The Foundry is one of the well-established effects houses in the world, with a reputation for creating great plugins for Adobe After Effects that goes way back. While they are very well known for their chromakeying package, Keylight Pro, which has been used in many television shows and films, they are known equally for Tinderbox, their filter and special effects package. With an almost dizzying array of plugins in each Tinderbox package, the features covered range from particle generated heat waves to sparkling starry skies to Borg-like light strobes to creative wipes.
To take advantage of the new 32-bit architecture available in After Effects 7 and the upcoming After Effects CS3, The Foundry recently re-mastered their Tinderbox effects packages. Since this comes shortly after their release of Tinderbox 4, we decided to review all four of the packages as they stand up today, in the light of their quality and the light of more recent competition.
Ease of Use
This is a pretty easy-to-use package, although some of the individual plugin names are a little hard to figure out ahead of time. For example, T_Beam (2.1) or T_Rays (2.1) are not the most descriptive phrases in the book, so you have to apply them to your clip to figure them out. If you’re still having trouble figuring out what a certain plugin does, they do have pretty descriptive “About” paragraphs for each filter, which is a big help.
Depth of Options
With 18 filters per package in Tinderbox 1-3 and 20 filters in Tinderbox 4, you get a total of 74 filters if you buy all four. As you can imagine, this gives you a huge number of options available in Tinderbox. The best way to describe Tinderbox is to think of a video version of almost all the filters currently available in Photoshop, with inherent general animation already included in most of them. (This animation can further be tweaked and streamlined through specific keyframes.) If you want a pen and paper version of your subject, there’s a Tinderbox filter that’ll do it. If you want to make your main character and heroine look like they’ve just stepped out of heaven, with light streamers around them, there’s a Tinderbox filter that’ll do that. If you want moving clouds to be rendered across the sky, Tinderbox has a filter for that and choices as to what type of light might be playing across those clouds.
Performance
Our test machine for this review was outfitted with a 1.86 Ghz Core2 Duo processor, 3 Gigs of RAM, and an nVidia Quadro FX 1500 graphics card. We used After Effects 7 and GridIron’s After Effects acceleration software Nucleo Pro. (To read our review of Nucleo Pro, check it out here.)
