The Editblog

If you’re a user of CoreMelt plug-ins and you haven’t updated to the new V2 line of products that was introduced at NAB 09 then now might be the time. CoreMelt is having a Summer Upgrade Special with 40% off upgrades to V2 products. It’s for 10 days only, July 21 – July 31. This coincides with an update to version 2.2 that adds a number of new effects and transitions. The version 2 of the CoreMelt is a stand-alone plug-in for Final Cut Pro, Motion and After Effects that is no longer part of the FxFactory-engine based architecture. They new release is fast, has a lot of great effects and adds CoreMelt’s own tweaked interface to the Filter tab of FCP:

Tune in to Studio Monthly for an upcoming review of CoreMelt V2.

CoreMelt aren’t the only plug-in creators with NAB specials that end May 1. Automatic Duck is running an NAB special until May 1 as well. Just enter the coupon code NAB2009 upon checkout and take $100 off of any plug-in or plug-in bundle. No you can’t get the $95 Media Copy application for free but you can get a plug-in amongst all of the Automatic Duck offerings that will let you move from one editing, audio or fx app to another. We use Pro Export FCP to move from Final Cut Pro to Quantel eQ for what I think is the best solution for finishing RED jobs from the native .R3D files. Only possible with Automatic Duck!

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the upgrade to the CoreMelt set of plug-ins for Final Cut Pro then head over to their website and check them out right now. They are currently having “special introductory pricing” on their new V2 version of their products. This is a big upgrade and you have until May 1 to get the special pricing.

I haven’t had a chance to review the new version yet but I got a good demo at NAB and I look forward to kicking the tires on the new product. Get ‘em now and save a few $$’s!

GenArts Sapphire Entire Package v2.0
all 4 boxes 200+ Plug-ins.

This is a nice deal for one of the best effects plug-in packages out there:

• Over 30 new effects and many enhancements in version 2.
• Includes support for Adobe CS3 and Smart FX.
• Support for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard and Mac Intel hardware.
• Support for Windows Vista
• More than 200 total plug-ins for image processing and synthesis.
• All plug-ins have multiple options and parameters that can be adjusted and animated for creating an unlimited range of effects.
• Resolution independent, antialiased, high quality images.
• Online hyper-linked documentation for all plug-ins.
• Dual, Quad, and 8-core support for faster rendering.
• On-screen user interface for visual control of parameters in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
• Only one license is needed to use the plug-ins with all AE compatible applications on the same computer.
• Free network rendering on After Effects, Combustion, and Digital Fusion.

There’s the choice of After Effects hosts and FxPlug hosts. FxPlug includes Final Cut Pro and Motion. Today only!

A blog post this morning pointed me to Twittermosaic. It’ll take all those cute little icons from your friends or followers and make a fun little mosaic for all the world to see. You can even buy a bunch of stuff with the images plastered on it. These are my Twitter friends, though all aren’t following me so “friends” might not be the right term no is it? (it might take this thing a second or three to load btw):

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I received an interesting email this morning:

My name is Ewout de Wit and I study Marketing and Consumer Behavior at Wageningen University (Netherlands). To finalize my Master program I will conduct a research on “post-production software” and additional software (third-party).

In my research I mainly will focus on the online behaviour of content creators with respect to post-production software plug-ins and tools. I specifically study the search behaviour, the main factors that influence the buying decision making and price perception. Since last week I’m distributing the survey links at several forums related to post-production / editing.

I was wondering if you could mention my survey request in one of your blogs. Would be great to collect more responses through your web site. Of course I can provide you the results of the survey. Look forward to hear from you.

I took a few minutes myself and answered the survey myself. It’s an easy few minutes that asks questions about our behaviors when evaluating and buying post-production tools. There’s also specific questions asked about a number of vendors that many post-professionals know very well. Please take a few minutes to answer the survey (it’ll probably takes less than 10 or 15 minutes). If nothing else I think the results would be rather fascinating study of our software/plug-in buying habits and what influces them. Click on over and take the survey yourself.

A tripod is often … very often … a good thing when shooting video. I don’t have one to complement the HV20 and it is on the get list. A steady camera is a happy camera and you won’t make your audience sea-sick as the camera bobs and weaves. But sometimes you just can’t shoot with one. What do you do when a shot that you need for your edit is too shaky? You can always try to stabilize the shot with software like Magic Bullet Steady. Steady is available as a stand-alone purchase or as part of the Magic Bullet Suite 2008. The important thing to remember with any software designed to stabilize a shot is that it isn’t always a life-saver and can’t save every shot. But on some it can work wonders.

The best way to see what it can do is look at it in action. First is a shot that I was trying to hold as still as possible with my fake Fig Rig. It’s not too bad but could use some smoothing out. It’s a 5 second piece of a 9.5 second total shot at 1440×1080 ProRes resolution (it was converted from HDV). Magic Bullet Steady took 5 seconds to analyze the shot and about 10.5 seconds to render. Apple’s built-in Smoothcam took 1 minute 5 seconds to analyize the shot and 14 seconds to render. This was on a Mac Pro Quad-core 3 ghz. Here is the result, with the MB Steady option toggled through its 3 different motion parameters:

There appears to be an issue with Vimeo, WordPress and some combination of browsers. If you are getting odd or fast playback let the Vimeo stream buffer and then start the video over. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are researching the problem.

Magic Bullet Steady test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

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