The updates follow customer feedback, including on upcoming Amazon MGM Studios feature, The Thomas Crown Affair

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Foundry has unveiled updates to Nuke Stage, its virtual production and in-camera visual effects tool.

The updates are in response to customer feedback, including during the production of upcoming Amazon MGM Studios feature film The Thomas Crown Affair.

Nuke Stage enables the real-time playback of photoreal environments onto LED walls, and is hardware-agnostic. It runs on standard hardware, removing the need for proprietary infrastructure or specialised expertise.

This latest version includes an enhanced sequencer and one-click key framing, enabling virtual production operators to quickly build the story they want to tell, and respond iteratively to creative requests on-set, says Foundry.

Aligned with the updates in the recent Nuke 17.0 release, Nuke Stage takes advantage of the new 3D workflows in Nuke, enabling artists to work natively with Universal Scene Description (USD) in both tools.

Artists can create assets in Nuke and import the USD scenes into Nuke Stage, providing full control to edit and override in real-time, adding extra flexibility in production.

“Our goal with Nuke Stage has always been to break down the barriers between on-set production and post-production to make it easier to refine assets across stages of production, rather than start over. The tremendous engagement from studios since the initial launch has been guiding the ongoing development of Nuke Stage and the wider Nuke family, creating a more iterative and interconnected pipeline,” said Christy Anzelmo, chief product officer. 

“Nuke Stage is really exciting because it’s a product designed from the ground up for virtual production. It takes the best of what we see in plates, which is fidelity and high quality playback, as well as a degree of flexibility that we see with game engines, and puts them together into one package,” adds Christopher Simcock, founding director of Sensel Studio, which specializes in live events, immersive experiences, and virtual production. “Using Nuke Stage, we can set up scenes in half the time.”

Key Nuke Stage features include: 

— NotchLC support: Productions can harness the efficient GPU-powered video codec’s playback capabilities to run high-resolution, high-fidelity environments on LED walls. Studios can generate, prepare, and validate NotchLC media directly within existing Nuke workflows across Windows and Linux. 

— Live metadata capture: Scene data, camera tracking, lens metadata, timecode, scene settings, and colour decisions are automatically logged and preserved in the Vault, ensuring all the critical information is available in post.

— Gaussian Splat support: Native integration with 3D Gaussian Splats enables productions to more easily integrate captured content and deploy it as a photorealistic virtual environment on LED walls. 

— Standard hardware to scale with your needs: A single machine can drive multiple LED wall sections while remaining fully genlocked, reducing the total number of nodes needed on set and creating cost efficiencies.

— Improved operator functionality: An enhanced Sequencer and a new Media Gallery simplifies show programming and Feed Mapping functionality gives greater control of the content on screen.

— Expanded Python capability: External devices can hook into Nuke Stage, allowing on-set control to be given to relevant production teams.