Archive of the Visual Effects Category

One of the most interesting companies in Adobe‘s plug-in pavilion was wondertouch, the producer of particleillusion, a sprite-based particle effects program. The company offers two versions, particleillusion pro, for $399 and particleillusion SE for $99. Both are available for Mac and Windows, and at the show, the company introduced a universal binary edition that ran natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs.

particleillusion is a standalone program. To produce effects, you load in your background footage, apply and customize the effect, then render the effect with an alpha channel. This makes it compatible with virtually all editors than can import an MOV file and key out an alpha channel. more

If you own Autodesk Flame, chances are you already have version 3 of GenArts‘s Sapphire Plug-ins and are eagerly awaiting version 4. From what I saw on the show floor at NAB, you won’t be disappointed.

The new version, which will cost $10,000 and is scheduled to ship by the end of Q2, 2007, includes 46 new effects and many functional enhancements. As before, the program offers an extensive array of presets with extreme configurability. With the film damage effect, for example, you can modify stains, dust, flicker, speed, scratches, dust, hairs, shake and defocusing, as well as color controls and motion blur. During the demo, the pristine HD footage morphed into old, damaged celluloid, with good responsiveness and preview frame rate on an HP quad-core Linux box running Flame 2007.

I also looked at the toon tool, which delivered Charles Schwab commercial-like effects with extreme configurability and performance. Check the GenArt’s web site for a complete list of features.

Today’s Digital Cinema Summit (put on by the Entertainment Technology Center at USC) was heavy on the 3D theme and its impact on both the creation of content and the distribution and exhibition of that content. The topic was apropos coming on the heels of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons–the subject of an afternoon session at the conference. During that session, panel members cited statistics indicating that the 3D version of “Meet the Robinsons” opened on 892 screens simultaneously worldwide, making it, according to them, “the biggest D-cinema release to date.” more

Teamworking in post is all the rage. You can‘t read far though the slew of pre-show press releases to learn that playing well with others will be a big part of the news at NAB 07

Quantel does its part with the launch of Genetic Engineering at their Sunday press conference. No need to worry about stem cells piling up on your NLE though: the Brit company is talking about overturning the traditional way of looking at SANs (storage area networks), allowing Q users to hook together any of its products–whether eQ, iQ, or Pablo–and getting access to the same clips at the same time without copying, reformatting, or moving the media. more