The Foundry is extending its sights outside of vfx with the development of STORM, which the company says will grow to be an affordable, all-in-one vfx, editorial and finishing tool.
Best known for Nuke (which was initially developed inhouse at vfx giant Digital Domain) and visual effects plug-ins, The Foundry has developed STORM from the ground up, and has just released a beta version of the software available at www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/storm/try/
STORM has had a fairly low-key release so far, with news of the product slipping out quietly at NAB, but this is largely down to the initial release being a relatively unassuming precursor to what’s likely to follow.
As it currently stands, STORM is simply pitched as a more fully featured replacement to Red’s own free (and perpetually in beta) raw rushes colour corrector RedCine-X. Red’s Ted Schilowitz describes STORM as ”REDCine-X on steroids”.
It currently captures picture, sound and metadata from Red cameras, where it can be reviewed, quality checked, tagged and organised and cinematographic looks tried out via colour correction tools.
However, the £250 software package also crucially bundles in a timeline editor. The editor is relatively feature-light at present, but, says The Foundry’s head of product development Richard Shackleton, “Next year we want to expand it and create a big brother STORM product that’s a full production hub.”
The enhanced version (which will be closer to £1,000 than £250) will have a much more advanced timeline editor, be able to do basic vfx as well as the conform and grade.
“It’s not going to be for high-end work,” says Shackleton, but will do “the bulk of work” that passes through a post production facility. The enhanced version of STORM could be ready for NAB 2011, he adds.
The Foundry is investing heavily in STORM’s development with a team of four dedicated to building up the product’s feature set.
The market for combined editorial, vfx, grading and finishing tools is already quite crowded, with the likes of Avid, Apple and Autodesk already offering similarly broad reaching products, so only time will tell if there’s space for The Foundry’s own addition to the marketplace.
Staff Reporter
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