MPC Taps The Foundry’s KATANA

London, UK -- Visual effects software developer The Foundry [1] announced that VFX facility MPC [2] (The Moving Picture Company) has purchased a site license of KATANA to replace its in-house lighting system. To compete in the highly competitive VFX industry, MPC were looking for a new, more powerful system to take its lighting department to the next level. The evaluation team at MPC found that KATANA enabled artists to be more productive than ever and felt that the software would improve its ability to attract and retain talented artists going forward.

Nick Cannon, Director of Technology and Operations, MPC Film comments, "We’re excited to be able to integrate KATANA into our pipeline and look forward to being able to reduce the admin overhead for our Lighting TDs. Lighters will now be able to spend more time actually lighting rather than managing and debugging assets. KATANA will empower our lighters to have more control over their scenes and make changes without having to be so dependent on other members of the crew. It will also enable tight integration of interactive rendering giving us more rapid iterations so we can deliver better looking assets and shots sooner.”

Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA takes an innovative recipe based approach, enabling facilities large and small to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort.

Andy Lomas, KATANA Product Manager at The Foundry comments, “We’ve been working with MPC for some time to help them understand the potential of KATANA and how it will improve efficiency and streamline the way their lighting team work on feature films. We work with studios of all sizes, answering challenging questions and addressing any issues they may have, to ensure that they are 100% happy with product before they adopt.”

MPC’s Cannon continues, “Our existing in-house lighting toolset is very powerful but its complexity means it takes a long time to learn. As KATANA becomes a prevalent tool in the industry, we expect there to soon be a pool of KATANA talent we can draw on so new artists will be fully up to speed in around a week rather than taking six months to learn the full power of our existing in-house toolset from scratch.”

KATANA 1.1 was released in June 2012 and is in use in production at studios of all sizes including ILM, Digital Domain, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Spin VFX, LAIKA and Reliance MediaWorks. KATANA is also under evaluation at a number of studios worldwide.

Source: The Foundry