Digital artists attending this year’s IBC show should ensure that stand 7.528 is highlighted as a ‘to visit’. This is where leading visual effects developer The Foundry will be offering sneak previews of the next major release of its compositing application Nuke; editing professionals will be able to get an idea of what’s to come with Furnace for Final Cut Pro; and those looking to enhance their OFX-compatible DI and compositing solutions will get a good look at the new Furnace 4 for OFX collection.

The Foundry will preview the next release of Nuke and has confirmed it is currently working on the much-anticipated UI improvements, plus support for Python, an extensible programming language, which is becoming widely supported by other application vendors and forming the backbone of many studios pipelines. Enhanced Layer and Channel support to eliminate the 64 channels limit, improved nodegraph manipulation capabilities, simplified management and selection – are amongst the other key improvements.

The Foundry will also show the latest developments of its Furnace for Final Cut Pro toolset, which will bring the power of The Foundry’s sophisticated motion estimation technology to FCP users for the first time.

The Foundry’s Furnace 4 for OFX will make its European debut at IBC 2007. Thousands of leading digital effects and DI artists already take advantage of Furnace to ease the routine processes involved with the creation of digital visual effects. Now, artists using supported OFX hosts will gain access to a much broader range of The Foundry’s advanced technologies to enhance workflow and boost productivity.

New plug-ins in Furnace 4 for OFX include, ChannelRepair, ColourAlign, ColourMatte, Contrast, Correlate, DeBlur, DeFlicker2, DeNoise, Depth, FrameRepair, MatchGrade, MotionBlur, MotionMatch, MotionMatte, MotionSmooth, ShadowRemoval, SmartFill, SmartPlate, SmartZoom, Splicer, Steadiness, VectorConvertor, VectorGenerator and VectorWarper. In addition to the new plug-ins, The Foundry has taken advantage of the latest advances in technology, combined with over seven years of its own research into motion estimation and revisited the existing Furnace for OFX plug-ins to deliver optimised output, enhanced speed, a more intuitive user interface and improve the user experience.

The Foundry will also be demonstrating its full range of visual effects plug-ins and image processing tools on some of the industries leading compositing platforms.

www.thefoundry.co.uk