Cookie Options
Version 1.5 of Premiere Pro 1.5 isn’t as fully featured an upgrade as After Effects 6.5, but there are some great new creative effects and some efficient workflow enhancements. The feature that received the most attention when Premiere Pro 1.5 was announced at the NAB show in Las Vegas was the addition of support for the wunderkind format 24P. This sounds great, but here in old Blighty ...
Of the three updates to Adobe’s Video Collection, After Effects has got the most out of the point-five upgrade. Plus, it costs £70 plus VAT whether you’re upgrading the Standard Edition or the Professional Edition, which is very reasonable. AE 6.5 claims more than 60 new effects, most of which have been bought from Cycore – the creators of the popular Final Effects plug-in set. Most of these are solid, one-shot effects, though effects such as ...
Bravo II's a combination disc-duplication and inkjet printing system – ideal for churning out professional-looking CDs or DVDs for passing round your studio or sending out to clients. You create your master and the disc art, and then the Bravo II Disc Publisher does the rest.
You wouldn’t normally call a workstation small and stylish – but that’s the perfect description for the Crossbow XB-A700. Armari has taken a chassis that would normally house a combo PC/hi-fi unit, and somehow fitted most of the usual workstation components inside it. The end result looks great - but once you stop drooling and start thinking, though, the XB-A700 isn’t so appealing.
HumanEyes 3D is an interesting new technology that creates stereoscopic images for print or on-screen viewing. It was originally invented to allow a single digital camera to capture 360-degree panoramas for stereoscopic viewing – this hasn’t previously been possible with one camera. Technically it’s not true 3D, but ‘2.5D’ as the subjects only rotate slightly, but your eyes see a realistic continuous-depth impression.
The market for match-moving software is becoming increasingly crowded – and now there’s another product to add to the list. The Pixel Farm’s PFMatch joins the likes of 2d3’s Boujou, RealViz’s MatchMover, and a handful of plug-in-based solutions in the match-moving market. PFMatch aims to offer a sophisticated toolset and autotracking for the extraction of 3D camera data from film or video footage.
Against rivals such as Adobe’s Encore DVD, Apple’s DVD Studio and Ulead’s DVD Workshop, DVD Architect is unusual in that it’s available only as part of Sony’s Vegas+DVD bundle (Vegas 5 is reviewed here). Looking at version 2.0, this makes perfect sense – as while its interface and integration will appeal to Vegas users, its toolset isn’t up to the competition.
Previous updates to Maya, one of the biggest 3D animation package out there, have seen Alias attempt to make the software easier to use. The company has sought to widen its appeal to include designers and DCC artists not working at the cutting-edge of 3D animation, and to slash the price too.
Primatte Chromakey is one of two compositing aids for still images we’re testing this month. Like Cinematte, it’s a Photoshop plug-in, and it works on the same principle of removing a single-coloured backdrop from a studio-shot photograph, leaving a natural-looking cutout that can be added to a new background ...
Cinematte is a blue or green screen cutout plug-in for Photoshop that creates natural-looking composites for superimposition over any new background image, or a pure white background. You just need to photograph your subject in front of a standard blue or green screen ...
Last summer, Sony announced a new eight million-pixel sensor for compact cameras, and we’re now seeing a rash of new models all hitting the market together. Sony was first, naturally, with the excellent semi-pro DSC-F828 that arrived late last year. It was followed by 8mp announcements from Canon, Minolta, Olympus. Nikon joined the queue with the CoolPix 8700 ...
The Perfection 4870 Photo is Epson’s attempt to combine the versatility of an A4 flatbed scanner with the ability to scan small format films at adequate resolutions for print. It comes a few months after Microtek’s £155 ScanMaker 6100, which had similar ambitions but fell sadly short on the film side. Can Epson do better?
The Super CoolScan 5000 ED is Nikon’s new top-end film scanner. It usurps the Super CoolScan 4000 ED, introduced in 2001, as the best scanner in its class.
RealViz is best known for its professional-quality tools for integrating 3D elements into movies. However, its Stitcher software is a high-grade still-imaging tool for creating panoramas from multiple images. Results can be output as a super-wide print, or put onto a Web page or CD to form immersive QuickTime VR MOV, Shockwave, or ...
For many digital creatives, asset management software stopped being useful when Photoshop 7 introduced the File Browser. However, there’s much more to this application than mere thumbnail browsing.
The relative success of CorelDraw upgrades is inconsistent to say the least. CorelDraw was already at version 3 before anyone took any notice; version 4 was astonishing; version 8 was a blinder; version 10 was the dog’s bollocks. All the intermediate releases, however, have come across as fillers, as if they were produced by contractual obligation. This is how version 12 feels too.
When Olympus announced the 5.1mp Camedia 5060 Wide Zoom compact digital camera back in September, it seemed like the excellent C-5050Z would just be fitted with a wider-angle lens. Actually it’s a major revision, with a new, fully articulated swivelling monitor, and it’s been tuned for faster start-up and shutter response, too. The lower-cost C-5060Z is still available.
There seems to be a plethora of mid-range DVD authoring tools on the Windows platform at the moment, including Adobe’s Encore DVD. In terms of ease-of-use however, DVD Workshop 2 actually resembles Apple’s iDVD – offering a similar approach, motion menus, and drag-&-drop functionality.
Until this autumn, Matrox’s line of DV-editing hardware looked to be in trouble. Tied to an ailing piece of editing software – Premiere 6.5 – the systems were facing redundancy, made obsolete by software-only NLEs and the power of host machines.
Too good to be true? Sadly, yes. It’s a reasonably good print scanner, but its film-reading abilities aren’t a patch on a dedicated 35mm or medium format scanner. While the resolution is enough for enlarging 35mm film frames up to A3 size and beyond, there’s more to image quality than resolution.
