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.