Psunami Plugin For After Effects Cs4 Free
Orestes Hardy
I have been a fan of the Digital Anarchy plugins for Final Cut Pro and After Effects ever since I discovered their Psunami plugin several years ago. I always appreciated the quality and flexibility of any of their software sets. ToonIt is compatible for Mac OSX or higher or Windows, and is compatible with AE 5.5 or higher or FCP 5.1.4 and Motion 2.1.2 or higher. ToonIt is both Universal and FxPlug compatible as well as compatible for Apple's new Leopard OS.You have surely seen the many commercials on television and in film where the actors have been transformed to cartoon versions of themselves. It is not a hard process to create but it can be time consuming, and time is money. Digital Anarchy has recently introduced their latest plugin package, ToonIt, which simplifies the task enabling you to create and customize your own cartoon looks from your original footage. Plus, it does it better.
ToonIt is comprised of four individual plug-ins, Roto Toon, Outlines Only, Goth and Blacklight Edges. The Outlines Only filter disregards all color in your footage and reduces the edges in each frame to a basic black or colored edge onto a white background.
While I've seen and used outlines filters before, this one from the ToonIt collection, seems to be the most effective.
It's edge detector creates a beautiful and artistic rendering of the photo used here. Photo by Jan Hemme
The Goth Filter condenses your image to 3 colors, dark, midtone and light. There are actually 2 Goth presets, which you can then further customize with the many parameter controls so that you determine just how much, or how little, your image is altered.
There are two separate presets within the Goth Filter which flattens out the entire image into 3 basic colors.
You have complete control over the filter's algorithm to decide how much color should be applied. Photo by Jan Hemme
For those old enough to remember Woodstock and the old blacklight hippie days, the Blacklight Edges filter should bring back some fine memories. It is similar to the Outlines Only filter except that it maps a color gradient to the edge detection algorithm enabling your image to almost literally pop out of the picture. As the name of the filter implies, it is as if you were seeing the edges under a blacklight.
Using the default settings, application of the Blacklight filter needed no adjustments. Photo by Randy Siegel
The filter you will most often use, and the main reason for buying Digital Anarchy's ToonIt set of plug-ins is the Roto Toon filter. It is an excellent filter capable of a wide range of cartoon looks. The Roto Toon effect works by flattening the colors at the same time as it supplies the editor with numerous controls over the amount of edge detail, outlines and color tones. The Roto Toon filter's rotoscoping and edge detection capabilities composite together to create complete cartoon effects within a diversity of ranges.
I wanted to keep the focus on the helicopter and found it easy to flatten the colors a bit more and add blur to the background.
Working in Adobe After Effects CS 3, I found ToonIt fairly intuitive to use, and easy to adjust blurring, half tones and edge detail.
Installation of ToonIt was simple. For After Effects you select AE's plugins folder and the install is almost immediate. For Final Cut Pro and Motion, you select the hard drive and it installs itself into your FX plug-ins folder. I had no problems with either installation. In After Effects, working on a 3GHz Dual-Core Mac Pro, 5.5 gigs ram, ToonIt worked great. Adjustments made to parameters resulted in almost instant results when using video clips. When applied to still images, there was a bit of a delay. Like Digital Anarchy's Psunami, while they say it is for both After Effects and Final Cut Pro, it is truly best to limit your use to After Effects. I found that ToonIt in Final Cut Pro too often brought up the spinning beach ball, which can really cut into your time. Once it disappeared, any adjustments to any of the filter's parameters just brought it up again. It never caused a crash; you just have to wait for the beachball to go away. This never occurred in After Effects. This is not really a fault of Digital Anarchy's, rather it is due to the way Apple handles Fx Plug-ins and the way Final Cut Pro handles the canvas video display. While, for the purpose of this review, I did not actually render out any of the filter applications, you can expect a longer than usual render time. According to the folks at Digital Anarchy, you can speed up the renders in Final Cut Pro by applying a deinterlace filter prior to applying any of the ToonIt filters. This avoids FCP from having to render each interlaced frame twice over for each frame and should cut your render times in half. Never the less, when I use ToonIt, I will choose to use it in After Effects where any changes to my images were smoothly created.
Thus, my bottom line for ToonIt is that, when used in After Effects, it is a real time saver for anyone who wishes to recreate much of the cartoon like effects that seem so ubiquitous as of late. ToonIt was very stable, and came with an easy to understand downloadable manual. Applause should also go to the folk at Digital Anarchy who, over the years, have kept downloadable video tutorials on their website which can go a long way towards clarifying things for someone just getting acquainted with any of their plugin packages. As are all of the Digital Anarchy plugin sets, I urge you to try a free demo of ToonIt available for download on their website. The demo will be watermarked but I think you will be impressed with their quality, which makes them certainly worth your hard earned cash. While I might not have a great need for each of the plugins, the real gem of this package is the Roto Toon filter for which I will be able to find a multitude of uses.
Steve Douglas is a certified Apple Pro for Final Cut Pro 6 and underwater videographer. A winner of the 1999 Pacific Coast Underwater Film Competition, 2003 IVIE competition, 2004 Los Angeles Underwater Photographic competition, and the prestigious 2005 International Beneath the Sea Film Competition, where he also won the Stan Waterman Award for Excellence in Underwater Videography and 'Diver of the Year', Steve was a safety diver on the feature film "The Deep Blue Sea", contributed footage to the Seaworld Park's Atlantis production, the History channel's MegaDisaster show and other networks. Steve is one of the founding organizers of the San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition and leads both underwater filming expeditions and African safaris with upcoming excursions to Indonesia and the Coco Islands, Costa Rica in 2008, Kenyan safari in Africa and the Red Sea for 2009, and Truk Lagoon in Micronesia for 2010. Feel free to contact him if you are interested in joining Steve on any of these exciting trips. www.worldfilmsandtravel.com
Review by Steve Douglas
Digital Anarchy has produced some truly fine plug-ins over the years. I still think their Psunami plug in for After Effects rocks and rolls and have used it often over the years. Not too long ago they sold most of their video software to Red Giant and focused on the marketing of their Adobe Photoshop filters and other products. Looking to get back into the video genre, Jim Tierney and Digital Anarchy have produced 'Beauty Box' for both Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects. One serial number is all I needed for both the Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects installations and both went smoothly. Beauty Box is a skin retouching software, which uses Face Detection to identify skin tones at the same time as it preserves important facial features. It is, by design, easy to use and intuitive even though the downloadable manual provides a considerable amount of additional and useful information, which helps to clarify many of the manually adjusted parameters that Beauty Box incorporates.
Beauty Box parameters as seen in Adobe After Effects.
There are some differences between AE's parameters and Final Cut Pro's
but nothing to confuse the user. Digital Anarchy's Beauty Box is really not about creating fancy effects and appearances that stand out from the crowd, though I suppose one could create them to some degree. It is about doing the final retouching to facial characteristics and skin tones once you have created your sequence. Its effects are subtle, as they should be, which only makes it that much more valuable a tool to have. Using it was really quite simple and automatic. With the original frame in After Effects on the left, you can see how the frame on the right with the applied Beauty Box has done an excellent job of reducing skin glare, pore size and creating a natural smoothness to actress Renee Gray's complexion. Note there is a slight softening of the image in the blinds behind her face. Once applied in Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro, you are instructed to set the playhead upon a good frame that best shows as much face as possible and click on the 'Analyze Frame' button. This analysis sets key frames for that frame and clip. In many cases, clicking this just once in After Effects will do. Final Cut Pro requires clicking this twice in different parts of the clip. There are no analyzed files stored somewhere as there are for Final Cut's Smooth Cam filter and other filters that do analysis. Beauty Box looks at the frame, changes the values appropriately, and sets key frames.Should there be lighting changes which affect the image throughout the clip you can move the playhead to those areas and click on the 'Analyze Frame' again which, by default, will analyze the second frame and keyframe that in a linear manner so that abrupt changes in skin tone will not occur to the audience. Three types of keyframes can be set, the Linear keyframe will probably be the one you most use when there is little color variation or lighting changes as you might have in a talking head situation. A Bezier keyframe is another option should you want to manually key your parameters and a Hold keyframe if your clips has multiple lighting or scene changes. If there are many changes in the skins appearance over the course of the clip due to lighting, angle, or scene change, you have the option to click on the 'Analyze All' button which will literally analyze the clip frame for frame. However, this will probably not be a necessary step for most and the 'Analyze All' button is not included in the Final Cut Pro version due to Apple's FX plug API (Application Program Interface which allows a software program to interact with other software) making including it difficult. In addition, unlike when using Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro does not automatically set key frames. This is really not a problem as once you click on the Analyze Frame it is easy enough to set the key frame manually in the Filters tab, move to the next section of the clip, click on Analyze Frame and now a new group of key frames will be set. It's really the same protocol as when key framing any filter in Final Cut Pro. Once the 'Analyze Frame' button is clicked the actual analysis runs quite quickly in Adobe After Effects. While it is best to use Beauty Box on a full face, side profile analysis is also possible. There may be times when a warning pops up saying that the analysis failed. According to Digital Anarchy this is just a warning letting you know that this was the case and that you should switch to a different frame where the face may be more visible. In my case, I was experimenting with a very tight facial shot so that the mouth was barely visible. This may have thrown off the facial identification algorithms as, oddly enough, when using a similar frame, it worked just fine. In After Effects the warning dialogue that came up on the left just lets you know that the analysis did not work on that particular
frame. On the right, in an almost identical frame, Beauty Box was successful.
Beauty Box's Face Detection automatically looks for a face to base its mask on. However, according to the manual as well as some of my tests, it can fail should the face be tilted back or be on an angle. This makes it all the more important to be sure that you have a good full frontal shot under the same lighting conditions that your interview or scene has been shot in. While the automatic 'Analyze Frame' button does the job, there are many manual controls for customizing your results. The most important are the smoothing parameters. The Smoothing Amount serves as the master control. Set too high will result in lost contrast and an unnatural smoothing out of facial features. Not much adjustment needs to be made as the default settings really seemed to be the best for me during testing. The Skin Detail parameter allows for both detail and texture in the skin, which can offset the work of the smoothing control. Thus, use it carefully and in small increments. The final smoothing parameter is the Smoothing Radius, which is useful for smoothing larger features, however, like the 'Smoothing Amount' parameter, this can cause a loss of contrast. Never the less, I found the default settings to really be the best way to go and any adjustments I might have made were quite small, a percentage here or there did the trick.If you will be doing this type of video work, I strongly encourage the use of an external high definition monitor through an MXO or similar output device. Because the proper use of Beauty Box creates such subtle appearance changes, I found that using the computer monitor made it difficult to evaluate the filter's effect. Viewing the image through my output device onto my Sony Bravia made it much easier to see the improvements to the image. On the left is the original image and the right with Beauty Box applied. While there was no suggestion as to what percentage of the frame a head should fill, even with such a small head size as in this frame, Digital Anarchy's Beauty box did a great job on the face with minimal effect upon either the foreground or background. However, if a face is too small as to prevent you from seeing much detail, Beauty Box is probably unnecessary. A face smaller than 150x150 pixels would definitely fall into that category. And what of the results? As previously noted, changes are gentle. There is a smoothing of the skin tones wherein blemishes and large pores are not as obvious. You can, manually, adjust the parameters to take the smoothing a few steps further but that tends to flatten out the face and introduce an artificial, plasticized appearance. This might be the look you are seeking but Beauty Box's primary function is simply to clean up the appearance of the skin tones and facial features such as distracting blemishes, scars or patchiness. In After Effects as well as Final Cut Pro you can also work with the mask that Beauty Box creates. This is a great tool to utilize to tweak your image. In Final Cut Pro there is a thumbnail image to work with. Once you set the Mode to 'Foreground' and the 'Show Mask' to 'On', you can click anywhere on the thumbnail (unfortunately, very small but serviceable) to help clean up the image. This worked quite well when doing final blemish smoothing.
In Final Cut Pro you can further tweak your image by using the mask thumbnail. Because Final Cut Pro's API does not allow you to click on the canvas as you can in Adobe After Effects, clicking in the areas of the thumbnail you wish to clean up provides the same dexterity as you would find in AE. In the FC canvas you can see the original mask after Beauty Box has been applied. While there is already improvement to the image, I can now click within selected areas of the thumbnail to provide further smoothing.