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Filed under: Motion Graphics •NAB 08 •Training •Visual Effects •

NAB 2008: Plugged In

As expected, NAB 2008 did not reveal any major new software releases for motion graphic designers, but it did showcase a number of interesting new plug-ins. We’d like to give you a quick round-up of our favorites here; we’re arranging to give many of these more in-depth reviews up here on PVC over the next several months. We also were very interested in with what The Foundry has done with the high-end compositing application Nuke (which they acquired from Digital Domain), and came away with the impression that in this slow economy, training has become more important again.

Noise Industries FxFactory

Perhaps most intriguing wasn’t a new plug-in, but a currently-existing set which is coming to the After Effects world. Noise Industries is better known to the Apple Final Cut Pro and Motion audience as creator of FxFactory Pro, a set of over 130 GPU-accelerated filters, generators, and transitions which take advantage of Apple’s Quartz Composer technology and their FxPlug specification. In addition to manipulating the parameters of these effects, you can modify their inner workings by editing their Quartz Composer plumbings to create your own effects. Once you’ve purchased the core FxFactory engine, you can then also buy add-on sets of effects offered by third parties which Noise Industries distributes. The core set normally retails for the rather reasonable price of $399; the NAB special price is $319 (valid through April 20). Add-on sets tend to run $50-100 - also very reasonable.

What piqued our ears was an announcement at the Media Motion Ball that they were porting FxFactory to Adobe After Effects. They are working on a shell which will allow FxPlug effects to run inside After Effects, which they expect to be ready in about two months. We’re very curious to try this out for ourselves, both to check out their effects and also to see what sort of performance penalty there will be running them inside of After Effects - hopefully not much. We talked to at least one other FxPlug effect manufacturer who indicated that if they worked, they would use it to port their own effects over to After Effects.

In the meantime, if you are already an FCP or Motion user, there is a 15-day free trial of FxFactory Pro available here.

DigiEffects Returns

One of the earliest plug-in manufacturers for After Effects was DigiEffects, perhaps best known for their Cinelook film treatment effect which pre-dated Magic Bullet and its brethren. The DigiEffects plug-ins were always interesting, but unfortunately also tended to be a tad slow and unstable.

Well, last year Robert Sharp took over DigiEffects and went about re-making the company. Cinelook is gone (although DigiEffects and Red Giant Software offer some very interesting crossgrade options to Magic Bullet), while many of the other core sets such as Delirium have been re-written. With their history tidied up, now they’ve started releasing new plug-in sets:

• Damage, which simulates several flavors of “bad TV” including a Blockade effect that recreates compression artifacts (apparently, there has been a big call from television post-production to make video appear as if it was shot by an eye witness with a cell phone).
• Two Natural Forces plug-in sets, including Vapor (Smoke, Smokescreen, Fog, and Nimbus cloud bank effects) and Aqua (Rain, Snow, Dispersion, Puddle, and Waterbeads effects). The sets cost $99 each.
• Two Simulate plug-in sets, including Illuma (Halo, Lightracer, Radiance, Photogust, and Luminus glow effects) and Camera (Archive, Overexpose, Iris, Destabilize, and Lens Flare effects). These sets also cost $99 each.

By the way, DigiEffects has also acquired the rights to the Walker Effects and Buena plug-in sets.

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