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Foundry's MasterClass London

I was at the Foundry’s MasterClass today. An event mainly focused on stereoscopic 3D. It was ‘OK’ overall, a couple of boring promotional presentations! One on Storm which I think it’s not very practical right now(from visual effects pipe line’s stand point) until it has more editing power and camera format support, and the other one from MPC on a very interesting work but a bit boring! (watch the ad)

Of course that’s not all that happened! There was an interesting intro to stereoscopic, the theory and setup at the beginning followed quickly by A breakdown of a shot in The Hole from the VFX Supervisor (John Gajdecki) which revealed some interesting aspect of setting up a 3d rig and the production and post production issues that you might face. You can listen to his presentation below.
John Gajdecki – The Hole.

Next, and rest of presentations in some ways, were promoting OCULA; the stereoscopic post production plug-ins dealing specially with polarizing effect happening when shooting stereo and vertical alignment of the footages.OCULA was apparently heavily used and developed alongside Tron. This was followed by MARI, the 3D texture painting package which is actually a very good tool and it’s new abilities to work with animated geometry and camera to do projection work; not that impressive at it’s current stage for projection since all this can be done inside Nuke in a similar fashion.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was the stereo conversions methods in Nuke which you can watch below.This highly anticipated part was rather very short and you could see some people, a small group, leaving afterwards. Apologies for the shaky camera! it was all hand held.

There was also a sneak peak of the Nuke 6.3 showing some pretty cool new features such as 3D particle system and planar tracking. Watch it below.

The event was concluded by a short breakdown of a Tron’s shot. It was alright, not as great as they were teasing us for it the entire day! especially with so many breakdowns of the show already available online. A better presentation was expected from a successful company such as The Foundry. I understand they need to do marketing for their product, but when you call it a Master Class you don’t expect to hear a sale pitch(for the lack of a better word) which was the first impression of many of the audiences. I think they can hold promotional events and keep the master classes technical and for the professionals. Overall it was ok. It’s important to say that expectations are very high from the Foundry. Maybe if this presentation was from any other company I wouldn’t have been this critical, but Nuke has been a sensational tool and it has changed the industry in many ways and people have high regards and respect for the Foundry. Besides,I got my Nuke badge and T-shirt .. so… can’t complain really! 😉

*The videos are intended only for public use,
Although this was a public event, the foundry has the rights to ask for removal or alterations should they find it necessary.
**This article is only reflecting a personal opinion. It was revised on 11/02/2011

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6 thoughts

      • john

        Let me continue on from Bob.. Sam, you are a negative chop.

        You should probably ask the company you freeloaded off if you could post pirated video clips.

        PS. It’s ‘particle’.. not ‘participle’

        • sam

          Thanks for your comment John – and pointing out the miss spell.
          I admit that I might have been a little harsh but this only because of the very high expectations I have from the foundry. I love their products but this is a personal weblog nonetheless and I speak freely without the limitations of writing a professional review. Having said that, many people felt more or less the same and disappointed with the overall presentation including my manager sitting next to me. This is not coz the foundry did anything wrong – it’s people’s expectations of a master’s class ran by them, overall it was ok like I said in the article.

          This was a public event and posting the videos is just for informing other interested people, who couldn’t be there, of the company’s latest developments etc and has no commercial values for me. I didn’t post any videos of the other presentations from people of other company’s or if any video clip was shown of a film because of the copyright. The one I found very valuable to share I used only the audio file to avoid showing copyrighted materials as well.

          I didn’t write this to disrespect the Foundry in any way – if anything they have my everlasting gratitude for developing such a brilliant piece of software;Nuke – at the end of the day I’m just one of the customers and this is my opinion and I don’t think it’s fair to label me or judge me based a few honest lines written in a personal blog.

  • paul

    this review is absolutely consistent with my experience at the LA Stereo MasterClass (and it’s ironic, because I ended up on this site because I was searching for Ocula best practices). I love the foundry folks and find their products pretty damn amazing. that said, for something billed as a “Stereo Master Class”, the all-day affair had little to no actual stereo information and did indeed feel more like an-all day marketing session. a significant number of people I spoke to felt the same way.

    again, not a knock on the foundry nor the presenters … the billing was just incredibly misleading. in no way was that a “master class”

    • sam

      Thanks for your comment paul, I completely agree. While I’ve got nothing but respect for the Foundry, their master classes are not meeting the expectoration. There are expectorations created by them as a result of their brilliant products.

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