Furnace fires productivity stateside

The Foundry have received large orders from leading US facilities and studios for their ground-breaking suite of plug-in tools, Furnace.
Following a promotional trip to California last month, CIS, Rhythm & Hues, Gray Matter, Warner Bros. Animation and Pacific Title & Arts Studio have all bought licenses. US beta site ESC in San Francisco, as well as London based facilities Skaramoosh, Double Negative, MPC and Framestore CFC are already using Furnace in their compositing pipeline.
Vikki Hamilton at the Foundry said: “Furnace is creating a real buzz in today’s stagnant market, and we are seeing this interest echoed worldwide.”
Cristin Pescosolido, Compositor at Esc Entertainment, has been using Furnace’s pixel flow retimer, Kronos. He said: “It gives me sophisticated retiming tools within the Shake package. Simple to use yet allows for a large amount of variation. Straight from the box, it’s definitely the easiest retiming tool to use. I have used Kronos on many shots, always with superb results.”
Furnace, built on motion estimation technology, is a suite of ten plug-in tools for Apple’s Shake compositing and effects system and is the result of two years’ research and development working closely with film effects houses. It is designed to reduce many complex day-to-day compositing problems, essentially saving companies both time and money. Plug-ins include wire and rig removal, a retimer, steadiness, deflicker, degrain and regrain, and three texture replication tools. Furnace is supported on all platforms for Shake, Irix, NT, Linux, OSX.
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