This is when it all changed …

[Walter Soyka]

[Oliver Peters] “I think also nodes works best on a single-shot basis, while layers works best for a timeline of several shots back-to-back. That’s evident by some of Stu Maschwitz’s DV Rebel and ProLost posts about doing complete show grading in AE.”

Yes indeed!

Why? Because the structure of the flow graph is static relative to time. Properties in nodes may change over time on the dope sheet, but the schematic itself is fixed over the entire duration of the output. That’s a non-issue for single shots, but to accommodate multiple shots in the same script, you need a massive structure, one schematic that can accommodate every combination of media in the entire multi-shot structure with all time-based variability contained solely in tool properties.

Contrast this with a layered timeline, which sacrifices some flexibility in arbitrary render pipeline control for a flow structure that provides compositing order on the vertical axis and variability over time on the horizontal axis.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Phil Hoppes]

Excellent analysis Walter. I use Nuke and AE and like using both. AE is fast and one does not have to bend your head around the whole linear workflow like you do with Nuke. For complicated comps however, especially with CGI, of which I do a fair amount, nothing comes close to what you can do with Nuke.

For all of us it’s conjecture at this point as to who will buy TF. I might go as far as to say whom ever does, Nuke is probably on pretty strong ground as to being impacted the least. One of my other favorite 3D programs, Modo, however may not fair so well. As mentioned here before the list of possible suitors is really quite small. I’d put Adobe and AD on the tops of those lists. While I’d like to think that Modo might survive an Adobe acquisition it is difficult to see. Adobe already has a very tight integration with Cinema4D creator Maxon. Heck they distribute a light version of 4D with AE. They would really upset their current user base if they dumped 4D for Modo and I can’t see them supporting multiple 3D authoring software so they would either sell off the assets of Modo or just scrap it. For AD to by TF the same scenario exists, Nuke would be supported very well and Modo is an also ran against 3DsMax and Maya. Just ask any XSI user …… that movie has already been played and the hero died…… badly.

We shall see…..

[Tim Wilson]

I’ve been thinking about this all week. Yes, this is what I do instead of give my full attention to my family. LOL

You know what bugs me about this? I’m an idiot. There’s no way I should know about this. I should only have heard this news after a a deal was made.

Think about any deal of any size in this space. Did you know DaVinci was for sale? Teranex? Did you know that Macromedia was up for selling Final Cut to Apple? Did you know that Imagineer was available if the fit was right? Go down the list. Big or small. How often do we EVER hear about stuff like this in advance? I can’t think of any examples at all.

That says a few things to me.

First, they couldn’t get the deal done through the usual methods. If they could have, they would have.

Regular channels include companies that specialize in this kind of deal for this market. I know the managing partners at MediaBridge Capital Advisers in particular (one was the CFO of Avid when I was there, the other I’ve crossed paths with many times over the years: he did the Boris-Media 100 deal, the $100 million+ sale of On2 to Google, etc), and I think they’re absolute aces.

There are others. If there was a deal to be made, couldn’t one of these specialists have made it?

The investment groups that the current owners outbid for TF just a few years ago surely told them to pound sand, right? Because I’m still not seeing enough upside for another group to see a sound investment here when they could be putting that money into Adobe and earning 20% a year, or buying another company that’s more seriously undervalued.

I’m not saying The Foundry is overvalued. Its current owners are an investment group, so any deal they pitch to another investment group would have to pass their own straight-face test first….but again, wouldn’t they have already made a deal if the could have?

I’m also noticing how often names like Adobe and Autodesk are coming up, and really, not a ton of others. Surely an investment group wanting $300 million for The Foundry would be frequenting the COW, right? LOL Don’t you think they approached Adobe, Autodesk, and a couple of other likely suspects first?

Heck, they probably approached Grant Petty, right?

Because this press release thing is the equivalent of Craigslist – just kinda throw it out there and see who nibbles. No sense of cultivation at all.

I wonder if part of the hitch is that a number of people who’d be interested had no idea of the scale of the thing. Did YOU know they had 250 people working there? Says so right on their website, and it never crossed my mind to look, but I can imagine that a number of people might have gotten the call, “Hey, we’re shopping The Foundry around, want to take a look?,” then heard the details and said, “What? You’re kidding. I can’t take on 250 people. And you want HOW much?”

Again, not saying that they’re not worth every penny, and that the next owner won’t make a bundle on it, but surely after such a big run-up in the past few years, this has to be a buy-and-hold deal….and with so few *obvious* potential buyers, who are the *actual* potential buyers…and if they’re realistic candidates, why didn’t one of them make the deal?

I dunno, maybe this is a play to drive the price up. They weren’t getting the reaction they wanted one on one, but maybe one of our putative prospects will step up to make sure that a competitor doesn’t acquire it first.

Anyway, I’m surely not alone in either ongoing vexation over this news, or letting my mind wander instead of giving my full attention to anything happening around me LOL but I wonder if you’ve had any more thoughts on this….

[Walter Soyka]

[Tim Wilson] “Because this press release thing is the equivalent of Craigslist – just kinda throw it out there and see who nibbles. No sense of cultivation at all.”

I don’t think it’s a press release. There’s nothing recent about The Foundry on Carlyle’s press page [link].

[Tim Wilson] “Again, not saying that they’re not worth every penny, and that the next owner won’t make a bundle on it, but surely after such a big run-up in the past few years, this has to be a buy-and-hold deal….and with so few *obvious* potential buyers, who are the *actual* potential buyers…and if they’re realistic candidates, why didn’t one of them make the deal? “

I was actually pretty surprised when The Foundry went PE: it seems like a difficult deal to exit.

At $300M, and considering the niche nature of the products, I think the deal is too expensive for the “obvious” buyers (Autodesk and Adobe).

Autodesk has the most obvious business case, but Autodesk M&E had $137.8M gross profit on $174.7M revenue last year.

How would Adobe sell Foundry products if they bought them? Continuing the current license model seems unlikely, but so does folding them into Creative Cloud.

Is the M&E segment interesting enough for a company like Dassault, who has a significant presence in an adjacent DCC field, to buy their way in? Is Nuke important enough to studio workflows to build a coalition to buy it out? Does The Foundry generate enough positive cash flow that buy-and-hold makes sense for an institutional investor like a pension plan?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]