Plugged-In Turned-On

Digital Anarchy Toolbox''s Psunami Effects

Adobe After Effects has more than 350,000 users. This makes it a breeding ground for every plug-in developer in the solar system, and a cottage industry for products targeted to Combustion, Digital Fusion, Mirage, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Motion, and Avid. Recently, some of the companies that make pricey plug-ins for Flame and Inferno lowered their prices for the mass market, which is mainly the After Effects crowd. There are literally hundreds of plug-ins available, from psychedelic convolution filters to practical matte clean-up tools, particle systems, and more recently, Python-based customizable effects.

This best-of list is not comprehensive, certainly not scientific, and includes a few overlapping plug-ins because of sets (too many individual effects to single out). Most plug-ins are now 16-bit — where appropriate — although there are a few companies still selling 8-bit effects, which is usually fine for broadcast work.

Here are the plug-ins that top the charts in price, performance, originality, and sheer fun:

Digital Anarchy provides a variety of things that are not available elsewhere. Here are some of my favorites: Psunami Water, the ocean-scene tool. Yes, it only does one thing, but it does it well. Very convincing underwater footage can be created with Psunami when combined with volumetric light and caustics.

Anarchy Toolbox has super-charged versions of filters already available in After Effects, but Designer Blur, Advanced Displacement Map, and Noise Complex are complementary to other effects and have dozens of uses.

Color Theory is as much of a learning and design idea tool as it is a plug-in that applies an effect. Essentially, this is a digital color wheel. Users can scan in paintings from the Renaissance to the 1900s and start to evaluate how the masters from different periods and schools worked within the range of complementary and harmonious colors. This is a very useful tool for generating comps for clients and teaching yourself color theory.

3D Assistants is for working in After Effects' 2.5D environment. 3D objects in After Effects are actually bitmaps on planes, which can be time-consuming to deploy and manage. 3D Assistants has pre-set arrangements that are big-time savers for complex scenes.

Digital Anarchy also resells some other excellent plugs and provides good tutorials and support. I highly recommend it as a regular stop online. www.digitalanarchy.com

If you are going to buy just one After Effects filter set, this package of more than 160 native effects and transitions is the best value for the dollar. Boris plug-ins are stable and have been refined over several versions for After Effects, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Combustion, and Premiere Pro. There are essential filters — Displacement Map, Jitter — and marginally useful filters — Wood Grain, Wood Planks. After Effects and other host programs have many of the same filters, but in general Boris has the faster versions and added useful parameters.

Added perks include: When you select a filter, you are hot linked to an HTML explanation of the effect and the parameters. The filters also tend to work the moment you apply them. For instance, Caustics, a native After Effects filter that was acquired from Atomic Effects, has no effect on a layer until you set parameters. In Continuum Complete, the caustic effect changes your image upon being applied.

Another very useful addition is the built-in Motion Tracking that is included in the parameter panel of several filters. I think this is of more use to Final Cut Pro or Avid users — After Effects already has a very good, recently improved tracker — but Boris shows off its commitment to workflow by making it extra handy.

Continuum Complete 3 has more than 45 new effects in the following categories: Blurs, Lights, Keys and Mattes, and Time. Two filters I like are Wire Removal, because it's easy to use and includes two motion trackers, and Witness Protection, the familiar face-hiding pixelization effect used on the Cops television show. Continuum Complete 3 has speedy OpenGL previews, in addition to the generally good rendering performance of all Boris effects. www.borisfx.com

Allegorithmic Map Zone

This product is the original big filter set for After Effects that later became Cycore Cult Effects. Many of these filters are now included in After Effects 6.5, but are worth a look if you are working in Combustion or Avid. The filters are 8-bit, but that's really not a problem for most broadcast work. Even after several years, the filters provide lots of functionality. Unfortunately, the price is a bit steep, but most of the favorite features in the package are bundled for free with After Effects 6.5. media100.com

The Tinderbox series from U.K.-based The Foundry were cutting edge a few years ago, but the individual effects — Lens Blur (depth of field), Lightning, OldFilm — are duplicated in other filter sets, including DigiEffects and Continuum Complete. The interfaces for the various effects feature gizmos are intended to give the user a more graphical way to change parameters. Often, these tend to be less intuitive than traditional sliders.

The quality of the filters is generally good. Tinder 2 recently added support for floating point images, or High Dynamic Range Images. Keylight, The Foundry's chromakey product, also has floating point support. It is available as a stand-alone product, but is also included in the latest version of After Effects. This world-class keying system helped pioneer the trend of including matte cleanup tools along with the basic keying functionality. It is also available as a plug-in for Illusion, AvidDS, Shake, and Discreet. OS X support was added in August 2004.

But that's all old news. In the fourth quarter of 2004 The Foundry is preparing to release Furnace 2 plug-in filters, the high-end of The Foundry's product line intended for film compositors. Furnace 2 has some rarified filters, including EdgeMatte, an automated rotoscoping tool; MotionMatte, which separates background and foreground elements (think Mokey); and SmartFill, an automated solution for repairing damaged film by reading adjacent temporal and spatial information. www.thefoundry.co.uk

Allegorithmic is a new developer with a fresh take on creating maps. Its two plug-ins, MaP Time and MaP Zone, are based on innovative procedural surfaces. MaP is is used to create texture maps or a displacement maps. The ground and natural material type maps are some of the best I've seen and offer a revolutionary feature: the ability to interactively edit a procedural map. This is a huge benefit to anyone creating maps as height fields in landscape generation programs.

MaP Time takes its core procedural technology and lets you keyframe it in After Effects. This can be used as an alpha matte or luminance source to control other effects, providing some interesting fractal-based patterns. Extra points to Allegorithmic for thinking outside of the box. www.allegorithmic.com

Every few seasons a product or company causes a lot of buzz. This year it's the After Effects plug-in developer TrapCode. Unlike most developers that aim for large sets of filters, Trapcode concentrates on six focused products: Particular, Shine, Starglow, 3D Stroke, Sound Keys, and Lux. All its plug-ins are 16-bit and very high quality, but the standouts are Particular, Lux, and 3D Stroke.

After Effects users have been waiting for a good particle solution for years. Particular is the first serious 3D particle system for After Effects. It features self-shadowing, the ability to create your own sprites, realtime preview, dynamics, collision detection, and motion blur. What's best about Particular is that it's easy to use and the documentation is very good.

No other plug-in developer makes anything quite like 3D Stroke. An ingenious use of After Effects' ability to use Illustrator paths as masks, 3D Stroke allows you to add dimension to the actual stroke, bend it in space, and animate its movement along the path to produce really beautiful luminescent images. Expect to see a lot 3D Stroke effects on-air this year. The demo/tutorial gets you up to speed in 15 minutes.

Lux allows volumetric lighting to be added to lights in After Effects, all in 16-bit to avoid any possibility of banding. The rendering is very fast and the setup is (as with all Trapcode products) wonderfully straightforward. Lux will replace a lot of volumetrics created in 3D programs that are usually slow and difficult to manipulate. www.trapcode.com

ProfoundEffects Useful Things

Re:Vision Effects has been around for several years, refining filters that were big-ticket items on higher-end systems: ReelSmart Motion Blur, the vector-per-pixel motion blur, and Twixtor, slow-motion filters. Re:Vision also has a field interpolation plug-in, FieldsKit; Re:Flex, a morphing and mesh warp tool; SmoothKit, an intelligent compound blur (lets you blur discreet areas while retaining detail); Shade/Shape, a 2.5D from 2D extrusion tool; and Re:Fill, a scratch and line removal tool. Recently, Discreet licensed Re:Flex for Combustion 3 and now includes it for free. ReelSmart Motion Blur Pro and Twixtor have been the standard motion blur and slow-motion solutions for After Effects users for years. They still offer the best price/performance for slow motion and motion blur effects. www.revisionfx.com

Useful Things is one of the most important developments in the plug-in realm. It's a Python script-based approach to plug-in development. Scripting is not for everyone, but Useful Things makes it available to the undecided. There are 140 pre-made effects that are easily customized and serve as the building blocks for other tools. Combined with Expressions, the effects can be used to drive parameters in other features or plug-ins.

Useful Things provides an interface for those interested in using Elements to create new effects or for artists ready to jump into simple Python scripting. This is absolutely the most versatile new plug for After Effects. www.profoundeffects.com

Digital Film Tools, one of the more interesting plug-in developers, is the software arm of Digital FilmWorks, an L.A.-based visual effects house. Its products are affordable and smart, designed by visual effects artists who create filters for their own production work.

Digital Film Tools concentrates on filters that match analog film optics and processes and tools for matte generation and clean up. It has three main products: Composite Suite, 55mm, and ZMatte.

Composite Suite is a specialized set of filters for cleaning up and manipulating chromakey and other types of mattes, as well as color correction tools and filters to handle transparent effects like fire and explosions (UnMult tools). I really like these tools for two reasons, first the documentation is very good. Second, the tools are aimed at film-savvy artists.

ZMatte is Digital Film Tool's chromakey tool. I have found it to be on a par with Primatte, Keylight, and Ultimatte AdvantEdge, arguably the best three commercial keyers. ZMatte includes most of the tools in Composite Suite, certainly all those having to do with matte cleanup. That is the current trend: keyers like Keylight now include the edge-manipulation and light-wrap tools that used to be separate filters. Primatte and AdvantEdge don't include them, although Primatte may be adding them soon. ZMatte aims to be a one-stop chromakey and cleanup solution.

Last, we have the interesting 55mm set of filters (47 in all). Many of the filters' parameters are calculated in f/stop increments. This is the idea behind Ozone, which allows discrete image correction based on the Zone System of Ansel Adams and Minor White. I was trained in that system and find this a cool gamma control tool. Other 55mm filters with self-explanatory names are Bleach Bypass, Infra-Red, Lens Distortion, Fluorescent (magenta removes green tint), and 43 other photographically inspired effects. Many of these filters can be achieved with standard color correct tools, but Digital Film Tools gives you a leg up by providing the pertinent parameter controls. Some filters, like Polarizer, are unable to mimic what a true polarizer actually does during acquisition. This is a typical mix of a few essential filters, several quick fixes, and a few others that power users will find irrelevant. Ozone alone is worth the price. www.digitalfilmtools.com

These 175 filters grouped in four sets have received a great deal of attention because of the promise of them being the über filter set. There is no question that the quality of these filters is very good and the range of effects impressive, but the price is exorbitant considering that many of the same filters are available elsewhere for less. On balance there are perhaps 30 must-have filters. The rest of the effects are similar to those available from Boris Continuum and Final Effects.

Box 3: Adjust, Blur & Sharpen, Composite & Distort concentrates on blurs. It includes camera-style blurs like Defocus Prism, Rack Defocus, RackDfComp, and the useful Edge Blur. There is online hyperlinked documentation describing what each parameter does, but the language is only slightly more informative than the parameter name. Also, dual procs are supported, but the renders are slow. These are high-quality filters at a premium price. www.genarts.com

GenArts Sapphire

Steve Walker, a visual effects artist, developed Walker Effects for his own use, and then decided to sell it to the public. There is some overlap with the Digital Film Tools products (and other sets), but the 10 filters included in the full Professional Edition of version 2.0 have a few essential high-end tools.

Unmultiply removes the fringing that occurs when semi-opaque footage of elements, such as flames or lens flares, are composited over a background plate. Another excellent filter is Color Composite, which puts together controls that are already in After Effects, but in a smart and helpful workflow. The tutorial projects that demonstrate the filters are the best part (available for free on the Walker Effects site). www.walkereffects.com

Brainchild of the highly successful visual effects house The Orphanage, Magic Bullet caught the Dogma DV wave with a one-stop solution for making DV images look like film. The long history of film-look products for video goes back to the ‘80s, but Magic Bullet gets you more than half way to doing the impossible. Like 90 percent of the plug-ins on the market, you can achieve similar results with De-interlace, Channel Operations, Levels, Grain Management, and a lot of know-how, but this product is a very good fix for DV filmmakers who have an intermediate knowledge of After Effects or Final Cut Pro. The most original aspects of Magic Bullet are the de-interlace and de-artifact algorithms that produce very pleasant-looking results for narrative DV projects. If you know how to light video, Magic Bullet can work wonders with your footage. Mainly, it's a lot cheaper than film stock. It's available in SD and HD versions. www.theorphanage.com

Power Picker is a simple and much-needed product. It's a color picker that appears in the Effects Palette of After Effects. Ordinarily, when you pick a color in Photoshop or After Effects, you have to close the palette to see the change. Power Picker does not desert you, and you get realtime feedback as you move the cursor around a field of color. Once you start using Power Picker you'll never go back. www.fnordware.com

Stu Maschwitz, CTO at The Orphanage, described Knoll Light Factory as a lens effect authoring system. That's a great way to describe this de facto standard lens flare tool. Visual effects artists use the many lens flare presets to supplement explosions, coronas, and other light burst effects. There are dozens of presets. Various adjustable layers comprise each lens flare. Layers can be turned on or off, and parameters control the global appearance of the effect. It has dozens of uses in enhancing point-light situations for realistic visual effects. This is the gold standard for lens flare effects. www.redgiantsoftware.com