FXHome has been a company that's been a friend to micro-budget filmmakers world-wide for years now. They first became known for their original product, AlamDV, which was a compositing program that became popular with folks who were creating sci-fi fan films, especially ones based on Star Wars. AlamDV made painting glowing lightsabers much easier than it had been in the past, and adding blaster effects was a breeze. As FXHome developed as a company, they retired the AlamDV name and created the VisionLab, EffectsLab, and CompositeLab programs instead. With a quirky interface that was quite a bit different than industry standards like After Effects and Motion, these products proved that they could create professional quality effects. With a thriving user base that's encouraged to create and share expanded options, models, and color grading effects, these products have been the key for many low-budget filmmakers to realize their genre-based dreams!
Now FXHome releases a set of special effects clips that you don't have to create yourself called Footage: Special Effects. It's a combination of high rez practical effects, medium rez particle effects, still pictures that can be used in films and animations, and lower-rez effects for animation (the latter of which largely originated with the original AlamDV). With that said, let's take a look at how well it works!
Need bullet holes in your heroe's Corvette? Well, just put tracking marks on the car when you film it and overlay it with these nifty quick transfer bullet holes.
Ease of Use
Once you get the hang of this set, it's pretty easy to use, although it is a bit troublesome to locate things in.
This is because things are a bit scattered about the DVD, being put into either “HD Stock Footage” or “Clip Art.” The HD footage folder is pretty easy to navigate, consisting of cinematic quality effects of dust explosions, explosions, fire, fog, gun effects, and sparks in either NTSC or PAL. However, the “Clip Art” folder is a bit of a disaster, as it actually contains a variety of both animated and still graphics. As both still graphics and animations are converted to Quicktime movies (as opposed to still image formats like .PSD or layered .PDF), previewing the still pictures is a pain unless you view the DVD in something like Adobe's Bridge (where the previews are quite good) or actually import them into your compositing program. Personally, I would probably advise that you import the entire 4.3 Gb of content onto your hard drive and reorganize things to your liking with Bridge, which will let you add lots of meta data to simplify searching for things.
Due to the way in which the effects are distributed in this set, it's best to preview them in something like Adobe Bridge, which can showcase videos and high quality thumbnails.
