Post Magazine

February 2015

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www.postmagazine.com 41 POST FEBRUARY 2015 DIGITAL ANARCHY ADDRESSES FLICKER, RETOUCHING BRISBANE, CA — At press time, Digital Anarchy (www. digitalanarchy.com) was getting ready to release two new plug-ins. Beauty Box Video 4.0 ($199) sees considerable speed increases thanks to GPU support from Nvidia (realtime) and other GPUs (near realtime). Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro editors can use the plug-in to smooth skin, add digital make up and perform retouching to video without compromising their workflow with render times. Flicker Free for Avid is a new Digital Anarchy plug-in that's designed for removing flick- er. The company also offers a solution for Adobe apps, Final Cut Pro and Resolve. Flicker Free allows users to easily deflicker video, fixing flicker problems that may have been caused by camera and light sync issues, slow motion, or timelapse video. Some common uses would be to fix the rolling bands that occur because of LED or fluorescent lighting being out of sync with a camera's shutter speed. Flicker Free is priced at $149. DFT PLUG-INS SIMULATE LIGHT & FILM STOCK LOS ANGELES — Late last year, Digital Film Tools (www.digitalfilmtools.com) released three plug-ins: Film Stocks V.2.0, Light V.4.0, and Rays V.2.0. Film Stocks ($95 photo, $195 video) is a filter that simulates 288 different color and B&W still photographic film stocks, motion picture films stocks and historical photographic processes. As a result of customer requests, Bleach Bypass, Cross Processing, Grunge, Three Strip and Two Strip Processes have been added. The Film Stocks user interface has also been upgraded with Retina display support for Mac as well as three new masking types: Path, Snap and Selection. OFX plug-in support has also been added, making Film Stocks compatible with DI solutions such as Assimilate Scratch and Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, the Foundry's Nuke compositing software and the Sony Vegas nonlinear editing system. Light ($50) can be added to a scene where none existed before. Gobos (patterns) used by designers can be now applied digitally. In addition to the 565 Gam gobos, Light adds 1300 Rosco gobos. A new user interface, filter layering, seven masking types, Lightroom plug-in, GPU acceleration, and Mac Retina display support round out the list of new features. And Rays ($50 photo, $99 video) allows users to quickly create realistic light ray effects. New features include a user-definable light source to generate rays, texture to give the rays a more natural and organic look, and ray blurring. The Rays user interface has also been upgraded with Retina display support for Mac in addi- tion to layering and seven masking types for photo plug-in hosts. Rays is also available as an OFX plug-in with support for Scratch, DaVinci Resolve, Nuke and Vegas. All three plug-ins are available now. The "video" versions are com- patible with Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5, Avid, Sony Vegas and The Foundry's Nuke. THE POWER OF THE GPU Karl Sims and I founded GenArts in 1997. Our mission: to inspire the world's greatest storytellers to bring their stories to life. Our flagship visual effects software product, Sapphire, combines the power of high-performance computing with the art of visual effects and delivers an extensive library of compelling digital effects to the global media and advertising industries. Every VFX Oscar nominee over the past 10 years has used Sapphire. One can also see Sapphire in countless news and sports broadcasts, commercials and more. We were early adopters of Nvidia CUDA technology because it offered a strong development ecosystem and robust cross-plat- form support. To this day, CUDA continues to offer industry-lead- ing performance and ease of development, which we rely on to build and refine our growing library of algorithms. Our GPU-cen- tric approach also benefits our customers because it greatly enhances performance, and because upgrading a GPU is much faster and cheaper than replacing an entire system. Our customers need to push a huge number of pixels per second, especially with the advent of 4K resolution and beyond. News and sports broadcasters are under particular pressure to rapidly generate graphics. Behind every breaking news story and change of lineup are VFX artists scrambling to keep up. Commercials, feature films and other media formats may have longer lead times, but performance is no less critical. The faster the system performs, the more time they have to polish their work and make it beautiful instead of simply slapping it togeth- er and barely making deadline. Speed also counts here at Gen- Arts because we need the ability to quickly and easily design new and upgraded effects. Thanks to the speed and flexibility of the Nvidia CUDA ar- chitecture, our plug-ins may run seven to ten times faster with graphics acceleration compared to relying on the CPU. Users will get the same results either way, but with smoother, more fluid performance. We launched Sapphire 8 in December with several new effects, including LightLeak, Grunge, DigitalDamage, Shake and Builder. Builder lets artists create their own effects and transi- tions by combining existing Sapphire effects. Artists can even package and distribute these custom effects to other users, regardless of platform. This is the first time that we have thrown the doors wide open to unleash artists' creativity and take even more advantage of CUDA's speed and power. —BY GARY OBERBRUNNER, CO-FOUNDER, GENARTS INC. CAMBRIDGE, MA, WWW.GENARTS.COM PLUG-INS

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