Qt provided The Foundry with a solution that
required minimal tweaking and customization.
The Foundry is a leading developer of visual effects and image processing
technologies that boost productivity and workflow in film and video post
production. The company was established in 1996 by Bruno Nicoletti and Simon
Robinson, both intimate with high-end post production facilities across the
globe, and together they produced the Tinder plug-ins for Discreet's® Flame®
systems – the first set of such plug-ins to be commercially available. The
Foundry has grown considerably since its early days; the company now
successfully licenses its sophisticated image processing technology to third
parties, holds a portfolio comprising three Academy Award® winning products
including high-end compositing application Nuke and operates offices in London and LA. The
Foundry’s innovative products are renowned worldwide and support a wide range
of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment
Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Fusion, Nuke, Scratch and Shake.
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The Challenge
The Foundry embarked on a project to release Nuke 5.0, a powerful compositing
application bringing speed, functionality and flexibility to the VFX pipeline.
Nuke 5.0 is particularly valued for its strengths in multi-channel compositing
and the 3D workspace. A massive product redesign was undertaken which required
an easy-to-use interface for compositors, cross-platform performance, a
flexible widget set and long-term support from the vendor and developer
community.
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- Nuke 5.0 Screenshot
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The Solution
In Qt, The Foundry found a solution that required minimal tweaking and
customization to achieve an identical look and feel across each operating
system. The flexible Qt application framework proved to be a tremendous
advantage by allowing the company to concentrate on its core strengths instead
of developing or maintaining its own tools. The Foundry needed to work with a
provider that was committed to long term development and that offered an
expansive user base. Qt’s developer community delivered on all fronts.
The Value
With Qt, The Foundry not only substantially improved the look and feel of the
newly redesigned Nuke, but it also saved on development time. The Qt framework
saved the Nuke project approximately 15% of time freeing development resources
to further incorporate enhancing user-experience features for compositors. The
result is a product with an improved interface and enriched product
functionality.
“Qt allows us to deliver a consistent and attractive cross-platform
interface without devoting a huge amount of engineering resource. As a whole,
Qt, eliminates most cross-platform worries, provides a consistent
cross-platform user experience and facilitates more creative solutions to user
interface and work flow issues.” - Andrew Whitmore, engineering
manager at The Foundry.
