Final Cut User

I have been waiting a few months for this to come out while keeping tabs on the development stages of this customizable playback software.Tweak Software is releasing RV, the company’s first commercially available software package, announced Seth Rosenthal, founder and president. RV is a highly customizable cross-platform image and sequence viewer that is capable of playing back uncompressed film resolution clips. Free downloadable trial versions of the software are available upon request at Tweaksoftware.com

RV is a real-time, film resolution, high-dynamic-range image and sequence viewer for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The application can play back uncompressed film resolution sequences, and includes native support for stereo 3D. RV combines a flexible architecture and a hardware accelerated compositing pipeline with a lean, polished design tailored to professional digital artists.

Key Features of RV:

• Real-time playback for desktop, dailies and projection
• Customizable, extensible architecture
• Real-time hardware color correction
• High dynamic range, floating point image pipeline
• Advanced color management with support for OpenExr style linear-light scene-referred workflow
• Native stereoscopic 3D support
• RVIO—a stand alone batch image-processing tool to convert, conform, slate, color correct and composite image sequences
• Comparison, tiling, compositing and playback of any number of sources
• Multi-channel audio with real-time floating point re-sampling
• Open source session file format (with Python/C++ tools)

RV is the first application to be commercially released from Tweak Software. It was developed by artists, for artists, to handle the company’s own high-end VFX projects. Founders Jim Hourihan and Seth Rosenthal spun off Tweak Software from Tweak Films in 2007. Tweak Films earned a VES Award for work on the memorable New York tidal wave sequence in The Day After Tomorrow and a Hong Kong Film award for VFX on Hero. The company established a reputation for tackling R&D intensive projects and has developed several proprietary VFX tools since it was founded in 2001.“High-end shops typically rely on home-grown playback tools that are hard to replace because they are deeply entwined in artist workflows,” explained Rosenthal.

“RV is very customizable and that makes it the first effective replacement for those proprietary viewers. But more importantly, if your work is all about images, you should have a great image viewer. Jim has a long history of creating refined tools for artists, and he designed RV from the ground up to be the kind of tool we wanted to use ourselves. RV has spread quite quickly in its pre-release form just through word of mouth, and based on feedback from our early adopters, we are taking the right approach.”RV is coming to market in a release version 3.4, having undergone multiple generations of development for internal use at Tweak Films. To date, RV has benefited Tweak’s projects as well as projects for a select group of major effects facilities, including WETA Digital, which adopted a pre-release version in 2006. RV is currently available directly through Tweak Software Tweaksoftware.com at the price of $299 per node locked license and $369 per floating license.