Furnace/Discreet – beta program starts

The Foundry, the leading effects plug-in developer, will be beginning the beta program of Furnace on Discreet. This was one of the more interesting products which was shown at NAB in April The site list includes The Mill and Rushes both in London, Digital Pictures in Australia and Riot Pictures in Santa Monica, USA amongst others. Furnace on Discreet is scheduled for release early September.

Furnace was released on Shake earlier this year and has already been adopted by many leading post houses including ESC Entertainment who are known for their extensive work on the Matrix films, Weta in New Zealand famous for their involvement with the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Warner Bros.

“Kronos gives me sophisticated retiming tools within the shake package. Easy to use, but allows a large amount of variation. Definitely the easiest retiming tool to use right out of the box. I have used Kronos on many shots with superb results.” Cristin Pescosolido, Compositor, Esc Entertainment

“The Wire and Rig Removal plug-ins in Furnace have easily saved us days of work per shot on one of our most recent projects. After seeing the great results, integrating Furnace into our pipeline was an obvious decision.” Kevin Tengan, Rhythm & Hues Studios

“I spent nine hours writing complicated expressions to remove high frequency noise from a hand-held camera move. Then I got Furnace. I tried the shot in Steadiness, spent two minutes clicking the mouse. Problem solved. It was that easy… next Shot.” Ben Grossmann, Gray Matter FX

Descriptions of Furnace plug-ins:

Wire Removal – This plug-in removes wires from an image; it is particularly good on complex shots where background replacement is not possible – for example, when wires cross the actors or where wires cross complex moving backgrounds like trees.
Rig Removal – This plug-in uses motion-estimation technology to remove foreground objects from a clip and reconstruct a clean background.
Kronos – This algorithm uses motion-estimation technology to build in-between frames in a sequence, and reduces the edge-dragging between foreground and background objects that is commonly seen with other retiming products.
Steadiness – This automatically tracks and removes translational and rotational camera shake, without requiring the user to select tracking points.
Deflicker – This is a fully automated plug-in that removes luminance flicker in a sequence.
Degrain – This wavelet-based degraining algorithm does both spatial and temporal grain-reduction, based on an initial grain selection made by the user.
Regrain – This allows the user to sample grain from one clip and apply it to another. Grain from some sample film stocks are also included.
Texture Replication – These tools can be used to generate seamless plates of imagery from a sample picture – for example providing a full-resolution frame of grass from a small sample swatch, without introducing obvious repetitions into the output.
Tile – This allows the user to produce a seamlessly tileable output from an input image without blending and softening the edges. It automatically finds the most invisible natural join.

About The Foundry
The Foundry is a software developer specialising in plug-in visual effects for the film and video markets. The company was set up in 1996 by Bruno Nicoletti after writing custom effects for flame operators at Rushes Post Production in London. Simon Robinson joined soon afterwards to form the partnership. The Foundry was the first sparks developers for Discreet Systems Products and now has its Tinder set of plug-ins on the leading compositing platforms and customers throughout the world. The Foundry also sells a blue/green screen keyer, Keylight, and a set of colour tools, Anvil. For more information visit www.thefoundry.co.uk.

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For more information contact:
Vikki Hamilton, The Foundry
T +44 (0)20 7434 0449 E [email protected]