IBC 2009

Jon Starck - 16 September 2009.

Well I had a fantastic time at IBC this year - it's nice when they let you out of the office. I was even allowed to be near customers!

I only had one day and ended up spending the whole time at The Foundry stand. It's a friendly place to be and there was just so much interesting stuff going on. There were a couple of highlights - seeing the reaction to some of our new research technology was fantastic and chatting with customers about some of the Nuke production work gave us some great ideas for new plug-ins.

Simon (our Chief Scientist) and Ben (Demo Artist extraordinaire) were showing off the 2D to 3D technology we are working on in our i3dLive research project. In i3dLive we're generating stereo views from one or more non-stereo cameras. Ben and Simon tracked a single view sequence using our new CameraTracker for NukeX, calculated depth using a DepthCalculator plug-in we're working on and synthesised a stereo camera in Nuke's 3D environment. The cool trick is that once you're rendering using a 3D camera you can do 3D camera stabilisation as well as control interaxial convergence and separation to create a perfect stereo view. Neat.

Blenheim Palace, stabilised 3D stereo camera created from a single camera.

The Foundry

Blenheim Palace, stereoscopic image generated from the 3D stereo camera.

The Foundry

Shervin Shoughian from Image Engine did a great demo of their work on District 9. They had some great tricks for image relighting using point geometry. Take a CG position pass (an XYZ render), convert it to point geometry and interactively update lighting effects in your comp by moving lights around in Nuke's 3D environment. Relighting is one of the problems we're looking at in our i3dPost research project. So thanks to the Image Engine guys and gals for sorting that out. They also showed some nice work on generating clean plates in tracked sequences. Wouldn't it be handy if there was a plug-in to automatically calculate a Nuke Camera for all the reference images they had?

So, as always, a hundred and one ideas on cool stuff to add to Nuke. It really is handy talking to clients and chatting through the possibilities.