What Should The Foundry Do?

Speculation is easy, opinions are interesting. Some thoughts on what The Foundry should do with Nuke.

The facelift: Redesign the UI. Nuke feels cramped on one display. Lose the floating window model and adopt panes like Shake and Fusion have. Steal a color palette from a website you like.

The if-you-can't-beat-'em: Provide an option to view nodes' output without manually linking them to a viewer node.

The edumacation: Publish some video tutorials and release demos for all platforms.

The big, wide world: Outside the sanctum sanctorum of DD, little things like the ability to use Quicktime movies matter a lot.

The no-brainer: Integrate Furnace technology like crazy. The not-so-obvious adjunct: Don't raise the price in the process.

The clincher: Lower the price (even just a little). You are still competing against Shake, and what you need most is to convert users who have already made a financial investment in other solutions.

The clincher part two: Continue to support Windows, Linux, and OS X. Nobody's gotten anywhere by only living on one of the three, and nobody else is on all three.

The hard part: All the cool kids have particles.

Foundry Buys Nuke

The Foundry has acquired Nuke.

Update: The fxguide article now features an interview with The Foundry's Bill Collis.

Nuke is impressive to say the least, but it's a bit pasty from being behind closed doors for so long. Maybe a handsome Brit to escort it to its coming out party is just what it needs?

The world of compositing software is confusedly annoying right now. Shake has voluntarily succeeded the throne, only to watch Fusion stumble and fall on its face in an attempt to take the seat. After Effects, while still the best place to be creative with images, added 32-bit support to an aging architecture, effectively putting gold rims on the hoopty. Toxik offers you the option to composite using Russian politics.

Meanwhile, Nuke is production-proven, has great kung-fu under the hood, and an "interface" that makes Kodak's Cineon look luxurious. With a fresh take on how it might be bundled, dressed-up, and marketed, Nuke might just pull out ahead in the race to suck the least in the world of desktop compositing.

Read the story at fxguide.

Southwest Winners Announced

...and I ain't one of 'em. But the winners are pretty funny—check 'em out here.

Thanks to everyone who voted for Fender Bender. I still plan to post some behind-the-scenes goodies when I can.

OK, maybe this is your new crash cam

The Canon PowerShot TX1, announced pre-PMA in that weird way that they do. From the press release:

The versatile PowerShot TX1 digital camera helps users to shoot home movies that can look like the next Hollywood blockbuster while recording CD quality Stereo Sound, in 44 KHz. In fact, consumers can take full advantage of the 10x optical zoom lens and image stabilization while shooting movies, which is a rare feature in most digital cameras. In addition to recording widescreen 720p HD movies at a rate of 30 fps for stunning High Definition clarity, the TX1 digital camera shoots high-quality VGA (640 x 480 pixels) movies at 30 fps (in a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio) and has the option of shooting at 30 fps or 60 fps in the QVGA 320 x 240-pixel setting (also in 4:3 format).

I love the 16:9 30p movies my Panasonic LX1 shoots, but I use them for previs and videomatics only. With this, maybe (big maybe) you could do a little more. I just wish I could somehow convince camera manufacturers to make a 24 (or even 25) p mode on these things!