
Furnace 4 for Fusion will include; Align, BlockTexture, ChannelRepair, ColourAlign, ColourMatte, Contrast, Correlate, DeBlur, DeFlicker, DeFlicker2, DeGrain, DeNoise, Depth, DirtRemoval, FrameRepair, Kronos, MatchGrade, MotionBlur, MotionMatch, MotionMatte, MotionSmooth, PixelTexture, ReGrain, RigRemoval, ScratchRepair, ShadowRemoval, SmartFill, Splicer, Steadiness, Tile and WireRemoval.
Highlights Include:
Contrast allows the user to extract hidden detail from dark areas of an image without overexposing the bright areas. Based on the adaptive contrast enhancement algorithm in Apical’s Iridix product, Contrast behaves like the human visual system by being adaptive and spatially varying.
DeFlicker1 and DeFlicker2 are fully automated plug-ins designed to remove luminance flicker in a sequence. DeFlicker1 is particularly good at coping with flicker that does not originate from the original scene, e.g. ageing film, dust and chemical exposure. DeFlicker2 is designed to remove in-scene flicker, poorly synchronised light rigs, stray light etc. Both of The Foundry‘s DeFlicker solutions can remove multiple over-lapping phase different flickers, while adapting to cope with motion in the sequence.
DeNoise is a noise and grain removal plug-in that uses advanced motion estimation technology along the direction of motion, thus reducing the noise without introducing any of the artefacts typically associated with noise reduction.
FrameRepair quickly replaces damaged or missing frames by interpolating pixels from images either side, producing a seamless repair.
Kronos uses The Foundry‘s advanced motion estimation technology to build in-between frames in a sequence. Kronos can be used to speed up (with motion blur) or slow down an image sequence. Artists have the option of supplying foreground mattes, to give retimed objects tight crisp edges and the latest version will detect and account for occluded regions of the image.
ReGrain and DeGrain are a pair of advanced grain management tools. DeGrain is an intelligent solution designed to remove the maximum amount of grain without damaging the image. ReGrain duplicates grain either from a sample image or stock footage and applies it to a new sequence.
WireRemoval is an automatic tool for removing straight or curved wires from a sequence, whilst preserving the images grain and background detail. WireRemoval comes with a whole bunch of tools to tackle variable width over the wire‘s length, as well as wire tracking and automatic colour correction.
Availability and Pricing
Shipping soon, Furnace 4 for Fusion nodelocked will be priced at: $4,400 / ?2,200, with a float priced at: $6,600 / ?3,300.
The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post production. On February 10th 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award? to The Foundry‘s development team for the Furnace image processing suite. The company now holds a trio of Academy Award? winning products including the high-end compositing system Nuke, and keying application Keylight.
The Foundry‘s products support a wide range of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk? Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Nuke, Scratch and Shake. The company has also driven OpenFX, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins, now broadly adopted by host and plug-in developers such as Autodesk?, Assimilate, FilmLight, Digital Vision, eyeon Software Inc, Grass Valley, Soluciones Graficas por Ordenador (S.G.O.), Photron and others.
Customers include: Digital Domain, The Moving Picture Company, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Warner Bros and Weta Digital Ltd. The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For more information please visit The Foundry‘s website at www.thefoundry.co.uk.
