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!

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.

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.

Now, Final Cut Pro has the built-in SmoothCam and you might wonder why you would need Magic Bullet Steady when you already have SmoothCam. From the clip above you can see that SmoothCam does a great job. While SmoothCam is a very good tool it has become legendary for analyzingly long analysis times. This is often due to (IMHO) a fatal flaw in SmoothCam where it has to analyze the entire master clip of the shot it has been applied to. If you use 3 seconds of a 20 minute shot it will analyze all 20 minutes. If you are on a PowerPC machine then get ready for a long, long, long, long, long wait. Did I say it’s a long wait? The above clip was only a 9.5 second master shot but if you capture whole tapes at once you can see where this could be a problem. Of course a workaround is to render a QuickTime of that 3 second shot and cut it back into your edit. That works to shorten the analysis time dramatically but if you have more than a few shots this can be quite time consuming. Magic Bullet Steady only has to analyze what is used in the timeline.

Steady-ing software works best on things with moderate movement and shake but you can throw it on a handheld tracking shot or a pan as well. It’s success depends on the motion and how much time you are willing to fiddle with the settings. You often have to be willing to accept some strange bending, flexing and jitter of the final shot for something with a lot of movement as you can see from the handheld tracking shot below. For best results spend time tweaking the settings. SmoothCam seems to produce a better result on tracking types of shots.

Magic Bullet Steady handheld tracking test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Another example is below of a pan:

Magic Bullet Steady pan from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Magic Bullet Steady produced great results with this shot where SmoothCam caused some strobing in the movement of the car and had to really zoom in on the shot quite a bit. Again, you often have to adjust the settings for the best results but it’s also nice to get good results from the default settings when you are in a hurry.

Magic Bullet Steady has quite a few more setting options than SmoothCam including the ability to set a manual detection region and a scene change detection function if you apply Steady to a completed edit like a self-contained QuickTime:

A quirk I did notice is that the product is called Magic Bullet Steady but it listed under the FCP effect menu as Stabilize. Overall Steady’s biggest advanatge is speed. It doesn’t have to analyize the entire unused media, only what’s in the timeline which can be the difference between using it and not using SmoothCam. It also renders faster than SmoothCam. After a shot is analyzed it then has to be rendered, both with Steady and SmoothCam. But SmoothCam seems to do a better job on tracking shots or shots with extreme movement. But if your shot has extreme shake and movement in them do they really need to be in the edit anyway? Truth be told it’s often been a trial and error process applying both to certain shots that I had to smooth out and deciding which one looked best. Since SmoothCam is included in a Final Cut Studio 2 install and Magic Bullet Steady is available as a demo you can try for yourself before buying. While Magic Bullet Steady is available as a stand-alone product the best deal is to pick up the entire Magic Bullet 2008 suite since it’s included as part of that install. Then you have Steady and a lot more tools at your disposal.