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REVIEW - Monster GT from Genarts

Being an editor for a long time, I have used my share of different editing systems, and on that I used at the dawn of the HD movement was Avid’s DS, and back then there was an awesome plug-in package called Monster from SpeedSix.  It had some ground breaking, ultra realistic looking effects that I had never seen before in an editing or compositing station.  Well, GenArts purchased SpeedSix a while ago, and began the port of Monster from the realm of “only for high end compositors” to the After Effects realm.  Has it been worth the wait, or should this Monster have stayed under the bed?  Let’s find out.

INSTALLATION

First, I want to mention as of this writing, Monster is a Windows only plug-in pack. There is a free trial available from the Genarts website, but Genarts has decided to go the way of “give us your e-mail address, and we’ll give you the demo” route, which always annoys me, as my first thought is spam!  Monster is available for both AE CS4 and CS5, and the package itself comes in at 20mb in size, which is very good (and surprising) for a plug-in pack with 50+ plug-ins.  The download will probably take you longer than the install, and you will be up and running in about 10 minutes.

WHAT YOU GET AND HOW IT WORKS

Now, Monster has 54 plug-ins that are divided into the same type of categories as Sapphire.

To be honest, I’m really surprised that Genarts would have put Monster as its own separate package, as the 54 plug-ins would have worked themselves perfectly into Sapphire v5, and really re-enforced Sapphire as a powerhouse plug-in package.

The effects are divided into seven catagories, and Monster is one of those packages that if you don’t look carefully, you could miss some real gems like the “Luna” Effect.  This one really amazed me as the very realistic looking moon can be created quickly and easily, and spicing it up with the Monster GT “Rain” effect, as well as adding an element from Digital Juice’s Compositor’s Toolkit produces an amazing final composite.

The above effect took about 5 minutes to build, which brings up an issue I have with not only Monster GT, but Sapphire v5 as well (stay tuned for an upcoming review of Sapphire 5), and that is the lack of presets.  Well, when I say lack of, I mean there aren’t any.  Now let me clarify that I don’t consider being able to choose between different types rain or different lunar looks as a preset.  I’m talking about having five (plus) different looks that would normally take me half an hour to an hour to build by playing around with the different parameters of the effect.  That is a preset.  These days, for me at least, I wear so many different hats that it’s hard to find the time to sit and “play” with a plug-in to create looks, and having different places to start always helps.

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