PHYX Stylist
For After Effects, Final Cut Pro or Express, and Motion
$199.00, Noise Industries,
www.noiseindustries.com
Noise Industries is a portal for a huge inventory of talented vendor effects makers, including PHYX, Inc, all regulated by the user through its comprehensive FXFactory Pro interface.
A suite of five useful filters for enhancing images of people and places comes from PHYX, Inc. Phyx is a versatile filter maker specializing in skintone-related effects, as seen in its Cleaner package, reported previously here in Imagine News.
In this Stylist package its Skin Light effect is your virtual reflector. It mimics the light reflector you forgot to bring to your shoot. You can assign any color or tint to the reflector to warm up or cool off a subject or turn a blah day into a sunny day.
Fog Generator offers a neat controllable fog machine effect with controls for brightness, detail, smoothing, which is very effective when animated to cross an image, or when combined with image masking for that “I remember it all as if it were yesterday” effect.
Haze Remover mimics a haze removing filter familiar to photographers. You can vary its resolving power and image warming effect.
Cathode Ray delivers a really cool scanline effect, like a nightscope on a Fox News special, with settings for color, “bad TV”, and electronic scope effects.
Sparkler Star is a virtual star filter, mimicking the star filter you couldn’t afford. You can change the size and color of sparkles and how they’re distributed based upon luminance, and of course, like all the effects, keyframe-animatable.
Truly cool tools!
Data Rescue 3
For Mac or Windows
$99.00, ProSoft Engineering,
www.prosofteng.com
Okay, I admit it, I will – very rarely—accidentally trash a file on my Mac.
It happened just recently. It was a unique video source file I needed as part of an edit. I thought I’d copied it and could safely delete it. And when I delete, I often empty the trash right away to free up disk space, so I can’t recover it by merely pulling it out and back into its place. It’s gone!
In the old days on Macintosh, I had Norton Utilities for this occasion. I would freeze all activity, make certain I saved nothing to the drive containing the deleted file (because it was still there, only its file table entry was zeroed out). And then I would use the UnDelete component. And voila, the named file would be back from the emptied trash.
Norton gave up on its Utilities line for Mac years ago. So for the first time in over a decade I scrambled to the internet for recommendations, and came up with Data Rescue 3, paid the $99.00 – a bit overpriced for a single group of functions, I thought- and downloaded the product. It installed easily and quickly.
I did a fast read of the manual, and booted the app. I chose Deleted Files Scan from the onscreen list of six available actions. I was treated to a goofy animated screen showing the retrieval of various file formats, none of which related to what was really being retrieved, but that was okay, it was tech-like and entertaining.
I was concerned that Data Rescue could read my RAID pair, since it was made of two separate drives striped together for higher bandwidth. The clock estimated 14 hours to scan the entire RAID drive, so I terminated it early, since the deleted file was recent. It did not bring back the needed file by name, so I had to go through the list of QuickTime recoveries in the workspace folder and identify it by file content and size (8.65 GB!), but it surely did the job.
Data Rescue must populate a separate drive for its “workspaces” which contains found and recovered files, but also a lot of gobbledygook users don’t really need to see, and most of which programmers usually hide in application support folders, not on a user drive.
This is why I’d like to see Norton bring back the Utilities: a whole suite of tools for Undelete, Speed Disk defragmentation, file allocation table repair, disk Imaging and other functions that were very user friendly, for little more than the price of Data Rescue! The other frowner regarding Data Rescue was a high upgrade price of $65.00. Upgrades rarely cost more than a third of the original price.
But it worked. That was cool, and in this case, critical. So take my grumbling in perspective.
My Story Can Beat Up Your Story:
Ten Ways to Toughen Your Screenplay
By Jeffrey Alan Schechter
$19.95 Michael Wiese productions,
www.mwp.com
Pro screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Schechter shares his wisdom on how to break through the competition when it comes to crafting powerful openings, great characters, and distinctive values which put your story above the rest.
In ten chapters, employing a conversational in-your-face style, he cajoles you to craft a compelling hero, build a better bad guy, how to pitch and plot your show.
The book contains five case study movies broken down in Schechter’s system of four questions: who’s the hero? What’s he trying to accomplish? Who’s trying to stop him? What happens if the hero fails?
He asks you to find hero-like experiences in your own life, those events which you navigated through some need to accomplish, and assess the obstacles in your way and how you accomplished your goal. It reminds me of training in Method acting—for screenwriting!
The book is a fast read which covers the waterfront but is nicely detailed with interesting observations on hero archetypes, of the unity of hero and villain, of movie story structure. It’s quite a tour; a pep talk with all the stimulation of buzz chess.
This belongs on any screenwriter’s shelf.
Loren S. Miller reports for IMAGINE and works as a professional longform editor. He also teaches college-level editing and post, develops KeyGuide™ professional placemats, and occasionally produces short documentaries on subjects which interest him. He can be reached anytime at techpress@mindspring.com .