The Foundry Introduces Two New Tools for Adobe After Effects

The Foundry is delighted to introduce two brand new high tech tools for Adobe After Effects taking full advantage of the 64-bit capabilities offered by Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium (CS5).

Kronos 5.0 – Hollywood-quality, Realtime Retiming

Kronos 5.0 is a new accelerated retimer and motion blur plug-in set based on The Foundry’s Academy Award Winning Furnace algorithms.

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. Blink runs our software on CPUs and GPUs allowing the extraction of peak performance from your hardware.

Kronos 5.0 produces far superior results by creating brand new frames using optical flow information, avoiding the poor quality output usually encountered when repeating frames such as blurring and stuttering. Clever math is employed 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.

CameraTracker – Matchmove, Directly Inside Adobe After Effects

The Foundry’s new camera tracker 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 the Adobe  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. Now, you can do all this in Adobe After Effects without exiting your application.

“These new 64-bit plug-ins from The Foundry will help artists who use Adobe After Effects CS5 to create high-impact motion graphics and handle the trickiest compositing tasks more easily,” said Michael Coleman, senior product manager for Adobe After Effects at Adobe.

Jack Binks, Plug-ins’ Product Manager at The Foundry, comments, “We are really excited to bring these new tools to the After Effects platform and can’t wait to see how artists employ their power and flexibility. We look forward to seeing the results.”