When I reviewed NewBlueFX’s Film Effects last month I mentioned that they have a bevy of other video effects available for a huge variety of platforms. (While most of there programs are still designed for PC editors like Premiere Pro and Vegas, some of NewBlue's newest plugins are designed to work with Final Cut Pro, Avid, and the Mac version of Premiere Pro.) Since I was favorably impressed with the cost-to-performance ratio of Film Effects, I thought I’d give one of their other plug-ins a shot and was most interested in Motion Effects. This plug-in package is a collection of 100 presets grouped in ten different filters, including Active Camera, Earthquake, Motion Blur, Ripple, Rolling Waves, Shear Energy, Spin Blur, Warp, Wiggle, and Zoom Blur. All of these filters either move the image around on the screen in some manner, or simulate the blur associated with movement.
The "Wild Shaking" preset in Active Camera is chaotic but cool, and looks to me like watching video fast-forwarding.
Ease of Use
Installation was simple, with a fairly typical installer. However, as with Film Effects, there was no option to choose the installation directory. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but it installed the filters into the plug-in directory of an older version of Premiere Pro. I had to manually move the folder to the new version, which wasn’t a big deal, but might be confusing for less tech-savvy users. (Reviewer's Note: According to the folks at New Blue, " We thought we were safe to use Adobe's API call to find the plugin directory, but it turns out it can send them to the wrong place. Needless to say, we had a number of Premiere Pro users who ran into this problem. We have an unreleased Beta that solves this." )
Activation was simply a matter of entering in the serial number, either by pulling up the plug-in in the host application or by navigating to a “manage activation” feature, via the Windows Programs menu. Activation can be completed automatically if you have an internet connection, or manually as long as you can get to another computer with internet access.
The presets in each filter vary from subtle to extreme, but all seem to be useful and well-programmed.
Motion Effects showed up as a separate plug-in folder in the Video Effects drop-down in Premiere Pro, and from there I was able to drag the various filters to my footage. There really aren’t that many parameters for any of the filters (Earthquake only has two!) which is actually very refreshing. Plus, with the large number of presets offered for each filter, I really didn’t see much of a need to tweak any of the parameters. You definitely won’t need to read the manual for this one. However, the parameters are there to be tweaked, and are laid out in a simple and logical manner. The parameters can be changed either numerically for fine tuning or with a slider for quickly seeing the results of large changes. According to the NewBlueFX website, other platforms show knobs instead of sliders, which is kind of cool, but apparently that functionality hasn’t been worked out for Premiere Pro.
