The Foundry announced that they have begun shipping HIERO, their shot management, conform and review tool for VFX. The company announced HIERO last year at IBC and this timeline centric application fills a gap for the shot-based NUKE in post. The goal of the software is conform a sequence from offline, export shots for vfx, and then allow one to review shots in context of the timeline.
fxguidetv covered the launch of the product by visiting The Foundry’s London offices before IBC last year and speaking with Bruno Nicoletti and Matt Plec. You can watch that interview on episode #119 by visiting our fxguidetv page.
The Foundry also produced an overview video covering HIERO.
The full press release from The Foundry follows….
London, 29th February 2012 – Today leading visual effects software developer The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk) released version 1.0 of its latest innovation in VFX software – HIERO.
HIERO is a timeline for NUKE and a lightweight shot manager for VFX enabling you to efficiently conform, review and export shots to your VFX artists and finishing systems.
HIERO 1.0 is NOT a compositor or a system for finishing, grading or editing.
Collaborative working on VFX projects, especially with a quick turnaround, can be painful. HIERO has been built from the ground up to address these challenges and create a smooth workflow out of the box to improve efficiency and increase shot throughput volume.
HIERO removes human error by automatically creating a file structure based on rules created by you as you conform and parcel out your VFX shots to multiple NUKE artists. HIERO knows exactly where to look for updates allowing you to review shot progress in the context of the edit with the confidence that you always have the latest versions at your fingertips.
Flexible and scriptable, HIERO is easy to integrate and significantly reduces the infrastructure work required to keep a VFX team up and running saving you time and money on every job.
Andres Kirejew, VFX Supervisor/Partner, Township comments: “HIERO has removed all the tedious, manual labour from conforming. I pointed it towards my EDL and 1.5tb of RED Epic footage magically relinked! HIERO breaks out shots with ease and automatically names, symlinks and prepares them for NUKE roundtripping. HIERO is ******* brilliant. Seriously, at the price point, it’s a no-brainer!”
Hugo Guerra, Joint Head of NUKE compositing at The Mill, London adds, “In the NUKE department at The Mill HIERO was a natural choice to fill the pipeline gap that we were bridging using in-house scripting and third party software. Using HIERO and NUKEX together is the perfect solution for us. With these tools we save time and money on our pipeline, leaving the artists more time to be creative and not be delayed by the technical part of the process. This means our productions get better, faster and more collaborative”.
Matt Plec, Head of Product Design at The Foundry concludes, “NUKE is already a powerful compositing tool, but it’s missing a component many artists need. HIERO provides this missing link functionality currently dealt with either by expensive tools, in-house scripting or a cumbersome manual process. HIERO’s the bridge tool our customers have been asking us for.”
FREE 15 DAY TRIAL LICENSES – TRY HIERO NOW!
If you want to try HIERO for yourself, sign up for a trial on our website http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/hiero
PRICING
£3,150 | $5,000 | €3,800 (all prices quoted are nodelocked and include one year of maintenance).
HIERO is available on OSX and Linux, with Windows to follow.
The product is looking very promising, but the price is extremely dissappointing. 🙁 I was expecting something between 500 – 1200 USD, tops.
I tend to agree. I had a look at the beta and although it did look super cool and has great potential I couldn’t justify its price point for the use I’d get out of it. We’re a pretty small studio. I do all the conforming and shot set up and about 75% of the comping myself. Its a mostly manual process for me with some scripts, spreadsheets and an organised methodology and it works ok.
I can see how the bigger shops would lap this up even at the price tag tho and how in a bigger pipeline it would probably pay for itself. But I can justify spending more on a cms than on our NLE or our 3D or comping tools.