Press Release

The Foundry demonstrated Furnace 2 at IBC 2005. This latest release from the London based visual effects developer, has proved to be a huge hit with over 50 licenses sold in the first week of its release.
Ten new sparks have been added to the existing Furnace tool-set, these include; dirt and scratch removal; channel repair; an assisted roto tool; keying without blue screens; the means to build large clean plates from clips; additional texture creation; damaged frame recreation – in a sequence – using motion estimation; and a spark to generate high quality images using several [poor quality] frames.
Ben Grossmann, Gray Matter FX , states, “I spent nine hours writing complicated expressions to remove high frequency noise from a hand-held camera move. Then I got Furnace, I tried the shot in Steadiness, spent two minutes clicking the mouse. Problem solved. Next shot. It was that easy.”
The culmination of over five years’ research into motion estimation, Furnace has been developed in close conjunction with effects houses across the globe resulting in a suite of incredibly useful sparks designed to help compositors correct every day problems.
Key features include:
  • DirtRemoval. Automatically detects where the image defects are and uses motion compensated pixels from both the previous and following frames to produce a seamless repair.
  • SmartZoom. Zoom in on an object without losing picture detail. Using motion estimation technology, SmartZoom allows the user to produce a single, higher resolution output, image.
  • ColourMatte. Detailed mattes from scenes not shot against blue/green screen.
  • SmartPlate. Provides the ability to clean-up moving objects within a scene and extrapolate larger still plates from a sequence of images.
  • MotionRepair. Seamlessly replaces damaged or missing frames.
  • ScratchRepair. The algorithm combines spatial repair with a motion compensated filter in order to remove vertical lines whilst minimising damage to the image.
  • ChannelRepair. Designed to repair film damage that only affects some of the channels of the film, e.g. water, chemical or mechanical damage to the top layer of the film.
  • EdgeMatte. Designed to save rotoscoping time. Roughly outline the object to be roto’d and EdgeMatte will accurately snap to the edge, producing an alpha matte of the object.
  • SmartFill. Uses advanced algorithms to seamlessly remove unwanted items from a picture. The technique uses pixels from the surrounding region and previous and next frames to fill in the missing region of the image and produce a seamless repair.
  • MotionSmooth. Smooths temporal artefacts.
Availability and Pricing
Now shipping, Furnace 2 is available to existing customers for:
Node-locked upgrade $2000; Floating upgrade $3,000
With the following variations;
Furnace 2 node-locked priced at: $6,600
Furnace 2 float priced at: $9,900