The last year has been a very exciting one for leading visual effects software company, The Foundry, in securing unique technology agreements with Sony Pictures Imageworks, Weta Digital, and Walt Disney Animation Studios to bring their home grown technologies to a wider user base. The first product to emerge from these negotiations is MARI (released in July) - a brand new creative, 3D texture painting application.
Simultaneously, the engineering teams have been working hard on the company's home-grown technology releasing new versions of NUKE, NUKEX and OCULA as well as developing a brand new product - STORM - and some hot of the press plug-ins for the After Effects market.
At IBC 2010, The Foundry will continue its tradition of letting customers do most of the talking on its Stand 7.J18. A strong line up of VFX artists from across the world will provide practical insights in to their use of The Foundry's tools in production.
NUKE & NUKEX 6.1 - with a sneak peek at 6.2
The Foundry team will showcase NUKE and NUKEX 6.1 - the latest release of its acclaimed compositing software as well as providing a glimpse as to what's coming in NUKE 6.2 (due in Q4).
NUKE 6.1 adds Ultimatte, improved 3D workflow, Framecycler Pro, RotoPaint improvements, and much more. NUKEX 6.1 brings additional features to the 3D CameraTracker.
NUKE 6.2 is due in Q4 and will be a major release. At IBC the team will wet your appetite by showing the image modeller and dope sheet that are coming.
We're also very excited to have several exciting customers showing us how it's really done as we witness their use of NUKE on a variety of genuine productions.
MARI
MARI is a brand new creative 3D texture painting product, originally developed at Weta Digital to handle the exceedingly detailed look development and texture work demanded by Avatar. MARI copes easily with an obsessive level of detail - literally tens of thousands of textures - quickly and elegantly.
With the help of some talented artists, we'll be giving you a good look at MARI what it is and why you might like painting with it.
OCULA 2.1
OCULA is The Foundry's unique collection of plug-in tools that address common problems experienced with stereoscopic imagery in post production. Winner of a TVB Europe IBC Award in 2008 and an iaward in 2009, OCULA boosts productivity and ultimately helps deliver a more rewarding stereoscopic viewing experience.
OCULA 2.1, created by The Foundry's SCI-TECH Award®-winning R&D team, is the result of a number of collaborations with artists on high end stereo projects including Avatar. This production testing has enabled us to deliver significant improvements to workflow and robustness.
STORM - FIRST SHOWING AT IBC
STORM is a brand new product developed by The Foundry bringing assistance to RED Digital Cinema camera production workflows. STORM generates and carries metadata, a vital element of the digital cinema camera workflow, along with the native footage connecting various production stages such as review, look development, editing, and final grading to the overall production context.
STORM is useful from the moment media comes off the RED to final delivery, on a laptop on or near-set, or a workstation in post-production to capture picture, sound and metadata, review, confirm cinematographic look and editorial intent, tag, organize and select, and deliver media and edits.
KRONOS 5.0 & CAMERATRACKER - fresh plug-in developments for After Effects
The Foundry has created a new accelerated re-timer and motion blur plug-in based on their Academy Award Winning Furnace algorithms.
KRONOS 5.0 produces far superior results by creating brand new frames using optical flow information. It uses clever math to look at every pixel on each frame, and see where it moves on to the next. By comparing the two it can make a very good guess at what would come in-between allowing the creation of additional frames and a super smooth slow motion result.
KRONOS 5.0 is the first product to be accelerated by The Foundry's new 'Blink' technology, dramatically speeding up render times and taking retiming to a whole new level. BlinkTM runs our software on CPUs and GPUs allowing the extraction of peak performance from your hardware.
The Foundry's new CAMERATRACKER analyses source sequences to extract the original camera's lens and motion parameters, allowing you to composite 2D or 3D correctly with reference to the camera used to film the shot. You can now match camera moves within After Effects' 2.5D environment, opening up new, robust options for the placement of composite elements, such as the creation of Fringe/Heroes style 'in scene' titles, the extension of virtual sets and much more…
This technology was previously only available in NUKEX, The Foundry's high-end film compositing tool but you can now do all this without exiting After Effects.