The Briefing Room

This year has proven exciting at The Foundry, a world-leader in VFX software. New products were announced at NAB in April, and the management buyout deal in June, led by Dr Bill Collis and the original company founders, returned the company to British ownership. This news was well received around the world, and was quickly followed by Nuke site license deals with ILM and Weta Digital.

At IBC 2009, The Foundry will continue its tradition of letting customers do the talking at its Stand 7.F28 in the RAI Centre, Amsterdam, 11th –15th September. A strong line up of VFX artists from across Europe will provide practical insights in to how they use The Foundry’s compositing and plug-in products. (At NAB 2009 Intelligent Creatures gave a masterclass in how it used Nuke for Watchmen. Image © 2009 Warner Bros, courtesy of Intelligent Creatures.)

New Nuke 6.0 and NukeX products:
The Foundry team will showcase Nuke 6.0, a major release of its acclaimed compositing software, which delivers a totally re-written Paint and Roto toolset resulting in significant performance improvements and shape flexibility. Nuke 6.0 also includes Keylight – The Foundry’s industry renowned keyer that is particularly good at tackling reflections and hair.

The release of Nuke 6.0 coincides with the launch of NukeX, a brand new compositing application. Building on Nuke’s award-winning toolset, NukeX gives digital artists integrated access to sophisticated lens tools, 3D camera tracking as well as image and motion analysis.

Building a family of Nuke products enables The Foundry to offer a Nuke workflow to facilities of all sizes – a pipeline that not only fits their requirements now, but can also accommodate whatever the future brings. Nuke will continue to evolve and be a flexible VFX tool ideal for a multitude of tasks, whilst NukeX brings previously inaccessible tools and workflow options to compositing artists, saving time and increasing the quality of their work.

Nuke and NukeX are fully script-compatible, with Nuke capable of viewing and rendering nodes created using the extended NukeX toolset.

Fresh plug-in developments:
The Foundry’s newly expanded plug-in development team has been canvassing community need and then cracking the engineering whip. Following chief scientist, Simon Robinson’s discovery of a possible fix for CMOS chip rolling shutter problems prior to NAB, The Foundry will launch RollingShutter, a new product available on After Effects and Nuke. RollingShutter compensates for skewing in the scene, improving the look and enabling trackers to work on a wide range of affected footage.

Tinderbox 4 will also be available on Nuke completing the set. Tinderbox 4 includes a variety of organic effects such as Snow, Rain, Fire and Water as well as interesting looks such as Cartoon, Security and InfiniteZoom.

The Foundry team has also been working closely with Avid to ensure that Furnace for OFX will work well on Avid DS 10.2 due for release at the show.

Last, but not least, The Foundry will release Ocula2 at IBC. Ocula, the company’s range of stereoscopic plug-ins, and a TVB Europe IBC Award-winner last year, has had a serious makeover to encompass suggestions driven by production feedback. Ocula 2 enables artists to manipulate aspects of live action stereoscopic footage such as the vertical alignment and interocular shift, as well as labour saving by replicating paint and roto shapes applied to one eye directly onto the second. Ocula is currently being put through its paces by Weta Digital and Framestore on James Cameron’s Avatar.

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 has two Academy Award® winning technologies including the high-end
compositing system Nuke.

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, Final Cut Pro and others.

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