The Foundry on Friday released Furnace 3 for Shake, a new version of its suite of image processing plug-ins aimed at helping workflow and productivity. The major ones added to the bundle are DeBlur, which automatically removes motion and out-of-focus blur; MatchGrade, an automatic color histogram matcher; and Tracker, a multi-point tracker that can track the most difficult areas of a moving image.
Other new plug-ins in Furnace 3 include Color/Align, which automatically removes discrepancies in the alignment of the three color channels in an image; Depth, which produces a relative depth matte from a sequence; DeNoise, which can remove noise and grain from footage without introducing artifacts; MatteToRoto, which helps edit and clean up poorly defined RGB and alpha mattes; and MotionBlur, which adds motion blur to a sequence.
The last three new plug-ins, which bring the total in Furnace 3 to 30, are MotionMatte, which creates a segmented version of the foreground and associated alpha matte in a sequence; PlanarPatcher, which tracks planar regions in a sequence; and Splicer, which stitches together arbitrarily-shaped images or parts of an image.
Furnace 3 is a US$2,000 upgrade node-locked, or $3,000 as a floating license. The full version is $4,000. Itis compatible with Shake 3.5 or 4.0.