| GENARTS BUYS TINDER, TINDERBOX; WORKS WITH FOUNDRY ON NUKE PLUG-INS |  |   | | | CAMBRIDGE, MA — London’s The Foundry, makers of Nuke, Furnace and
Ocula, has sold off its Tinder and Tinderbox visual effects plug-ins
business to Cambridge-based GenArts, which offers Sapphire, Monsters,
Raptors and most recently ParticleIllusion. GenArts will begin
development, sales and support immediately. No staff will change hands,
but engineers at The Foundry will continue to work closely with GenArts
going forward. | | (2/16/2010) | | Randi Altman | | According to CEO Bill Collis, this will allow The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk) to continue to focus on the development of its high-end processing tools such as the existing Furnace and Ocular, and some new plug-ins coming down the road, and of course Nuke. The two companies will also collaborate on the development of GenArts (www.genarts.com) plug-ins and The Foundry’s host platform Nuke to deliver a more synchronized solution for workflow.
“Host platform development and partnering development are not always in sync but are key components to what the customers see as a single solution,” says GenArts’s CEO, Katherine Hays. “The Foundry, because they started as a plug-ins developer and then brought in the host platform [Nuke] is really quite visionary in understanding the importance of those two components being in sync, and this strategic alliance allows us to do that.”
Collis agrees The Foundry is in a unique position. “Because of our background we can see both sides of the equation and know how frustrating it could be as a plug-in manufacturer when the host doesn’t necessarily cooperate as they could. We want to come up more ways to cooperate with plug-in vendors, and that is the idea behind the strategic alliance we have formed with GenArts.”
Hayes emphasizes that with technology evolving the way it has, “with full floating point, GPU and stereoscopic becoming more prominent, the importance of the plug-ins and the host platform working well is extremely important to customers and their workflows.” She reports that the company will continue to work with other host platforms and points to the recent announcement of Sapphire 5 for Autodesk as an example.
The Foundry also plans to continue on its plug-ins path, focusing on its image processing offerings. “If you look at what we have been doing as a plug-ins company over the past five, six years, it’s all been based around Furnace and Ocular. These are our main strengths now, so we are going to keep doing that and we have some exciting plug-ins releases coming in the next month or two in that area.”
Both GenArts and The Foundry will be at NAB in April.
For those with questions about Tinder and Tinderbox, prices will remain the same, but here are just a few changes: Tinderbox will now be sold as a full suite as opposed to individual boxes; the minimum period for all license rentals will now be 30 days; and only node-locked licenses will be available for rent.
GenArts says that currently, there are no plans to combine Tinder or Tinderbox with Sapphire or Monsters to create a single product. For now, Tinder and Tinderbox will continue to be sold in their current form and at similar price points.
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