AE PLUG-IN NEWS:

This edition's contents:

(1) Sakurai Optical Labs Final Focus and Iris Filter

(2) Re:vision updates Fieldskit and Refill

(3) ObviousFX not so obvious for Mac

(4) Digital Trove "Prime" released

(5) DFT 55mm 4.0 adds 15 new filters

(6) CycoreFX HD

(7) Synthetic-Ap Color Finesse 1.5.1

(8) Panopticum Curtains now for Mac

(9) Profound Effects updates available

(10) The Foundry ìFurnace AEî 1.0

(11) The Orphanage/Red Giant Magic Bullet for Editors & Misfire

(12) The Orphanage/Red Giant eLin

(13) 4th. Party Effects for Useful Things

(14) Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro 4.0

(15) Toolfarm AE 6.5 Compatibility list

(1) Slightly old news (April) but I hadnít seen it before, Sakurai Optical Labs (reiji.net) have introduced version 2 of their Final Focus depth of field product, which they claim to be 5-20 times faster than version 1! They set itís powered by a ìjet engineî. Microsoft apparently haven't seen this site yet ;-o  Prices remain high @ US$630 for D1 res up to US$2520 for Cineon res.

Their Iris Filter product has also advanced its version. Itís now 5.6 and boasts 5-30 times ìjet engineî acceleration. Prices for 8-bit are: D1: $299. HDTV: $630., Cineon: $1260. For 16-bit ìplease ask for pricesî ñ sounds ominous! The OS-X version requires Panther.

(2) Re:vision effects have updated versions of 2 sets: Fieldskit 1.4.2 and Refill 1.2. Main addition to Fieldskit is that it now works in PPro, although there are some minor bugfixes too, so Fieldskit owners are well advised to download it. Refill is now multiprocessor aware. There have also been tweaks to:

- Twixtor, now at version 3.2.1
- ReelSmart Motion Blur, now at version 3.0.1
- SmoothKit, now at version 1.3

(3) A new (to AE anyway) plug-in developer has surfaced at www.obviousfx.com. They have two commercial AE plug-ins so far (Inverse Telecine at US$70 and ñ on June 30^th. 2004 ñ Milky Way, a plug-in which emulates patterns made by an audio-vizualizer like iTunes (more specifically it emulates the Milk-Drop plug-in for WinAmp.) There are also two freeware plugs (Copy Image and Erodilation) the second of which was produced quickly in response to a request on the AE list. The first is an AEGP plug, which puts an extra command in AE's Edit menu, to copy the current Comp image to the clipboard. They are also promising " a number of releases in Q2/Q3 '04" although these might be "video tools" rather than plug-ins for AE. In any case, all products are aimed at the Windows 2K and XP markets, so OS-X users can currently say "ptah!" and treat them with the scorn they deserve ;-)

However, ObviousFX's Andrew Millin has indicated on the AE Listserv that most of the plugs will be ported to OS-X. He said that:

<<We're working on ports for our other plugs, I believe "real soon now" is the technical term for their delivery date. But Milky Way will probably remain Windows only... it does some tricky DLL handling to support its software based OpenGL renderer, so it doesn't clash with the OpenGL renderer used by After Effects.>> There is no statement to that effect on the ObviousFX site thought.

.For Windows users there's currently a 30 day demo ñ not sure what happens at the end of this, whether the plugs add a watermark (good) or just stop working (like GenArts ñ badÖ.) The Effects plugs are 16-bit and appear to be MP-aware.

(4) Another new Developer, Digital Trove (www.digitaltrove.com) have just opened (June 1st.) with a set of 26 plugs called "Prime" which is currently only available for OS-X ñ although they promise a Windows version "soon." Price is currently $199, but will rise to $299 in "July." There appears to be no demo, which will probably kill it for many people, since the majority of the effects are reminiscent of existing effects (e.g. Cycore Effects) and people will probably want to see just how similar before they buy. Also since the "core" of the set is distortion effects, I would certainly want to see how well the antialiasing holds up before buying it.

The set is "non-themed" like early sets from Cycore and DE, with effects ranging from Adjustments, Image FX, Distortions and Generators to auxiliary keying tools.

The best way (currently ñ in the absence of a demo) of seeing these currently is via the QT movie demos on the Digital Trove site, but here's a listing:

Alpha Strike: Sharpens the Alpha Channel. BCC Unsharp Mask can do this although AE's can't.

Bias: An Adjustment plug. Channel bias for Color Correction

Centre Shift: A Distortion plug. Warps the center of an image to a user-specified point. Might be useful.

Channel Inverter: Inverts specific channels with flex slider. Seems that you could do this by duplicating layers and dissolving between them when one has been treated with AE Invert.

Circle: Creates a coloured circle, cutout, reveal, or mattes with powerful point controls. Looks like you could do this slightly less conveniently in AE already.

DeDV: Cleans up color distortions from analog-captured video. Could be useful ñ need a demo to see.

Displace: A distortion plug-in. Looks a bit like Pinnacle Super-displacer.

Edge Map: Edge effect that can make video look cartoonish or grungy.

Edge Warp: Looks similar to CC Scale Wipe.

Enhance: Enhance & stylize video with only three parameters. Not sure what else it's doing besides adding contrast

Foil FX:  Image Effect. Creates a foil-art look. Quite interesting.

Gnarl and Gravigrid: A distortion effect with morph-to-source ability. Could probably get a similar effect with some Artmatic noise into AE displace.

Lift: A fast filter for Color Correction & Fades. Seems to be brightening to white.

MosaicTrans: Transition plug-in reminiscent of CC Griddler

Power B&W: Color to black and white converter. Looks quite interesting.

PowerTwirl: Distortion effect with morph-to-source ability. Twirls tiles outside as well as twirling inside.

Retrograde: Gradually slide into four new inversion effects. Seems similar to Channel Inverter, although some transitions manage to avoid going through 128 grey..

Spill Noise: possibly a little better than other scatter plugs

Stripper:  Shreds an image into strips to reveal the layer below. Useful Things has variations on this.

TechGrid: Generates a complex fractal grid. Many different styles. Some could be useful for backgrounds.

Time Transfer: Allows you to transfer any layer at any time onto the current layer. Unless there's value added you could do this with two layers (one offset in time) in AE.

TV: Adds scanlines, static, and interference to simulate TV & reception effects. Probably a little different and easier than Tinder Bad TV.

Vacuum: Distortion effect that allows you to 'suck' your video into a point over time. A vortex effect like CC Flo Motion.

Vertigo: Dizzying distortion effect. Looks quite interesting although the aliasing on the QT demo makes me want a demo to check.

Webcast: Makes video look like web video. If Jpeg artifacts are what you're after there are other plugs which are better, but this has a few other features like softening.

(5) Digital Film Tools has released a new whole number upgrade to their 55mm set. It's now version 4.0, and as with the version 2 and 3 upgrades, they've added several new plug-ins ñ 15, in fact. This, in theory, should bring the set up to 52 plug-ins, but 5 have also been removed since version 3.0, so the set actually stands at 47. They are 16-bit and the price is $295. There's not much that's revolutionary in 55mm, but they are useful plugs for treating footage on a day to day basis, and will find a lot of use both in AE and NLEs, I think. Good value. As is the full DFT bundle at $695.

The new 55mm plugs are:

55mm Color Conversion

55mm Color Temperature

55mm Cross Processing

55mm Enhancing

55mm F-Stop

55mm Lens Distortion

55mm Printer Points

55mm Rosco Calcolor

55mm Rosco Cinegel

55mm Rosco Cinelux

55mm Rosco Storaro Selection

55mm Selective Saturation

55mm Soft EFX

55mm Sunset/Twilight

55mm Ultra Contrast

Confusingly, the 55mm Color Conversion plug-in is almost identical to the new AE 6.5 Photo Filter ñ not sure who's copying who here ñ but both plugs are quite useful, and 55mm works in hosts other than AE, of course. 55mm has the value-added of an ND grad code block. The Color Conversion plug is certainly well in the 55mm mould of 55mm "digital optical filters" since it emulates the effect of some of the Wratten correctional filters, as well as more intense colour filters.

Color Temperature enables colour correction by setting a color temp (in degrees Kelvin) to compensate for / emulate the change in "warmth" during the day or when realigning a computer monitor. Cross Processing gives the effect of making a print into a slide or vice versa. The effect is likely to be too extreme at defaults, but you can correct that with the Amount slider. 55mm Enhancing adds warmth to an image, but seems to have a tendency to also warm up any pixellation. Other 55mm warming filters are probably preferable here. F-Stop is a useful Highlight-Midtone-Shadow colour corrector, which can adjust the R G and B in each zone, the "exposure" in each zone and also the level at which the zone occurs (although you seem not to be able to adjust this too much before you get LUT artifacts on antialising, etc, even in Force 16-bit mode. Lens Distortion is a distortion or distortion correction plug-in, which is mostly not as good as the Optics Compensation (ex-Cult FX) plug-in which comes with AE. However it does have anamorphic squeeze and Curvature X and Y parameters which enable it to do some special effect distortions which I haven't seen elsewhere. Printer Points. has parameters the same as F-Stop, except the default values are different. Not sure why you need a separate plug-in here. The 4 Rosco plugs are similar to the more generic Color Conversion plug, but have colour values taken from 4 of the Rosco gel colour sets. Selective Saturation is a useful Colour Correction plug which allows saturation to be raised/lowered separately for Highlights/Midtones/Shadows. Soft EFX is also useful. It's an adaptive blur (55mm Fast Blur?) which has settings to reduce it's effects based on a luminance map of the footage or edges or a combination of both. Sunset/Twilight is an improvement on the earlier 55mm Grad and Dual Tint plugs, which enables you to make a 3-stop gradient (ramp) and then blend it with the image using HLS, HSV or Replace modes. Curiously there's no setting to have just the grad without the image, but you can get that by using HSV mode on a white solid. Ultra Contrast sounds like it ought to add contrast, but actually it is designed to reduce contrast in Shadows and Highlight Zones. Likely to be much less useful in 8-bit than 16-bit, I imagine. Not sure why they don't also have Shadow/Midtone/Highlight zones and why you can't add contrast as well as just reduce it. If I have one criticism of 55mm it's that ñ in the attempt to make them easy to use, the plugs do sometimes get a little inflexible. I suppose if they were more flexible, it wouldn't be so easy to add new plugs at the next whole number release ;-)

The removed version 3.0 plug-ins are:

Combined Grad

Cool Mist

Selective Grad

Skin Smoother

Warm/Cool

Cool Mist is actually the same as Warm Mist, but with a different colour, so no great loss there. But I'm not clear as to why the other plugs were removed. Anyway, assuming that this is not just a freak of the demo version versus the full version, people upgrading should retain these 5 plugs, if they want to maintain backwards compatibility.

(6) Cycore FX HD is the second part of the story of why the Cycore FX (Final Effects equivalents) were bundled with AE 6.5. As deduced last time, the bundled versions of Cycore FX are 8-bit only, and only one new plug-in was added to the previously existing FE set, plus a few enhancements to some plugs like the AE Comp Camera and Lights. The new cycorefx.com website opened in June states that:

"Cycore announces Cycore Effects HD 1.0, available this summer 2004 (07.06.2004) - Cycore will release a 16-bit version of it's Cycore Effects plug-in package during this summer. Cycore Effects contains 61 professional effects and comes bundled with Adobe After Effects 6.5. Cycore Effects HD will in addition to these 61 effects include an improved version of Particle World, as well as some brand new plug-ins. Read more here."

Clicking on Read More Here actually doesn't tell you anything new at all, currently.

A flash added on 7^th. July adds a more precise date for release: "Cycore FX HD is expected to ship end of July 2004." With that there is a link to a variety of offers: by paying in advance you can get the $349 set for $199, or $249 if you order in advance but your card isn't billed until shipment.

I have to say that I'm confused by Cycore's policy here. It's like users are being expected to buy on pure faith and trust in the Cycore name, since all you know you are going to get for your money is an upgrade of your AE-bundled plugs is 16-bit and some (unspecified) improvements to Particle World, which for many will not be much of an attraction, since they probably have Particular by now. You will also get "some brand new plug-ins". What are they? The site doesn't say. How many will there be? The site doesn't say. Will they be heavily-featured plugs that are worth $199 or just "stocking-fillers" (as actually a lot of the FE and Cult plugs were.) The site doesn't say.

I guess that for people doing high-end work, the 16-bit upgrade may be worth it. But I wonder what percentage of users actually believe 16-bit is essential to their work (viz. something they will pay extra for) rather than something which is "nice to have?" Certainly, in Asia, 10-bit video is still relatively uncommon due to pressure on budgets, and although people will switch AE into 16-bit if they feel this will help with banding or whatever, I don't think they'll be forking out cash for it. And I'm sure that some people will feel this is, in any case,  a catchpenny: viz. you make a lot of PR about CycoreFX being bundled, and then charge extra for 16-bit, in a world where most people would expect new sets to be 16-bit already.

I think the desirability of the Cycore FX HD "upgrade" will hinge most on what new plugs are added, and how many/good of these there are. The talent in Cycore is undoubted, but they are now operating in a crowded plug-in market with around 1500 offerings (compared to none when FE first came outÖ..) so the new plugs definitely do need to show that talent in a substantial way, if they are to persuade people that they need this set. I would suggest that, with the release date so close, the new plugs should be immediately documented on the CycoreFX site ASAP, so that people can actually make a true buying decision, rather than having to gamble on what they might be getting.

For many people, this will be the third time they have been asked to pay for the full FE set (Metacreations, then Media-100, now Cycore again) without any recognition of previous ownership. Cycore will also need to give some feeling of assurance that the set has a future. Will Cycore make some money out of it, then sell it to Adobe, like CultFX, for example? Cycore already seem to have taken the questionable business stance of supporting AE 6.x only, which must be cutting them off from a large part of the potential plug-in market. We know from the Media-100 FE set that the plugs can be made to work in multiple hosts without much trouble. With Apple Motion just around the corner, buying a set which is not supported in Apple hosts will weigh heavy on some, I'm sure.

All the same, the cycorefx site (www.cycorefx.com ) is definitely worth a visit from AE 6.5 users since it has demo projects for the bundled CC effects, which will surely be of benefit to those who haven't used FE before, and probably also of use to many who have.

(7) Although a little late on schedule, the Synthetic Aperture 1.5.1 upgrades for users of Color Finesse are now available for download from the Synthetic Ap website. There are 3 separate installers: one for the bundled version of AE 6.5, one for the non-bundled version of CF, but for use under AE 5.5-6.5, and one for the non-bundled version of CF for use in hosts other than AE (like FCP.)

Users of AE 6.5 who already own CF are recommended not to use the bundled version, but to use the commercial version throughout.

(8) The Panopticum Curtains set, previously only for Windows, is now available for OS-X. This leaves 3 Pan sets as Windows only: Anima Text 3D, Rulers 1.0 and Water 1.0. The Curtains set consists of 3 plugs: Curtain, Tableau and Theatre and costs $80. There is a demo. Tableau and Theatre emulate pleating theatre curtains pulling back, with the ability to make them sway, etc. Curtain is a more customisable waving/folding fabric emulator, which looks a little similar to Forge Freeform AE and DA 3D Layer (but without depth.) The plug-ins appear to use the same engine, and are mesh-based with various types of shading, and if you expect such plugs to be slow rendering, you'd be rightÖin fact, sometimes they're dog-slowÖ.

The plugs are not especially simple to use. As with many Pan plugs, there are a wide variety of controls. You have control over the properties of the curtain as a basic plane in space, physics such as wind, gravity, fabric weight folding speed, plus various types of material properties including ambient/diffuse/specular lighting, shininess, self-illumination, transparency/glassiness, reflection, reflection and bump-mapping. So the design of the plugs are good. But, as has often been the case with Panopticum in the past (although their last offering ñ AreaFX ñ had lead me to believe they had been improving,) the QA is less than adequate. I found very quickly that there was very little break-checking, so if the plug had started processing on a set of parameters which was impossibly slow (e.g. where you accidentally set a parameter too high or turned on intersection processing) then it was almost impossible to stop it other than by crashing out. Also it was quite common for some folds to break up into jagged lines, where the wireframe had created sharp folds which the shader couldn't cope with. The mesh size seemed to make little difference to this, so it's probably due to a flaw in the algorithm.

It's quite likely that you can get good results with these plug-ins and the price is right, but you will need patience and a fast machine in order to overcome the tendency to break up at certain settings. Hopefully these shortcomings will be gradually worked out of the plugs in future revisions, as they were with Pan plugs like AnimaText. Panopticum still have 3 sets (AnimaText 3D, Rulers and Water) which have not been released for Mac, although they have Windows versions.

(9) Profound Effects have now released the updaters for Useful Things (1.6) and Useful Assistants (1.5) to cope with the AE 6.5 upgrade. Users who have both UT and UA will need to update both, since they have shared files.

(10) The Foundry has released Furnace AE 1.0. Details are available on the Foundry's site, where you can download a 15-day demo or buy it at $650. Unlike the Furnace sets for expensive platforms like Discreet (which have 10 plugs in the set,) Furnace AE (currently?) only has 2 plugs: Kronos ñ a retimer using motion estimation and Steadiness, a stabilizer which also uses motion estimation technology like 2D3 Steadymove (well actually not like 2D3 Steadymove since that's windows only, while this is also for Mac OS-X ;-) However, both of these seem to perform their job well, and the retimer seems to be a lot less fiddly to use than competing products. I think both are certainly worth a close look, although with 2D3 Steadymove selling at $99, then I'm sure that a lot of people will be wondering if Kronos is worth $550. Competing retimers are also expensive as well though ñ Twixtor Pro is $585 doe example ñ so for those that can afford it, the sale will be won on performance, and I'm certainly impressed by Kronos so far.

The Foundry have also changed their locking system from a "put in your original disk" based system to an application locking system, which may look a little too close to the hated Media-100 locking system for some people, but it is in fact a bit friendlier and you can check how well it performs for your system with the 15-day trial anyway. The Foundry say they have "node locking" and "floating" licenses (which enable you to move the plugs around machines) available too. I'm not sure of the exact details of this or whether that entails additional cost. However, it does seem as if they are trying to avoid some of the Media-100 pitfalls. The plugs are 16-bit and use multiprocessing.

The blurb on the Foundry site says:

<<Furnace on After Effects 6.0 and 6.5 is now available to download. Furnace ships with two plug-ins. Kronos uses optical flow technology to accurately track the movement of every pixel from one frame to the next. This data is used to build in-between frames to slow movement down or add artificial motion blur without retiming the clip.

Steadiness automatically removes camera shake. It takes much of the drudgery out of stabilisation since you're not required to add tracking points. It's particularly useful on sequences that are difficult to track or where tracking points continually move off screen or are obscured.>>

Odd that they should choose to promote the term "Optical Flow" when BorisFX have already used this as the name of their retimer plug-in (although Kronos preforms considerably better, as you'd expect given the cost differential.)

(11) Some confusion exists over The Orphanage's Magic Bullet for Editors. The FCP version demo (which can be downloaded from the Red Giant site) seems to work fine in AE 6.5, although Red Giant are not supporting it for AE hosts. Why is that, I wonder, when plug-ins which operate in multiple hosts are inherently more "valuable" to people?

The Red Giant site originally announced that the film damage element of Magic Bullet for FCP: Misfire, will be available as a separate plug ($149) for AE compatible hosts, at the end of May 2004. The plugs would be 16-bit, but also work in FCP and PPro. This has disappeared, however, and there is still no sign of a separate Misfire plug-in set.

Misfire and the Magic Bullet Look Suite are the two components of Magic Bullet for Editors ($279/299.) The Misfire plugs are built along similar lines to Knoll Light Factory BTW - you can use them all in one plug (seems quite slow) or you can use the bits you want as separate plugs. That's useful.

In theory, according to the Red Giant comparison sheet, MBE is 8-bit, while Misfire and the (upcoming) Misfire for AE sets are 16-bit, although in fact, if you load the MBE plugs into After Effects, the Misfire plugs aleady appear as 16-bit. It's only the Look Suite (which uses the same matchname as in Magic Bullet Suite, and a version number which is only 0.0.1 different) that is 8-bit.

What's curious is why the separate Misfire AE set is supported in FCP, but Magic Bullet for Editors isn't supported in AE. The only thing that is currently missing when you use MBE in AE, is that the Look Suite doesn't have either the Magic Bullet Suite preset selection dialogue or preset "favorites" (as it does under FCP, Vegas, etc.) So if The Orphanage just added AE favorites for the various Looks, then Magic Bullet for Editors would be fully AE compliant and would give AE users a 3rd. buying choice: Magic Bullet Suite (AE) for $795, Magic Bullet Editors (AE and compatibles) for $299 and Misfire AE (AE and compatibles) for $149. I certainly hope they do this.

(12) The Orphanage's eLin plug-in/script package was due for release at the end of June, but a last minute hiccup has pushed it back a little. The Red Giant site now says it will be released "no later than July 16^th." The software only works in AE 6.5..

The Red Giant site was very slow with this info and was still saying "end of June" a week after June had expired. The site has sported one good feature though. Under Buyer's Guide it does give a clear statement of the node licensing of their products for render-farm use. The good news is that most products come with unlimited render-farm licenses. The exception is Magic Bullet Suite, which  requires a dongle for each machine in the farm, which won't please many Magic Bullet owners, I think. Note though that Magic Bullet is one of the few plug-in sets (Trapcode is the other notable Developer which offers this) which comes with a cross-platform license.

(13) Kenneth Woodruff 4th. Party (www.4thparty.com) effects scripts for Profound Effects Useful Things have still not been released yet. Kenneth has been caught up in other projects. So the launch of his Color Sampler, Effervescence, Filigree, Sprite Generator, Matrix Displacer, Lorentz Attractor, Generate Layers as Colors and XTone scripts has been delayed. No firm date has been given for release, although the state of the scripts is fairly advanced, so it shouldn't be too long after his other commitments free him. Whenever that isÖ

(14) Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro 4.0 (mentioned in detail last time) is now shipping. I thought it was shipping a few weeks ago, but it turned out that although you could order it at that time, it was in fact a pre-order. Anyway, you can get it now and it appears to be working better than ever. If you want to use Invig Classic in AE 6.5, you should download the 3.0.9 update.

(15) Toolfarm have a list of plug-ins which are confirmed as AE 6.5 Compatible at http://store.yahoo.com/toolfarm/ae65co.html - note that they do not distinguish between plugs for Mac and Windows, though. So just because you see it there, does not mean itís available for AE 6.5 OS-X (e.g. Algolith.)

Dik

Plug-ins available now ñ Bundles

Plug-ins available now ñ AEGP