FxFactory News - Effects & Plugins for FCPX, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Motion

Plugins and Effects for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Motion

Warping Wheels – Color Wheels for FCPX, Premiere Pro and AE with Skin Tone Protection

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Warping Wheels for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and After Effects reinvents color wheels to protect skin tones during adjustment, creating great looks with a familiar UI.

Download Free Trial or purchase today for only: $69

Picture Instruments has reinvented the color wheels!
At first sight, one may not immediately recognize the difference between the traditional color wheels and the Picture Instruments Warping Wheels. However, at second glance it becomes clear that the Warping Wheels are far superior to the traditional color wheels.

Advantages of the Warping Wheels as compared to the traditional color wheels!
In contrast to traditional color wheels, the Picture Instruments Warping Wheels Plugin provides extra functions for restoring and subsequently adjusting skin tones. Thus in most cases, the time-consuming work with masks is overdue.

With the “Protect Skin Tones” control, the skin tones are protected from the tint of the Warping Wheels. The Boost control saturates or desaturates the skin tones independently of the color wheels. If necessary, the Skin Tone Hue control can also be used to adjust the skin color.

With the range controls on the left side of the three color wheel for shadows, mids and highlights you can now set separately adjust whether the color tint should affect the darker-, the mid- or bright part of the respective range.

With the smoothness control of each Warping Wheel it is possible to set the width of the respective range (shadows, mids, highlights – sometimes known as lift, gamma, gain). A high value widens the range. As a consequence the crossover to the adjacent brightness range gets smoother. A small value reduces the width of the respective range.

Just like with the classic color wheels there is a Master Wheel which lets you tint, saturate and desaturate the entire image or change its brightness. In addition you can tint the various brightness ranges of an image by using the controls in the middle of the individual wheels for shadows, mid tones and highlights. There is also a brightness control for each of the three ranges.

Color Warp Technology
The name Warping Wheels refers to the Color Warp technology invented by Picture Instruments. With the Color Warp technology, colors can be bent very smoothly in the color space. This greatly reduces compression artefacts such as block formation or banding. Since the increased use of smartphone pics and videos as well as mini-gimbals and drones lead to more and more heavily compressed footage we think it’s a very important step to create our algorithms in such a way that they amplify the sometimes inevitable compression artefacts during post-processing as little as possible.

Advantages

  • You can work intuitively with the color wheels, since you are already familiar to the classic color wheels.
  • You can perfectly adapt the individual range (brightness and width) of shadows, mids and highlights to your footage.
  • Advanced skin tone functions to protect and adjust skin tones can avoid using masks.
  • Create professional looks in the blink of an eye.

Download Free Trial or purchase today for only: $69

Tunnel Transitions for Final Cut Pro

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CineFlare Tunnels is a set of 20 layer-based FCPX transitions that create a tunnel-shaped effect; both static tunnel and depth tunnel effects are included. Tunnels transitions are convenient and easy to use, yet produce stunning results.

Download Free Trial or purchase today: $49

Download Free Trial or purchase today: $49

Hedge Backup 19.1 Update – Queueing Transfers

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Hedge combines superfast transfers with a clean, intuitive UI. Simultaneous transfers give you peace of mind in the shortest time.

This is quite simply the best backup software for filmmakers.

Download Free Trial or purchase for only $129

  • Built for media: Offload media lightning fast, whether it’s video, stills or audio. Make your life easy and let Hedge do the tedious jobs.
  • Peace of mind: When creating multiple backups takes no longer than just one, you can finally sleep well — no more late night hotel room backup sessions.
  • Superfast transfers: As files get bigger and bigger, old copy-verify methods just aren’t cutting it. Hedge’s Fast Lane engine is purposely built for speed.
  • Simultaneous backups: Create as many copies as you need, at the same time. Hedge transfers multiple sources to all destinations, fully utilizing your bandwidth.
  • Keep track of everything: Keep complete track of what goes where, when and how with Transfer Logs. MHLs allow you to re-verify backups later, with Checkpoint.
  • Flexible at its core: Hedge is just as comfortable with NAS, SAN and RAID as it is with USB or Thunderbolt disks. Copy to and fro, or even within drives.
  • Expand your workflow: Have Hedge auto launch your AppleScripts to process footage with third party apps. Check out how-to and examples on GitHub.

Download Free Trial or purchase for only $129

What’s new in Hedge 19.1?

Hedge now has two ways to control if and when transfers will run together: Single Source & Single Transfer.

Single Source

Imagine you have three media cards to back up, and the only thing that matters is to get one back to the camera as soon as you can. It doesn’t matter if the total time to offload all drives will go up — only one source needs to be done, ASAP. Enter Single Source:

3 Sources into 2 Destinations, with Single Source enabled

Single Source prioritizes sources based on when they’re connected: first in, first out.

Single Transfer

Many teams nowadays use a NAS or SAN to be able to work simultaneously from a single network drive. Copying data to a drive while also streaming video files back to the NLE, can seriously affect the overall performance.

6 Sources into 1 Destination, with Single Transfer enabled

For instance, when consolidating a lot of projects on different drives to a single network destination, the bottleneck will soon become the network cable. With Single Track, you can limit how much data flows to or from your network share by only allowing a single transfer to run:

Single Track is instrumental when you need to migrate lots of independent folders or collections from a single volume to another. Changing the Queuing settings affects new transfers, not existing ones.

RAW Speed

One very practical example of how useful Queuing can be, is to consider offloading ARRIRAW to two drives. Even when you have two seemingly identical drives, their speeds will differ slightly. Fast Lane used to prefer the fastest destination, and as such the slower one would fall behind a bit, causing some files to require a second read. With Hedge’s new copy engine, these drives will copy synchronously — significantly improving the overall speed.

Checkpoint 2.0

Besides the new Queuing options, we have made significant improvements to Checkpoint, Hedge’s source verification engine. Checkpoint sniffs out issues with hardware and peripherals that usually go undetected by checksum verification. Hedge 19.1 speeds up Checkpoint in multiple ways:

When transferring a source to multiple destinations with Checkpoint enabled, Checkpoint now does a single preread that can be utilized by all transfers. The more destinations you have, the more speed gain you get (1/amount of destinations, to be precise).

Download Free Trial or purchase for only $129

Hedge Backup

by

Hedge combines superfast transfers with a clean, intuitive UI. Simultaneous transfers give you peace of mind in the shortest time.

This is quite simply the best backup software for filmmakers.

Download Free Trial or purchase today: Only $129

  • Built for media: Offload media lightning fast, whether it’s video, stills or audio. Make your life easy and let Hedge do the tedious jobs.
  • Peace of mind: When creating multiple backups takes no longer than just one, you can finally sleep well — no more late night hotel room backup sessions.
  • Superfast transfers: As files get bigger and bigger, old copy-verify methods just aren’t cutting it. Hedge’s Fast Lane engine is purposely built for speed.
  • Simultaneous backups: Create as many copies as you need, at the same time. Hedge transfers multiple sources to all destinations, fully utilizing your bandwidth.
  • Keep track of everything: Keep complete track of what goes where, when and how with Transfer Logs. MHLs allow you to re-verify backups later, with Checkpoint.
  • Flexible at its core: Hedge is just as comfortable with NAS, SAN and RAID as it is with USB or Thunderbolt disks. Copy to and fro, or even within drives.
  • Expand your workflow: Have Hedge auto launch your AppleScripts to process footage with third party apps. Check out how-to and examples on GitHub.

Download Free Trial or purchase today: Only $129

BrightPhoton brings AI to life with Nodes 3 in After Effects

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Award-winning motion designer, Pierre Magnol (aka BrightPhoton), joins us again to tell us about his new project using Yanobox Nodes. We have previously featured Pierre’s work on the promo video for the Falcon 8X from Dassault Aviation and Orchestra.

Pierre’s latest video was created to express depression in artificial intelligence … will it be depressed like us?

Artificial intelligence depression from BrightPhoton

What was the goal of the project? / How did you get this cool project?

A the very beginning, I gathered a lot of my research on patterns and fractals that I had done back in June for a commercial.

At the same time I had a discussion with a friend about AI. Will artificial intelligence have a mental representation for their own consciousness or about what they think? I imagined that those mental projections would look like. I sat down and wrote a quick story with a few words to translate the emotional state of mind of an depressed AI.

How much time did you have?

From the concept to the final edit it took about 3 weeks

What tools / Workflow did you use?

My personal workflow, which I use for my personals projects, is different than the workflow I use when working with clients.

For clients, it has to be strong, fluid and malleable until the end of the production. So typically, it’s Photoshop >> AE >> C4D >> back into AE >> and at-last edit in Adobe Premiere.

When I work for myself.. it looks more like a chaotic storm. I use C4D extensively and AE together at the same time! I love to generate “accidents” and give them a logic sense to then serve my purpose. So I always go back and forth between 2d and 3d mixing them together.

I regularly create one render.. then mix it with an effect, and then I go back and forth, until I obtain something that inspires me.. It’s a bit like a painting… I’m looking for the juxtaposition of layers.

So this is not an orthodox approach, so I have some trouble explaining it to others, as most of the time I can not explain it myself. 🙂

What shots did you use Nodes for in the project?

Nodes, even if it’s not very obvious, is used in almost every shot. Sometimes with a typical nodes look, sometimes disguised, under many layers of distortions.

What’s new about Nodes 3 that you used?

The replicator is a strong addition. I use it a lot to duplicate obj sequences I created in C4D. Very powerful.

Why are tools like nodes cool and how do they change the creative approach and workflow with clients?

What I like most about Nodes is that it allows me to explore new ways to represent data. Nodes is a tool where you can create a specific look you had thought about beforehand, but you can also dive in and tinker and have the results inspire you.

Bright Photon is Pierre Magnol

Pierre started his career in 1998 as a video and film editor for Le Groupe Canal + before moving on to the wonderful world of graphic design for several broadcast channels and luxury brands. Macro photography and beautiful lighting are two constants throughout much of his work, as Pierre constantly strives to bring a unique perspective to each and every piece, whether it be live photography, computer graphics, or hand crafted images.

“How to light a scene, subject or even character is very important because what is revealed is as important as what it is not…. Every single product or person is the source of a precious history that deserves to be illuminated.”  You can find Pierre online here:  Website – Twitter – Vimeo

Yanobox Nodes

Yanobox Nodes is being used by many talented artists on a number of great projects. Previously, we have looked at screen graphics in motion pictures such as Ender’s game, Planet of the Apes, Earth to Echo, The Avengers and Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Download free trial or purchase Nodes for $299.