dvGarage has made major updates to their innovative dvMatte keying plug-in and Conduit nodal compositing plug-in and stand-alone application. dvGarage claims the new version of dvMatte is 20-30 times faster than before and includes a new Screen Correction feature, while Conduit has sprouted Adobe After Effects and Photoshop versions (in addition to GPU-accelerated versions for Apple FCP and Motion), scopes, and other features. Conduit also comes with a 3-month subscription to the training guild, the Pixel Corps. Oh – and they’re both on sale through February 20. An email from dvGarage’s Alex Lindsay follows with more details:
So, we’re releasing what we think are the most revolutionary collection of tools in our history. I know that sounds over the top…but, well, I mean it. Here’s what we got…
The dvMatte Studio 3
We started with a basic greenscreen keyer for DV, then we added luma controls and plate matching tools. A little over a year ago, we dived into real-time keying with dvMatte Blast. BUT, when we went to real-time keying, we gave up many of the controls we, at least, were attached to. So, Ben Syverson went into his virtual lab and cooked up brand new code – dvMatte Studio 3. The is a complete, from the ground up, re-write that takes full advantage of your computer’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
What does this mean? High-end greenscreen keys in realtime or near realtime. This is about 20-30 times faster than the previous version of dvMatte Pro, which was one of the fastest keyers in the world already. We also added a screen fix tool to handle, ahem, poorly shot greenscreens. Finally, we split out the color matching and light wrap tools to allow you to use them easily…even if you weren’t using dvMatte.
It’s all for $199 ($149 until February 20, 2008)
You can see an overview here.
But there’s more!
The Conduit Suite
Conduit began as an experiment: could we build a nodal compositor inside of Final Cut Pro? Two years later, it’s the backbone of our day-to-day compositing. We can barely remember what is was like to not have nodal compositing in Final Cut Pro and Motion. But…it wasn’t enough. We had real time compositing, so, why shouldn’t we be able see it live? Thus the creation of Conduit Live. Now you have a nodal compositor that operates on live video in real time. It’s, well, really cool. Using an $800 handicam, a Blackmagic Intensity Card, and a Mac…we’re getting every hair of the subject…while it’s happening. You can do this with expensive keying hardware but not with a $200 software application.
Yea…you need to see it…and you can do that here.
To add to the fun, we built a version for Photoshop and After Effects to compliment the live application and the plug-ins for Final Cut Pro and Motion. All of these plug-ins and the application can send compositing trees to each other. This means you can work out ideas in Photoshop or export composites that worked on set to your editor.
All of it, the application and the plug-ins, are $199 ($149 until February 20, 2008)…right, that’s for the whole bundle.
If you love everything, you can get both the dvMatte Studio 3 and the Conduit Suite for $199 until February 20, 2008. After that, the bundle jumps to $299.
I hope you give these tools a test drive. We think they are in a class of their own.
Alex Lindsay
dvGarage