The Foundry Preview NUKE With Full OFX Support

The Foundry has previewed version 4.7 of its high-end compositing application NUKE at NAB 2007.
The first major release of NUKE under The Foundry brand, NUKE 4.7 will feature support for The Foundry’s full range of OFX plug-ins and new Foundry FLEXlm licensing.
NUKE began as the in-house compositing and effects application at Digital Domain, where it won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement and has generated effects for over 45 feature films and hundreds of commercials and music videos. In March 2007 NUKE became part of The Foundry’s portfolio of visual effects products and is now being developed at its offices in London.
Since the move over to The Foundry, NUKE has seen a number of new enhancements including a brand new optical flow node for accurate retiming operations, Tracker sports a new user interface with enhanced tracking markers and improved selection methods. There is support for reading/writing .hdri image formats, the colour wheel has been updated, the Framecycler engine has been upgraded to Framecycler Professional 2006 and now full support for The Foundry’s creative suites of visual effects and image-processing plug-ins.
Launched by The Foundry 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. It is via the OFX API that The Foundry has been able to provide plug-in support for NUKE so quickly after it acquired its product development.
NUKE, already a powerful high-end film compositing application, benefits from the addition of The Foundry’s Furnace, Tinder and Keylight, as the plug-ins enhance its functionality.
In addition to NUKE 4.7, The Foundry has announced that it is porting the full Furnace 4 toolset to OFX. Furnace 4 for OFX will feature 40 advanced image processing plug-ins designed to ease the routine processes involved with the creation of digital visual effects. Furnace 4 will be previewing at NAB with the released version shipping soon after.
Dr Bill Collis said: “We are delighted that NUKE has become a Foundry product. NUKE fills a unique niche in the high-end visual effects market and complements our existing plug-in business whilst offering new challenges and the opportunity to continue to deliver world-leading products to our customers. In the past NUKE hasn’t always had the resources necessary to commercially develop a high-end film compositor and the move over to The Foundry means that this is no longer an issue. Combining our experience with that of Bill Spitzak, the primary author of NUKE and Matt Plec, formerly Senior Technical Director at Sony Pictures Imageworks, together with the newly recruited engineers will mean great enhancements to NUKE providing a much more powerful and comprehensive compositing solution.”
The Foundry will building on the strong foundations set by the D2 Software team and NUKE’s development will be focused toward evolution and extension of the existing product.
Available on Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms NUKE delivers unparalleled speed, an extensible 64-channel TCL-based architecture, and powerful feature set unrivalled in the desktop market. NUKE is 4.6 is available to download now from The Foundry website www.thefoundry.co.uk
(SP)