The Foundry’s head of research and development Dr. Bill Collis, chief engineer Simon Robinson, and senior software engineer Ben Kent, along with consultant Dr. Anil Kokaram, received the Academy Award® for their roles in the design and development of The Foundry’s Furnace, an integrated suite of software visual effects plug-ins, which robustly utilises temporal coherence for enhancing visual effects in motion picture sequences. The Academy considered the Furnace toolset’s modularity, flexibility and robustness to have set a high standard of quality for optical flow based image manipulation.
Optical flow or motion estimation is an area in which The Foundry has pioneered a new generation of algorithms which enable the tracking of every pixel in a frame to subsequent and preceding frames. Launched in 2002, The Foundry’s Furnace was the first comprehensive toolset to deploy these new algorithms, with the retiming tool Kronos rapidly becoming a market leading technology for speeding up and slowing down footage. Today over 30 plug-ins within the Furnace package take advantage of advanced motion estimation technology, providing digital visual effects artists with a range of sophisticated plug-ins to tackle everyday compositing issues as diverse as wire and rig removal, grain reduction, dust busting, image stabilisation, super resolution, auto rotoscoping, image segmentation, flicker removal, image stitching, adding motion blur, tracking and generating depth mattes amongst many others.
Furnace enjoys an enviable reputation, having been used on a host of high profile feature films including Casino Royale, X-Men 3 The Last Stand, The Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, King Kong, The Lord of The Rings Trilogy, Poseidon and Superman Returns.
Dr Bill Collis commented, “We are absolutely delighted to have our innovation recognised by the Academy. We continuously strive to deliver real solutions and cutting-edge technology for the motion picture industry, and to receive such a high accolade is a great honour. Thanks must also go to our customers; we are privileged to work closely with leading companies around the world such as Weta Digital, Pacific Title and Art Studio, Double Negative and The Moving Picture Company. Their requirements for technology that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, willingness to trial our new motion estimation applications, and eagerness to share their views, have made a huge contribution to Furnace and helped it become the success it is today.”
The Foundry was the only British company to be honoured with a 2006 Academy Award® and was one of only four companies to be awarded the Scientific and Engineering Award Academy Plaque®.