NewEnglandFilm.com

Tinderbox 2

Tinderbox 2 for Mac/PC, from England’s The Foundry, is a set of 20 new filters for After Effects. This is not a version upgrade from the popular and useful Tinderbox 1. T2 is a sequel and entirely new product.

While there is some overlap in T2 with other products in the AE plug-in market, this collection provides some unique effects and new twists on familiar ones. All of the filters have a common control panel, which makes for a shallow learning curve.

Not found together in other collections are effects such as "Blob," "Kaleidoscope," "Newsprint," and "Night Sky." Blob creates shaded spheres (from one to many) that stick, deform and can move independently. Think of this as your own little Flubber machine. Kaleid turns an image into a kaleidoscope, with controls over the shape, position, and movement of the "mirrors."

Newsprint will screen your image into grayscale or colored screens, representative of the dots that make up newspaper photos. And Night Sky creates numerous star fields and constellations, with movements like spinning, clustering and forward/reverse. With Night Sky, sending your starship into warp speed or through a galactic wormhole is easier than saying "Take us home, Mr. Chekov."

The grain, blur, and painting filters in Tinderbox 2 are similar to those in other products, including AE 5’s incorporated effects. But the common interface and a few different implementations provide users with new choices in old standby effects. For example, you can find numerous Gaussian blur filters, but T2’s BlurMasked filter uses a mask to control the size of the blur. This is a quick way to create accurate depth of field or rack focus shots.

T2 also includes lens flare, color bars, glass, ripple, stutter, wobble, and swirl, among others. This package has so many neat filters that with T2 you could create your own, well "T2."

If you need to create hip text effects, such as those in "The Matrix" or on The Weather Channel (nothing hipper than that), Digital Anarchy’s Elements of Anarchy: Text is for you.

Designed to make the random text elements used in backgrounds of commercials and films, Elements of Anarchy: Text (Mac/PC) provides the quickest way to create and control these text elements. Although you can use keyframes for precise control, the three effects have numerous settings so the user doesn’t need to set hundreds of keyframes.

The three filters in EofA:T include Text Matrix, Screen Text, and Text Grid. Within each, the controls offer almost unlimited tweaking to create unique effects whose only limits are the imagination of the artist.

At $79 for EofA:T, it’s probably one of the best bargains in AE plug-ins. EofA:T can also be purchased with DigiEffects’ VideoLook for about $100 or with DigiEffects’ Aurorix for under $300.

The biggest complaint I had about After Effects 5 was that I couldn’t preview my work on an NTSC monitor to see what it really looks like output to video. EchoFire 2.0 (Mac only) from Synthetic Aperture solves that problem and a few more.

How can anyone live without this product? Installed as a system extension and control panel, EchoFire outputs the comp window from After Effects projects or the document window from Photoshop to an external monitor via FireWire or other video card, such as a Targa, Media 100, or Digital Voodoo.

In addition, any QuickTime-enabled application can output video and audio via FireWire. Or any supported video file can be output using EchoFire’s drag-and-drop movie player. EchoFire supports 4:3, 16:9, and 14:9 aspect ratios and is compatible with NTSC and PAL. You can overlay a waveform monitor, vectorscope, safe title, action areas and test patterns on the video output.

I found EchoFire worked extremely well. The output was clean and fast, and it made a big difference being able to check my After Effects projects on a real monitor.

Since it’s a system extension, and considering the complexity of interfacing with numerous QuickTime-enabled applications, I did encounter a few hiccups and freezes, and wasn’t always sure why EchoFire was or wasn’t outputting video to the external monitor.

For example, viewing a streaming video from the web in QuickTime caused some problems and a system freeze. And my version of Toast wouldn’t recognize my CD writer until I disabled EchoFire and restarted. These are the kind of kooky problems that are difficult to predict during product testing; and another user’s system may not react the same way mine did. But using EchoFire within the appropriate situations was generally functional and problem-free.

If you had to choose between EchoFire, Tinderbox 2 or Elements of Anarchy: Text, I would say don’t settle for anything less than getting all three. You can never have too many After Effects filters, and EchoFire is the best way to preview your work on the monitors your finished projects will be viewed on.

Get ‘em all!