VFX is cinematography continued by other means — the completion of a vision that the camera could only begin on the day.
Yet for all the sophistication of modern VFX pipelines, the lens has remained surprisingly silent, yet its influence has been anything but. Distortion that needs solving before a single track can be laid. A character and rendering quality that VFX must match but cannot directly measure. Focal length behaviour that shifts with focus breathing, shot by shot. These are not incidental properties of the glass. They are exactly why the cinematographer chose that lens. Every quirk that makes a lens challenging for post-production is a quality that was deliberately selected on the day to shape the image, tell the story and complete the vision. VFX doesn’t just need to work around what the lens did. It needs to understand what the cinematographer intended and honour it. Until now, the pipeline has had no way to do either.
Cooke /i Technology was built on the conviction that the lens should not have to stay silent. For over 20 years it has been capturing metadata directly from the lens, frame by frame, focus distance, T-stop, focal length, and more, through an industry-standard ecosystem embedded in productions worldwide. Not approximated. Not inferred from a slate. Read from the lens itself and carried forward with the image. The information has been there. The pipeline simply hadn’t had a way to act on it.
Cooke’s new Nuke plugin is where that changes and where something larger begins. Precisely measured lens profiles, informed by per-frame /i metadata, bringing a new level of accuracy to compositing and matchmove workflows that simply wasn’t reachable before.
On the night:
- First look at the Cooke Lens Distortion plugin for Nuke
- Discussion about the /i Technology ecosystem
- Hands-on time with Cooke glass and the team behind the technology
- An open evening to connect with Cooke’s senior leadership, optics engineers, and fellow practitioners
Doors open at 7PM. Presentations begin at 7:30PM
Featured Speaker
Jordan Thistlewood — Chief Innovation Officer, Cooke Optics
With 15+ years in VFX followed by a career in product leadership at Foundry — including as Director of Product Management for Katana — Jordan understands the pipeline challenges these tools are designed to solve. As CINO at Cooke, he’s working at the intersection of optics and post-production to close the gap between what a lens records and what a VFX pipeline can see.
When: April 3, 7PM doors open / 7:30PM presentations Where: 4131 Vanowen Pl, Burbank, CA 91505
Reserve your spot below