In this interview we were asking questions Jon Wadelton, NUKE Product Manager from The Foundry. The interview is focused on The Foundry as the company itself and NUKE, which is a powerful compositing product that delivers unparalleled speed and a first-class feature set that is unrivalled in the desktop market. With NUKE you are able to create VFX in a new way using camera technologies, 3D assets and particle systems. We would like to thank again Jon for taking his time to answer our question as well the crew by The Foundry.
At the bottom of this article you can find a short video about NUKE and as well a gallery in which is also Jon Wadelton at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam where he was presenting the new features inside NUKE 6.3.
Q: Presently is The Foundry a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies. What was behind forming the company? What was the reason?
A: The Foundry was formed in 1996 by movie special effects specialists Bruno Nicoletti and Simon Robinson. At the time there were no commercial plug-in solutions available for Flame or high end visual effects in 2D. Seeing a gap in the market, they started life at The Foundry developing and selling plug-in tools for post-production teams. They were the first developers of Sparks on Discreet Logic’s Flame systems. From there they grew and continued to develop award winning technology that filled a gap digital artist’s need.
Q: If you compare the company at the beginning back in 1996 and now, what changed at most?
A: The growth of the company has been explosive. We went from about a staff of 50 people in 2009 to 130 this year. The company success comes down to continuing the original idea of finding gaps in the market and delivering products that help artists. Whether it is gaps in compositing, painting or stereo, The Foundry has continued to deliver game changing products for the vfx industry.
Q: Your product contains AMPAS Sci-Tech Award® winning technology. Can you explain it a little bit to our readers?
A: In 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award® to The Foundry's development team for the FURNACE image processing suite. The company's widely adopted, high-end compositing system NUKE is also based on AMPAS Sci-Tech Award® winning technology.Optical flow or motion estimation is an area in which The Foundry has pioneered a new generation of algorithms which enable the tracking of every pixel in a frame to subsequent and preceding frames.
Launched in 2002, The Foundry’s FURNACE was the first comprehensive toolset to deploy these new algorithms, with the retiming tool KRONOS rapidly becoming a market leading technology for speeding up and slowing down footage. Today over 30 plug-ins within the FURNACE package take advantage of advanced motion estimation technology, providing digital visual effects artists with a range of sophisticated plug-ins to tackle everyday compositing issues as diverse as wire and rig removal, grain reduction, dust busting, image stabilization, super resolution, auto rotoscoping, image segmentation, flicker removal, image stitching, adding motion blur, tracking and generating depth mattes amongst many others.
The Foundry was the only British company to be honoured with a 2006 Academy Award® and was one of only four companies to be awarded the Scientific and Engineering Award Academy Plaque®.
FURNACE enjoys an enviable reputation, having been used on a host of high profile feature films including Casino Royale, X-Men 3 The Last Stand, The Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, King Kong, The Lord of The Rings Trilogy, Poseidon and Superman Returns.
Q: How long you were developing NUKE and what inspired you? How many people participated on the development?
A: NUKE was originally written at Digital Domain at around 1993as their in-house compositing tool. It started out as basically just a command-line tool that could read text scripts to perform compositing operations. I believe the first feature that it was used on was True Lies back in 1994. From then it has continued to evolve. By the time Digital Domain worked on Titanic in 1997 it had basics of graphical node based tree view you see in the latest NUKE now. In 2007 the Foundry acquired NUKE and made some major updates including adding python support and a modern Qt interface. Since then NUKE has gone out to become the standard compositor in the film industry today. It’s hard to say how many people in total have worked on NUKE over the years, it all adds up!
Q: NUKE was used in various movies including Avatar, District 9 or The Dark Knight. On what use of NUKE are you proud at most?
A: I’m always proud whenever I see NUKE used on any movie or indeed commercial. I am always amazed by what artists push NUKE to do to produce these amazing shots. I guess a moment that made be proud recently was when visiting Framestore they showed me a hero shot from the upcoming major film where they did all the particle effects from the new particle system in NUKEX 6.3. The shot looked amazing. It took us a long time to get the particle system in and working ‘right’ so it was very satisfying to see how when put into the hands of talented artists how great the result could be.
Q: By the description of NUKE at your webpage you write; NUKE is the world’s most powerful nodebased compositor. Can you explain this to our readers?
A: NUKE has from the very beginning been designed to be scalable and powerful. It processing images on 32 bit full floating point pixel information. This means you can manipulate images through many compositing and effects nodes and not have degradation of the image. It is also scalable in terms of image sizes and compositing tree sizes. We often see movie studios with NUKE projects including 100 and even 1000s of image processing nodes to produce a final image. NUKE also handles large images sizes very well. Large matte paintings of 50K projected onto 3D geometry and are not uncommon.