San Francisco, CA (July 30, 2008)-Tweak Software, developers of RV, the image and sequence viewer for animation and visual effects, announced today that Lucasfilm Ltd. has selected RV as its playback tool of choice. RV will replace Loupe, the legendary playback software originally developed at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and used at sister companies Lucasfilm Animation, Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, and LucasArts.
“With Tweak’s RV we found an elegant solution that we can customize and integrate into our pipelines for film, animation and episodic production,” explained Richard Kerris, Lucasfilm Chief Technology Officer. “There are no other playback tools on the market that come close to RV’s ability to customize and seamlessly integrate within our environment, which was an absolute requirement for us”.
RV is a real-time, film resolution, high-dynamic-range image and sequence viewer for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The application also 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. RV was developed by Tweak Software founders: Jim Hourihan, former principal R&D developer at ILM and Seth Rosenthal former ILM motion capture supervisor. Free downloadable trial versions of the software are available upon request at www.tweaksoftware.com.
“RV has been very easy to integrate into our production workflow. RV’s features and flexibility give the user the ability to customize it to their specific needs for any given task or procedure. Most important is that the tool is artist friendly and easy to learn. It’s a great tool that scales for our production needs,” said Tony Plett, Managing Digital Supervisor, Lucasfilm Animation.
“We developed RV based on our own visual effects production needs, and commercialized the software to provide other shops with a playback platform that they can tailor to their own way of working,” explained Seth Rosenthal, co-founder and president, Tweak Software. “Having Lucasfilm choose RV software is the ultimate validation of RV’s design philosophy and architecture.”