Adobe considering buying The Foundry

The telegraph is reporting that Adobe is considering buying The Foundry. It seems The Foundry’s private equity owners have put it up for sale, and Adobe might be interested.

Now this will likely scare some of the high end users of the Foundry‘s software, but seems like a perfect fit for Adobe who would like to get into the high end of film compositing. as well as 3D. And the foundry has the high end node based compositor Nuke, Modo for 3D sculpting, Mari for 3D painting as well as powerful Plug Ins including a 3D Camera Tracker, Keylight for Green Screen keying, Kronos for CUDA accelerated After Effects retiming and Motion blur and Furnace for 2D problem solving in Nuke. Of course they also have Ocula for 3D imagery in Nuke, and Katana for relighting shots, as well as Flix for Visual Story Development, and Colorway for Design colaboration and Heiro for shot management, conform and review, which would likely just be rolled into Adobe Dyanmic Link.

And it would be just awesome to have all or most of this rolled into your Creative Cloud subscription, and hopefully Adobe would keep developing all these applications and not just do Dynamic Link enhancements (which they seem to have done with SpeedGrade, worrying more about putting the tech into Premiere than enhancing the original app when it really needs some upgrades).

Of course Linux users will likely be worried, as most Nuke users run on Linux, and Adobe has only ever released one version of Photoshop for Linux, and then killed it.

Still I would be much happier with this, than say Apple’s purchase of Shake, which while it did drop the price, really just ended with them stealing some tech and killing the program.

And with Black Magic making Fusion so cheap or even free for most users, The Foundry really needs to compete with Nuke, so this would likely do it.

The Foundry announces a Non-Commercial version of Nuke for Free!

Creative cow has this exciting news, The Foundry will be releasing a non water-marked versions of Nuke with some light functionality restrictions for FREE! Wow!

You can get it here from the Foundry!

Here are the feature differences:

  • Output resolution up to HD (1920 x 1080).
  • Some nodes disabled including: the WriteGeo node, Ultimatte node, Primatte node, BlinkScript node, and GenerateLUT node.
  • 2D format support disabled for MPEG4 and h264.
  • Encrypted data storage and limited python scripting.

I am assuming this is in answer to Blackmagic Design basically releasing Fusion for free. Looks like it is time to learn some new compositing software my near future!

Definition Magazine has an interesting comparison of Fusion, Nuke & Smoke

Adam Garstone at Definition Magazine gives a quick overview of these 3 powerful 3D Compositing Programs. Work a read.

After learning Shake years back I would love to get into one of these, but can’t afford either Nuke or Smoke, but once a free Mac version is released of Fusion by BlackMagic Designs I will probably spend the time to learn it, and hopefully they will have added a good 3D camera tracker by then.

PVC reviews Nuke 7

Alistaire Rankin at the Pro Video Coalition has a review of the new features of the Foundry’s Nuke 7.

Damn I wish I could a copy of NUKE and learn it, but it is just way too far out of my price range! I had previously learned Shake when Apple dropped the price to $400, and really fell for Node based compositing, but gave up on it ages ago, but would love to take NUKE for a spin.