Director and VFX supervisor Jeff Ranasinghe discusses Nuke Studio in a video promoting the upcoming VFX, editorial and finishing system. The Foundry has just announced that the software will be priced at $9,240.

The Foundry has announced pricing for Nuke Studio, its much-anticipated upcoming complete “VFX, editorial and finishing studio”, first unveiled at NAB earlier this year.

The news was announced at last night’s launch event for the Nuke 9 product range.

So how much will it cost?
New licences of Nuke Studio will be priced at $9,240 (£5,600 or €6,720), including one year’s maintenance: just under $4,000 less than the combined prices of NukeX and Hiero, two of the toolsets included in the product.

Registered users of both NukeX and Hiero will get a free upgrade to Nuke Studio until 31 December. Users of NukeX alone will able to upgrade to Nuke Studio for $1,650 (£1,000 or €1,200).

The Foundry is also introducing a 12-month payment plan enabling startups and freelancers to spread the cost of their first seat of Nuke, NukeX or Nuke Studio for $351.08, $660 or $770 per month.

It isn’t a rental deal, and leads to full ownership of a perpetual licence of the software.

What do you get for the money?
Nuke Studio provides a conform system, an online editing toolkit, ‘soft effects’, a 3D compositing environment, and collaboration tools, including the option to draw annotations directly on frames.

There is a strong emphasis on real-time workflows, with 4K playback and GPU-accelerated effects playable directly from within the timeline, opening up the possibilities of live finishing sessions with clients present.

And like its sister products, Nuke Studio has a Python API and OpenColorIO support.

“It’s much more than the sum of its parts,” said freelance VFX supervisor Alex Fry, speaking at last night’s launch event. “We’ve never had a tool with a timeline with real colour support and full scriptability.”

“The amount one person can do [with a single product] is going to go up so much.”

Competitively priced?
The Foundry has been careful to pitch Nuke Studio as complementary to existing tools, rather than a competitor to any specific current product. However, inevitably, guest speakers at the event did make comparisons to Autodesk’s tools – many of them centering on pricing.

“It’s democratised the whole process [of finishing],” said Realise Studio founder Paul Simpson. “Before we had to have everything going through Flame, which is just a terribly expensive piece of kit to use.”

Former Glassworks and MPC VFX supervisor Ludo Fealy also cited price as a key reason for switching to a Foundry-based pipeline at nineteentwenty, the boutique post house he co-founded last year.

Availability
The Nuke 9 product line, including Nuke Studio, is expected to ship before the end of November.

Read more about the Nuke 9 product line on The Foundry’s website

Read a complete feature comparison on Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio

Tags: Alex Fry, Editorial, Featured Articles, finishing, Flame, Ludo Fealy, nineteentwenty, nuke, Nuke 9, Nuke Studio, NukeX, Paul SImpson, payment plan, price, Realise Studio, The Foundry, upgrade, user feedback, vfx