The Foundry

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.

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.

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.