PhotoCopy
Digital Film Tools, www.digitalfilmtools.com
$195.00, for recent After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Aperture, Photoshop running Intel Macintosh and Windows.
You’ve just been to the Louvre and your head is swimming with the classic paintings on display. You get home; you load your latest project and view the bland head shots for that local museum fundraiser you’re producing.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could enhance the texture of a shot with an uncanny resemblance to Breughel? Or the grain and color of BEN-HUR? Or some arcane canvas process like Gum over Cyanotype after Anderson’s “Skunk?”
Or perhaps you need an appropriate look for that dream sequence that just isn’t making it with a flat blue tint alone?
DFT is known for its subtle filter effects, having developed what has become Tiffen’s Digital Filter Suite. Now we come to PhotoCopy, the next level of sophistication: borrowing the actual grain and chroma look of movies, the brushwork in paintings, emulsion and tone of famous photographs, and the similitude of lithographic processes to enhance your video work in Avid, FCP, After Effects, as well as your stills in applications like Aperture and Photoshop.
You can approximate styles and textures in Photoshop and After Effects with various color and noise mixes, but that’s a time sink. Let’s assume your sink is full. You have found the answer: PhotoCopy. DFT’s plugin filter for stills or video can be applied to imbue any image in the manner described.
What sets this apart from competing products, such as Magic Bullet QuickLooks, are the very sources of inspiration being offered. PhotoCopy analyzes color, grain, emulsion, tone, brush detail and texture in almost a hundred classic films, six dozen paintings, over three dozen famous photographs and thirty processes and canned them for you. (Curiously, Caravaggio and Warhol are absent.)
These are not fixed presets. DFT gives you a usable point of departure, and you can tweak and vignette them to your heart’s content.
A very cool tool to add to your favorite image or editing system.
StoryBoard Quick Studio
www.powerproduction.com
For recent Mac and Windows, $399.00
Martini QuickShot Creator
www.martiniquickshot.com
Plugin for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, $199.00
Both from PowerProduction Software, Inc.
Free 7-day trial versions available.
The StoryBoard series and little brother Martini QuickShot Creator from PowerProduction Software offer high-quality storyboarding for those who don’t even draw. Just select pre-made elements from menus, export and job done. Martini is a Final Cut Pro and Premiere plugin which allows editors to rapidly create placeholder missing shots—no more black slug with bland Scene Missing title! If you wish to do more drawing than selecting, their Storyboard Artist series offers all this plus elaborate drawing and texture tools; a product geared more toward agency animatics.
I needed to create some quick setups for a gag interview with STARWARS’ R2D2, which was shot as B-roll at a Comic-Con convention. I assembled the best shots of the lil robot zipping about, but had black slug for the interviewer’s side of the sequence.
I installed Martini QuickShot, the first such boarding plugin for FCP. I launched it from within Final Cut Pro. It opened in its own window, allowed me to select a likely character from a popup menu, and I was delighted to see a range of choices for his eyeline and camera angle. I could actually “spin” the character to the correct orientation in the frame, and even choose a low angle, shooting up, of interviewer looking down at the robot. Martini QS and its big brother Storyboard Quick offers a large selection of pre-created spin-able characters and a ton of backgrounds, from vague and simple sets to full locations like office boardroom, corridors, lobby, restaurants, elevators, factory floors, bedrooms, hallways, etc.
The Storyboard series of products are standalone applications. Storyboard Quick Studio allows you to customize all elements with a limited set of drawing tools for shapes, lines, and text, including a comic speech balloon. You can also rearrange the frames you generate and caption them. You can export them to popular graphic formats. Its new “QuickShot” technology resembles the capabilities of the Martini QuickShot plugin. The included Print to Sketch function comes from its StoryBoard Artists series, rendering frames in pen and ink style black and white frames. You can import your screenplay into SBQ to create a boarded script, and export your boards to Flash and your pages to HTML for web delivery. Even more elaborate character archetype sets, settings collections, and even a prop collection, four sets for $99.00, available on their website.
Back in Martini, I needed something akin to the walls of the convention center mezzanine where R2D2 was filmed to get across what was required for the insert side. The mezzanine showed black-draped sections of wall in the background. That would be easy to stage in a reverse-angle insert. I chose a Martini background with a black wall section in it and zoomed in to crop out unneeded detail. A few preset “limbo” backgrounds would be helpful, like black, greenscreen and bluescreen colors, but there are easy workarounds. The supplied backgrounds are like watercolors, impressionistic works which convey a location effectively but without extreme detail—they are not virtual sets by a long shot. They can be flipped to left or right or vertically.
I generated a few different compositions, by simply scaling the character, and/or the background in the frame to indicate new focal lengths. Very flexible. Would not be surprised to see more layering capability and more background manipulation available in a new release. You can certainly make and import your own characters and background collections, including photographs, for custom boarding, a smart feature.
When done it exported all the frames I racked up right into Final Cut Pro as asequence containing the frames appearing in the Browser. I added some voice over to complete the rough cut gag interview (“So, you don’t like being a ringtone?” etc.) and sent the exported sequence off to my director across the country. He got it right away. His cameraman will consult the sequence and know exactly how to frame the interviewer against a vague black background, and then we’ve got the world’s first interview with R2D2, invented in Boston, filmed in Seattle.
Storyboard Quick Studio and Martini are fast fun-to-use previz tools with surprising flexibility. Upgrades to higher level products are reasonably priced.
Loren Miller reports for IMAGINE, edits longform drama, comedy and documentary on both coasts, teaches college-level post software and processes, and develops KeyGuide™ professional placemats, available at www.neotrondesign.com. Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.