Nearly 10 years ago, iZotope released a product called Trash, an audio plugin that gave users a wide array of tools to distort and mangle audio. It has been heavily used by bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Garbage, and Sigur Ros and has served the music and film industry well over the years. Just a few months ago, iZotope released the rebirth of this classic plugin now called Trash 2, and it’s better than ever. Whether you are a sound designer mangling sound effects or a filmmaker looking to add some grit to some background music in your next short film, Trash 2 has an application for everyone in the music and film industry.
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Alloy 2 gives filmmakers and sound designers seven stellar tools to shape and form audio, arguably one of the most important and yet most ignored parts of a film. Assuming a basic knowledge of mixing, users will love Alloy’s user-friendly interface, wallet-friendly price tag and reliable performance. If you take Alloy 2 for a test run, be sure to pair it with a trial of Ozone 5 and let these products speak for themselves.
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Instead of a magical “instant fix” in the Quick path where there are few choices, or an overwhelming list of options in Expert, the new Guided Edits path lets the creative side of the user flow as you do things like add depth of field or a high key effect to a photo. In the Guided area, you are led step-by-step through each phase of adjustment, using your eye and goal for the project. What you get is rather impressive, even if you are an amateur photographer using a point and shoot camera.
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However, PRE11 seems to be much cleaner and faster. There is very little lag in response time and my old problems of dropped frames, uneven pans, and errors have vanished. To get an accurate preview of the edited video you have to render the Timeline, which used to be a slow process and not always successful. Now the Render tab is on the top of the Timeline and is much more responsive and effective. The preview plays accurately and there are no unpleasant surprises by the final product during publication.
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Hailing from Sweden, Reason 6.5 is a music creation program for the Mac and PC. Reason supplies users with everything necessary to create film scores and sound effects from scratch—everything from synthesizers and sampled pianos to drum kits and orchestral strings. Unlike SonicFire Pro, the ability to write music is a prerequisite for this program, and those familiar with playing a musical instrument (preferably the piano) will find this program much easier to navigate. The quality of the sampled instruments is quite good for the price, and the possibilities to create new sounds with digital synthesizers are endless.
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Corel VideoStudio Pro X5 is a surprisingly powerful video editing tool given it’s really low price tag. While it’s geared towards new editors, or those that just like to “dabble,” there’s a lot to this package that professional editors typically pay a lot more for.
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One of Adobe’s established programs has become even easier to navigate, giving novice and advanced users alike the ability to create the marketing pieces they need to professionally sell their products. At first glance, InDesign may seem like a program only for creating print pieces such as flyers, magazines and books. But InDesign CS6 is so much more.
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Many of us have had the opportunity over the past year or two to beta test Adobe Story as a screenwriting program that allows you to collaborate online with other writers, producers and directors. Taking in much of the user feedback, Adobe has released Adobe Story PLUS with its latest creative suite.
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Dreamweaver CS6 is another solid, stable and innovative release from Adobe. While there certainly isn’t a major jump in new features when upgrading from Dreamweaver CS5.5 to CS6, fluid grid layouts and the ability to integrate PhoneGap and Business Catalyst will be enough from some viewers to spend the money on the upgrade. If you have never purchased Dreamweaver, now is as good of a time as ever to enter the world of web design and app development (Dreamweaver has now made these two creative endeavors one in the same).
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A new feature with version 2.8 is the single window mode. Found as a toggle option in the Windows tab, the single window mode allows for a more cohesive, less cluttered, working environment. Open images appear as thumbnail tabs top center, with dialog boxes affixed to the left and right of the main window. I found this option to be an improved working environment.
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What is offered with Continuum Complete is a package full of quality effects with a vast amount of options. Hopefully, the quality shown in this package is the quality we can start to expect in the use of the effects in general.
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With CS6 Production Premium, Adobe continues to move forward not by only being innovative, but by creating the options the users have requested.
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Photoshop has never been more intuitive and user friendly. Improvements to the look of the User Interface (UI) as well as re-engineered design tools help make this the easiest to use Photoshop yet.
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This version of Maya will be more of an advantage to a film crew or microbudget filmmaker. Whether you’re a large production house or a small group of indie filmmakers, it’s a good idea to get familiar with these tools and build on this innovative trend for digital immersion, especially if you intend to make forays into stereography.
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After Effects is a pretty essential tool for most filmmakers who are incorporating any type of graphic treatment to their work, and this latest update is a major one specifically designed to increase the speed at which you can create, without waiting on your computer. This alone makes this update more or less essential for anyone who relies on After Effects as part of their normal work-flow, but the addition of the camera tracking feature and extruded text are also HUGE.
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Today, though, despite what Flash has done for the internet and its builders, the climate has drastically changed presenting a frigid reception to the once indispensable toolset. New media devices, like the Apple iPad (with its huge adoption rate), have decided to freeze out the plugin from being used and in so doing splinter the market on utilizing it in production. On top of that, the rise of HTML 5 has finally brought a way for developers to create rich media without having to depend on complicated scripting or purchased software. These big changes beg the question “Is Flash still relevant anymore?” In Flash Professional CS6, Adobe has made some integral additions to answer that very question.
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Editors new to Premiere Pro will find a lot of great features, and for previous users (especially those who held off on getting Premiere Pro CS5.5 because of the relatively few updates over CS5) now may be the time to upgrade, as Premiere Pro CS6 offers up many new slick features designed to speed up your work flow.
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It’s a plug in designed to blend frames, and it has enough options to keep you happy. It’s not just about slowing down or speeding up. You can change frame rates in general, taking 30fps footage and getting a better 24fps output is certainly a great option, this should work for converting any frame rate you require. As far as I know, the amount of frame rate changes you can implement to clip is limitless, given your OK with waiting for a long render to create new frames. The amount of controls given to each keyframe is pretty impressive.
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Monsters is a pretty high-end set of plug-ins. Atmospheric effects like Raindrops for example are meant to seamlessly integrate with live-action footage and give the impression that you rented a $10,000 rain machine on your low-budget shoot. Everything here looks pretty convincing, and unlike many other plug-in sets, there are very few “throw away” effects. GenArts clearly spent a lot of time making these look great.
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Lightroom 4 is a bit of a different upgrade to the popular platform. For the first time we see significant shifts from the editing and workflow side to the distribution, social media, and print side. The interface has largely stayed the same, save minor additions and new modules. This installment doesn’t bring significant changes in editing performance; it expands your options regarding how you want to edit your pictures.
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iPi Soft’s combo software package of iPi Recorder and iPiStudio allow users to harness today’s latest camera technology to inexpensively generate motion capture data.
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It is getting harder and harder to look the other way when it comes to adding CG (Computer Graphics) to the independent filmmakers tool set. For serious indies that are looking to “up their game” Cinema 4D, the full studio version, is worth a long, hard look. Even TV shows are doing so much with green-screens and environment manipulation, that viewers are expecting a level of sophistication greater than ever before.
Yes, we all know that the story is King. However, with offerings like Maxon’s Cinema 4D (C4D), even humble filmmakers can have professional grade tools in their studio, which only expands on the ability to tell a good story.
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Traditional Hollywood and anyone who has ever put a filter in front of a camera lens, whether still or motion, has probably used a Tiffen filter or gel. They’re amazingly well-known in the cinematography and special effects community for filters and gels for getting amazing looks in the midst of production, but it’s only been fairly recently that they’ve delved into the realm of optical effects.
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A short time ago, Adobe introduced CS5 and with it came some great features. But the forward thinking people at Adobe realized that as media evolves at an astonishing rate, new features must be added to their existing programs. Not wanting to wait until the release of CS6, Adobe introduced InDesign CS5.5, which adds some great new features specifically targeting publishers who want to publish across multiple platforms.
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With CS5.5, writing with a partner is even easier than it was in CS5, and you can even set up permission levels to only allow them access to certain parameters. This is done very simply and becomes important when working with multiple partners or producers that you don’t want to directly edit your work. You can even access your scripts on your iPhone! (You can read them for changes and make comments, although, as of yet, you can’t actually change the script directly.)
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Premiere Elements 10 does a masterful job of just skirting the line between professional and consumer friendly. Enough elements for a seasoned pro to explore, but simple enough for someone to slap together some footage and get it rendered quickly.
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As with version 10 before it, Vegas Movie Studio HD is an incredibly priced software suite. At below $100 you WILL NOT find a more feature-packed piece of software for editing. I’ve been using Vegas Pro pretty exclusively for the past few years and have always found it surprising in its efficiency and quality, so to get so much of that power for hundreds less, you can’t beat it.
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iZotope Ozone is a killer mastering plug-in, and the value of six mastering effects in one plug-in continues to amaze me. It would be well worth your money to buy this program just for the presets, especially if you simply cannot afford to pay an audio engineer to master your film. Simply using the presets with minimal tweaking will place your film in front of so many other independent films. This plug-in would benefit any filmmaker looking to make their work a step above of the rest.
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As if dominating the market with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver (just to name a few) weren’t enough, Adobe has stepped into the realm of digital publishing with some amazing tools for both designers and filmmakers. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite gives creative folks with little to no experience programming software the ability to publish interactive apps for tablet devices such as the iPad, Android, and BlackBerry Playbook.
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Finding a program that will make your film audio sound better does not have to be a confusing process. Most companies sell audio effects separately. You can buy this EQ for 100 dollars or that compressor for 200 dollars. But wouldn’t it be nice to have all of your basic audio processing tools in one intuitive program? Wouldn’t it be even nicer to buy all of these tools together for a reasonable price? This is where iZotope Alloy comes in.
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Nectar’s ability to offer users access to several audio effects in one plug-in truly sets this plug-in above the rest. If that wasn’t enough, Nectar also gives you access to realistic pitch correction of vocals, which is very useful in adjusting the presence of an actor. Let’s dive into the heart of Nectar to see if this could be a plug-in you use on your next project.
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Adobe Dreamweaver has stayed on the cutting edge for years, and CS5.5 does not disappoint. If you are new to web design, you will probably want to read a bit about the basics of web coding, but the beauty of Dreamweaver is the ability to create a website without having to write any coding by hand. Whether you want to insert a picture, a link, or a menu bar, Dreamweaver makes it easy with tools built right into the program. And if you are already familiar with Dreamweaver, CS5.5 offers some fun new features, which we will look at in the ‘Depths of Options’ section.
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The need for audio engineers to make tracks sound as if they are coming from various types of acoustical environments is as old as audio production itself, and has only intensified with the use of audio in film. Of course, when shooting for realism, the initial (and still the best) solution was to actually record the sounds in those environments – concert halls, theaters, living rooms, vehicles, etc. Then studio engineers like Bill Putnam Sr. and the like thought, “Hey, we have this facility with all kinds of rooms – why don’t we play back an audio signal miked in a dry room (one with little reverberation) into a wetter (more reverberant) room with a loudspeaker and mic the results?” And thus, the art of applying additional reverberation to tracks was born. The process has undergone a great deal of mutation since then, with the creation of reverb devices utilizing anything from metal plates, springs, a series electronic delay lines, all the way to modern digital equipment with powerful IC’s.
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For the past several years, programs like 3ds Max, Softimage, Mudbox, and MotionBuilder were separate, unique experiences all on their own. Artists, as well as companies, had to ally themselves with one particular 3D application to supply most of their needs and be cautious when considering any other packages to add on that might throw a wrench in their existing pipeline. Since those days, Autodesk has been working to bring the biggest 3D applications used in the entertainment industry under one roof. But collecting all the most popular tools was not all Autodesk had plans to do.
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The titling options alone are exceptional, with literally hundreds of modifications you can do with your text. Clicking and dragging what you want done to the text couldn’t be simpler. Inserting provided graphics and overlays, quickly creating shapes and objects, and changing camera angles can all be done on the fly and then the program provides you with 3-D animation models for you to explore and insert. Once you’ve completed your animation/titling/graphic – you can render it to multiple types of video files and insert it easily into your project.
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The latest version of Sapphire offers a very extensive set of over 240 plug-ins for every editing platform imaginable, including After Effects & Premiere Pro (which is the version I looked at for this review), as well as Final Cut 7, Autodesk, Avid, Nuke/OFX & Sony Vegas. Highly touted in this new release are many updates to the previous version including 6 new effects and 9 new transitions, updated LensFlare control as well as 3D lens flares (currently only available in actual 3D for After Effects), a preset browser and more.
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