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Thank you to The Foundry marketing team and Lucy Cooper for their collaboration in this first interview for Dimensión 2.5, where we review the origins and evolution of the company until today, with leaders products in VFX industry like The Foundry NUKE and OCULA.

Welcome to Dimension 2.5. The Foundry has been traditionally known as one of the leading companies in the development of tools for VFX, with products as The Foundry KEYLIGHT and FURNACE. What have been the main changes that the company has experienced since its creation in 1996 by Bruno Nicoletti and Simon Robinson?.

The company was originally founded to build plug-ins for VFX systems such as Flame. In 2007 The Foundry team won an AMPAS Sci-Tech Award for their image processing work developing the FURNACE plug-in set.

In the same year, the company was approached by Digital Domain to take over the development of NUKE. This was a significant turning point for the company as it went from making plug-ins for 3rd party application to making its own compositor.

An aggressive development schedule for NUKE involving more than 20 software releases has created a product which is today the “de facto” standard in film and television visual effects compositing. A key addition has been support for stereoscopic imagery and adding the OCULA plug-in set, which has facilitated VFX on ground-breaking productions including AVATAR, TRON: LEGACY and HUGO.

In 2009 the company acquired 3D digital paint package MARI from Weta Digital, another example of close industry collaboration. MARI is gaining significant traction among texturers and has been adopted by key industry players including Dreamworks Animation, Digital Domain, Framestore, MPC, Double Negative, Animal Logic and Mr.X.

Later the same year The Foundry also entered a close collaboration with Sony Pictures Imageworks to develop their KATANA lighting and rendering technology. KATANA 1.0 was released in October 2011 and has already been adopted by Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain and is under evaluation at a number of studios large and small.

So… in conclusion, things have changed quite a lot, but the ethos of close collaboration with industry to provide great products and support remains constant.

With the addition of The Carlyle Group as an investor and with Bill Collis as CEO, what is the current work of the original founders, Bruno Nicoletti and Simon Robinson?.

Both Simon and Bruno are still very important members of The Foundry team. Simon is Chief Scientist, a bit of a mysterious job title. In reality he works very closely with CEO, Bill Collis on all strategic business decisions as well as managing the in-house research team.

Bruno is now CTO and very involved with the products, performance and future innovation.

How many employees make up the team at The Foundry?. What does it mean for The Foundry have a second Office in Los Angeles (EE.UU.)?.

The Foundry now numbers 140+ employees worldwide. The majority are based in the company’s London headquarters. But The Foundry also has a smaller office in Venice, California and several sales and engineering staff across the rest of the globe. With 15 spanish speaking staff distributed between both offices. In addition we work very closely with our Spanish partners TRIGITAL (www.trigital.es) who can help anyone interested in us locally in Spain.

It is really important for The Foundry to have an office in Los Angeles. Many of our key clients are based on the West Coast and it’s essential to be close to them. The combination of the support teams in LA and London also enable us to offer nearly 24 hour support to our customers during the week.

What has it meant NUKE for The Foundry?.

The acquisition of NUKE was pivotal to The Foundry’s growth and development. The team had to expand dramatically to accommodate the aggressive development plans and support required. Digital Domain had faith in The Foundry team and philosophy reaffirmed by the Academy´s endorsement in the form of a Sci-Tech Award in 2007.

The Foundry MARI and KATANA are two good examples of tools developed internally by visual effects studios such as Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks. It is clear that The Foundry is a clear reference in the VFX industry. What are the key to this confidence, and how The Foundry start these contacts for collaboration?.

Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks have been clients of The Foundry since long before they had NUKE. A genuine desire to build the right tools for the job and provide good customer support have given The Foundry a positive perception in the market. This combined with personal relationships, a dedication to openness and honesty and continued collaborative working have opened many doors. The track record established by the successful commercialisation of NUKE also helped to confirm The Foundry as a good option to take internally developed production software to a wider market.

Let’s talk about The Foundry´s products, what are the advantages of The Foundry OCULA against the competition?.

There really is no direct competition for OCULA. NUKE and OCULA combine to offer a unique toolset to tackle VFX on live action stereo projects.

NUKE has a native stereo workflow which makes setting up on a stereo job easy – whether animation or live action.

OCULA comes into play when you have to match eyes exactly regardless of differences in alignment, timing and colour – no matter what precautions you take on set there are always fixes required. OCULA’s disparity mapping is also really powerful allowing artists to create effects that would otherwise not be possible. OCULA was used extensively on groundbreaking stereo projects; “Avatar”, “Tron: Legacy” and “Hugo”.

And the advantages of The Foundry MARI?. At this point, The Foundry will incorporate in a future organic modeling features as Pixologic ZBrush and Autodesk Mudbox?. Or keep specializes in advanced texturing.

MARI aims to be the best 3D paint tool for VFX. Currently we have no plans to add sculpting or modeling to MARI, but instead are focused on improving the workflow and integration with other software.

What will do The Foundry KATANA to improve 3D lighting workflows?.

I’ve heard many people saying that KATANA is a “game changer” for lighting workflow and we believe they are right. KATANA takes an innovative recipe based approach enabling facilities large and small to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort.

Artists can define and control look and lighting whilst maintaining performance with very large datasets. KATANA operates non-destructively using a rule-based approach, allowing modeling, look development, animation and lighting teams to work in parallel.

it was traumatic end of the development of The Foundry STORM after the REDCINE RED-X PRO release by RED?.

We think REDCINE-X PRO proves RED’s commitment to its professional users.

STORM was a professional tool for RED users and now that REDCINE-X PRO has emerged, justifying investment in developing STORM was nigh on impossible against a free software of this breadth. Hence we have discontinued STORM. Maintenance for current customers remains available until the end of October 2012.

While The Foundry continues to innovate with new solutions for visual effects and recently announced the launch of The Foundry HIERO, what provide to the professional environment?.

Our customers are working increasingly collaboratively within facilities as well as across geographies. HIERO makes this collaboration easier by improving efficiency and VFX shot throughput volume, leaving high end finishing systems for their intended purpose.

You can parcel out VFX shots to NUKE, version and review within the context of the edit and remove complicated error prone manual processes.

The Foundry CAMERATRACKER is another recent release, integrated with The Foundry NUKEX and as plugin for Adobe After Effects. With competition like PFTrack or SynthEyes, what does The Foundry CAMERATRACKER, which differentiates it, what are its advantages?. Can we export in the near future from The Foundry NUKEX camera tracking data to 3D application as native format project like Syntheyes?.

The key advantage of NUKEX’s 3D camera tracker is not needing to leave NUKEX to use it. If you have a quick turnaround time on a shot, importing and exporting all take time and make a smooth workflow more challenging.

With regards to the possibility of exporting tracking data into a 3D application, we are always looking at ways to give more people access to our technology so never say never…

And we can not end this interview without mentioning The Foundry FURNACE, awarded with AMPAS Sci-Tech Award as NUKE, or The Foundry KEYLIGHT, a leader tool for keyers tasks. What is the future of these products?.

FURNACECORE and KEYLIGHT are now both standard in NUKEX and as such continue to be developed and refined. The algorithms behind the original FURNACE often act as starting points when we’re asked to tackle difficult problems and have formed the basis of some of our best innovation in recent years.

Besides the quality of your products, is also especially important to have adequate technical support with a fast response, and in that, from my personal experience I can say that The Foundry has a fantastic team support. How many people are the support team, how is the normal workflow at this department?.

Thank you very much. Support is paramount as far as we’re concerned and the team work really hard to keep our clients happy. There are six support engineers in the UK office and two in Los Angeles so we work across two time zones. If you’d like to read more about our support services you can visit our website.

The Foundry recently announced new educational licenses Nuke, are there plans to launch educational licensing the rest of the product range?.

The Foundry will be launching a new educational policy on the 1st February 2012. We are very excited about it and are sure that students studying VFX will be too. The policy covers NUKEX and MARI and will also incorporate HIERO after it is released. There are several different options.

You can find more information on our website where you can also register your interest before the program is launched.

In future articles or interviews, we´ll speak with depth about The Foundry products, so to say goodbye, you have any message for The Foundry´s customers from Spain and others countries?.

I think the only message we have for customers is THANK YOU and keep talking to us. We wouldn’t be here without our customers and rely on a constant dialogue and interactive working relationship with them to direct future product developments and improve current releases. We think they are awesome.

More information | The Foundry

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Noticias relacionadas:

1. The Foundry anuncia sus nuevas licencias educativas de NUKEX, MARI y HIERO
2. Presentación de The Foundry Nuke, Ocula y Storm en Madrid y Barcelona
3. The Foundry lanza Ocula 2.0v2 para Nuke 5.2v2, Nuke 6.0v5 y RollingShutter 1.1v2 para Adobe After Effects CS5
4. The Foundry no continuará dando soporte de Nuke para Mac OS X PowerPC