Folks from the U.K.’s The Foundry were very pleased to be touting this afternoon the new release of their Nuke compositing software–Nuke 4.7. It’s the first new version of the product since Foundry took over development, marketing, and sales of Nuke from Digital Domain, and Bill Collins, PhD., Foundry’s CEO, made it quite clear that Nuke represents the company’s compositing future, even though Shake (latest version 4.10) continues to spread in popularity throughout the industry.

The idea, Collins says, is to put some Nuke capabilities into new versions of Shake, and many Shake capabilities into Nuke, and then, eventually phase out Shake in favor of Nuke. He expects that transition to take approximately two years, since the company will continue to support existing Shake customers until their natural upgrade cycle comes up again. The movement to Nuke, he insists, will be “easy” for Shake users because of the increased power of the Nuke platform. The new version, for instance, includes, among other things, optical flow node, support for HDRI, RAW and Quicktime, FrameCycler Professional 2006, Truelight, universal binary for Mac OS X and lots of other funky stuff.

–Michael Goldman