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The Foundry Delivers Increased Performance and Efficiency with NUKE 10

NUKE 10 offers key new updates across NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO, improving performance in Roto Paint, Vector Blur, timeline manipulation and transcoding, while NVIDIA multi-GPU support speeds up processing time for GPU-accelerated nodes.

LONDON -- Creative software developer The Foundry has announced the launch of NUKE 10, designed to make artists more productive. With a focus on accelerating everyday workflows by enhancing performance, increasing stability and delivering new functionality in the areas that matter most to artists, NUKE 10 delivers key new updates across the entire product range: NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO.

“It’s been almost a decade since The Foundry took over development of NUKE and in that time we’ve focused on consistently delivering new features that have broadened the scope of its user base and made it the global tool of choice for anyone delivering high-end media productions, no matter how big or small.  We also expanded the NUKE family with the launch of NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO,” said Andy Whitmore, chief product officer at The Foundry. “One of The Foundry’s aims is to make tools that help artists be more efficient, so they can focus their energy on using their creativity to achieve the highest quality results. With NUKE 10, we’re putting an emphasis on performance, stability and productivity to attain that goal.”

To help eliminate bottlenecks from common tasks, NUKE 10 improves performance across several areas: Roto Paint, Vector Blur, timeline manipulation and transcoding are all now significantly faster, while NVIDIA multi-GPU support speeds up processing time for GPU-accelerated nodes on appropriate hardware.

NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO also save time for common clean-up, replacement and augmentation tasks through a new Smart Vector toolset, which draws on technology from The Foundry’s research team. With it, artists can generate high-quality motion vectors from image sequences and use them to automatically push or warp paint or textures across a range of frames, replacing a tedious and time-consuming manual process.

“Our priority, as always with the release of major updates to NUKE, is to answer our customers’ needs,” said The Foundry’s NUKE product manager Sean Brice. “With NUKE 10 we’ve really focused on NUKE’s day-to-day performance to help make artists’ lives easier. This year is a big milestone for us and we’re really pleased with the results, but most importantly we hope that our customers are too.”

NUKE STUDIO 10’s editorial and finishing toolset also receives updates: in addition to faster performance, there are new in-timeline Soft Effects that include real-time chroma keying, color correction and the ability to create custom GPU-enabled effects, together with enhanced audio handling.

“NUKE 10 is a one-man studio powerhouse, and with Color Correct as a Soft Effect in NUKE STUDIO, I can do advanced grading on the fly,” says Hugo Guerra, cinematic director at Fire Without Smoke. “I can't wait: bring it on!”

Certification for a new HP system that will ensure 4K real-time playback in NUKE STUDIO is expected shortly. NUKE 10, NUKEX 10 and NUKE STUDIO 10 are available in the coming weeks, together with HIERO 10 and HIEROPLAYER 10.

What’s new in NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO

  • Accelerated Roto Paint performance: Now users can enjoy significantly improved interactivity and stability when working with large numbers of paint strokes in a single RotoPaint node. With a number of bottlenecks identified and addressed, artists will be able to do far more painting or cloning in a single node where previously they would need to split it up over multiple nodes, with all the inherent workflow complications that entailed.
  • Vector Blur enhancements: NUKE’s VectorBlur node has been revamped with a more intuitive UI, accelerated performance and higher quality motion blur results, including areas of occlusion. The new version makes better use of the available processing power in machines with many CPU cores and offers the option for GPU acceleration.
  • Localization system improvements: The Foundry has unified the way NUKE and NUKE STUDIO perform localization, taking the best parts of each system to produce a faster, easier-to-use solution that features a more informative and responsive UI, together with greater stability.
  • OCIO Integration: OpenColorIO has been integrated into NUKE’s root LUT management, so artists can use the same process for accessing OCIO LUTs as any other type, eliminating the need to add OCIOColorspace nodes.
  • NVIDIA multi-GPU support: Take better advantage of your graphics hardware investment to accelerate your workflows, with new support for harnessing the power of dual identical NVIDIA GPUs for all existing and future GPU-accelerated nodes.
  • BlinkScript GLSL GPU path: The BlinkScript node can now use a GLSL GPU path, allowing you to create custom GPU-enabled Soft Effects on the NUKE STUDIO timeline and in the node graph.
  • VFX Reference Platform 2015 updates: Updates to the VFX Reference Platform libraries include Pyside to version 1.2.2; EXR to version 2.2, featuring DWAA/DWAB compression; and GCC to version 4.8.3.

What’s new in NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO

  • Smart Vector toolset: The Smart Vector toolset delivers a powerful new workflow for adding textures or paint to image sequences that contain complex motion or subtle detail. With it, you can generate high-quality motion vectors and use them to automatically push or warp an input image sequence across a range of frames. With the Smart Vector toolset, you can replace tedious and error-prone manual clean-up, replacement and augmentation tasks with a simple and accurate automated process.
  • NUKE Assist updates: The NUKE Assist licenses included with NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO now include Blur and Vector Distort nodes, extending the range of everyday paint, roto and tracking tasks for which they can be used.

What’s new in NUKE STUDIO

  • Timeline performance: NUKE STUDIO now offers a faster and more satisfying timeline editing and conform experience, especially when working with longer timelines or timelines with many items. Key improvements include better responsiveness when interacting with the timeline user interface along with faster and more stable playback on both short and long-form projects.
  • Transcode performance: Users will experience faster export speed due to accelerated file transcoding when converting NUKE’s native DPX format to Apple QuickTime ProRes 4444 and Apple QuickTime ProRes 422.
  • Chroma Keyer Soft Effect: NUKE STUDIO’s new Chroma Keyer Soft Effect delivers real-time keying directly in the timeline. When used in conjunction with the Overlay Track, Chroma Keyer lets you see your keyed element on top of background elements, enabling you to make adjustments in context. The corresponding ChromaKeyer compositing node is available in all NUKE products.
  • Blink Script Soft Effect: The BlinkScript node is now available as a Soft Effect on the NUKE STUDIO timeline, allowing you to create custom GPU-enabled Soft Effects on the timeline and in the node graph.
  • Color Correct Soft Effect: A new Color Correct Soft Effect brings the functionality of the frequently used ColorCorrect node to the timeline, letting you make quick adjustments to contrast, gamma, gain, and offset without jumping to the node graph.
  • Audio handling: You can now scrub or step through audio samples in order to easily match specific points in a clip or sequence. In addition, there’s a new option to view a half waveform for better use of screen real estate.

Source: The Foundry

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.