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.

Be Stu in 1995

I'm eBay-ing my very first ILM crew jacket. It's literally the first item of clothing I bought when I got my job at ILM, fresh out of CalArts with only an Amiga-made demo reel and a seriously embellished resume (oh, sure, I "know Unix." Who doesn't?).

What I like about this jacket is that it reminds me of the pre-computer-graphics days of ILM.

The thing even has my name embroidered onto the front, guaranteeing a nice low selling price! Unless your name is Stu. Then I got ya right where I want ya...

More Nodes vs. Layers

In this post I was not saying outright that nodal interfaces are better for compositing than After Effects's layered approach, but they do have distinct advatages—and not just for "high end" users. The thing is, After Effects could so easily have the best of both worlds, and allow users to use either or both method in any combination. If it did, it would be a tough app to beat.

Over the years I've wished for small improvements to After Effects's Flowchart View, to make it a better project navigation tool. But after spending some quality time using Shake, Nuke, and Fusion, I have changed my tune. I now feel very strongly that After Effects should have a pervasive and complete nodal interface, in addition to its layered comps.

For a microscopic example of why, witness a post from late last year, where for some reason I rose to a challenge posted on the After Effects list of creating a solar corona effect. It's a simple project, but it has a couple precomps and adjustment layers, so anyone wishing to learn how I created the effect is left to dissect the project file. Compare that with the Fusion version, and it's plain to see, even for those not accustomed to a nodal environment, what is happening where. The UI is so precisely descriptive of the process that no steps, no tutorial, and no arcane knowledge are necessary in order to grok the technique.

Nodal apps have a reputation for being "high end" and unapproachable, but I call bullshit on that. Take a simple example of displacing an image with some fractal noise. In a nodal system, this would be three nodes; a loader, a noise creator, and a displacement. Anyone, with any level of experience, would get this right on the first try in Fusion. But put the same problem to a new After Effects user, and watch them struggle. Once you start explain to them how, because of the internal order of operations, it is necessary to precomp the noise layer, you are asking them to imagine the nodal structure of their composite in their head.

After Effects users are visual people, but in this example After Effects has now eliminated any visual connection between the noise layer and the displacement effect. Sure, there are several places where you can see that "Noise Precomp" is used in "Comp 1," but the very fact that there are many places to check this is indication that there's no one good place like there is in Shake. One of the most important connections, between the Displacement Map effect (on Comp 1 layer 1) and the Fractal Noise layer (Comp 1 layer 2), isn't even shown!

Adobe, please give After Effects complete nodal capabilities. Look to Combustion and Toxik for inspiration. Both have layered comps, and both allow you to work without ever looking at the nodes if that's your choice. In other words, I'm not advocating changing anything (big) about how After Effects works—I am simply asking for the UI to show how After Effects works.