The Foundry confirmed at IBC that a new version of its 3D compositing software, Nuke, will ship by the end of the year. Also announced was version 1.8 of Hiero, The Foundry's shot management, conform and review tool. Together, The Foundry said, the applications are a "comprehensive solution" for compositing, conform, review, editorial, and shot management. 

The new version of Nuke was designed in part to be a more welcoming and accessible environment for users who are already familiar with other compositing applications. To that end, Nuke 8 includes a revamped version of the Dope Sheet, an interactive view for manipulating keyframes first introduced in v6.2, that The Foundry says will be more intuitive because it displays results in context as changes are made. And a new text mode will allow artists to write, edit, format, and animate text right in the viewer. 

Color-grading tools have been beefed up, as well. A new in-panel color wheel will allow tweaks to be made to hue, saturation, and value either manually or in an automatic "precision" mode, and a new Match Grade node lets users automate color-grading by creating a LUT that matches two images when appropriate. New scopes will include waveform, vectorscope, and histogram viewers as well as something called the Pixel Analyser that provides more information about color.

A new Camera Tracker includes the ability to solve for multiple reference stills of a set, along with an updated workflow. The model-building tool now allows a 3D model to be built directly inside Nuke, including the creation of editable UVs. 

Nuke's deep compositing workflow has been extended with the addition of deep output to the Scanline Renderer, and other enhancements include OpenEXR 2.0 multi-part image read and write support, Alembic 1.5, and planar rendering.

Hiero 1.8 will come with improved playback performance as well as new tools for handling color and editing audio, including controls for changing the volume on separate tracks and timeline items.

Watch the "Sneak Peek" video, below, for more on Nuke 8 from Product Manager Jon Wadelton.