Marco Paolini, a major Hollywood visual effects pro, started as an editor, hired at one time by Avid to train other editors. In Los Angeles around 1997, he started Digital Film Works with another editor, Peter Moyer, offering visual effects on studio features. A few years after working with off-the-shelf software Marco suggested they develop some of their own.
His first well-known product for the Digital Film Tools division (www.digitalfilmtools.com ) was Composite Suite (2000), now the Composite Suite Pro collection of utility effect filters, which has turned many a user’s editing desk into the equivalent of a high-end post workstation. He followed with products like the Digital Filter Lab, offering a huge filter set for nonlinear editors, since acquired by Tiffen as a software version of its famous glass filters.
DFT didn’t sit still and have continued to add affordable, sine qua non products for creatively manipulating light, color, shadow, masking and grain. That covers a huge amount of territory. They weren’t interested in eye candy generators; their plug-ins offer real utility to address a wide range of image issues and needs.
We have all eagerly purchased tools with high hopes. These deliver. I use Final Cut Pro 7 to demonstrate effects and controls, but all of these are available for Adobe, Apple and Avid products. (Since they target mostly professional users, they are watching the evolution of Final Cut Pro X carefully, and some of their filters, like Rays, do support FCPX.) Four of their popular new tools for photography and video have been selected here for what they do and add to your productions. Their new licensing model allows each of these plug-ins to install on Intel processor machines for recent Avid, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Final Cut 6 or 7- all at once. On Macintosh, you should be running OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard or 10.7 “Lion”. Under Windows, you should be running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. All products are multi-processor aware.
Film Stocks
For Photography: $95.00
For video/film: $195.00
Other companies have offered authentic film stock looks, but the thinking that has gone into this set and layout is truly impressive. Each stock was assiduously researched for grain structure and tone, and each is customizable for unique looks only you might need.
Grain looks from past Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, and Ilford stocks are useful to invoke the visual flavor of a specific period, and incredibly important to accurately match existing film footage from decades ago with new digital material you might need blended with it.
The controls allow further customization of any preset.
PhotoCopy
For Photography: $95.00
For video/film: $195.00
PhotoCopy lets you actually employ a large variety of presets from actual movies, paintings, photographs and darkroom processes and also allows you to sample digital images of your favorite art or images, to copy the canvas or grain look and feel, and apply it to your own work. Think about that. Imagine copying not the Van Gogh, but the brush pattern, texture and tone of the painting – it’s DNA – and apply it to your own Starry Nightmare…
How you use this tool is limited only by your imagination. The controls are straightforward and like all these tools, invite experimentation.
Rays
For Photography: $50.00
For video/film: $99.00
A stunning way to add rays of light-limited only by the scene itself, since rays take their cues from highlights in the scene and act upon them. This effect can really transform a drably lit scene and make images pop. The controls are simple; they govern the length, amount, color and position of the rays.
ReFine
For Photography: $50.00
For video/film: $99.00
ReFine is a sophisticated and versatile sharpener which can also edge-enhance and posterize your images into graphic art with Cartoon or Pencil looks. I used it to rescue some near-hopeless out of focus N-scale (that’s 1/160th actual size) model train footage I shot off the cuff at the giant Amherst Railroad Hobby Show in Springfield, MA, this past January. It was extraordinary to be able to tweak different sharpen values to turn near-hopeless HD into nearly-acceptable and at least presentable footage.
The controls are divided into three sections. For Sharpening, you can vary Coarse, Medium and Fine detail and selectively sharpen Shadows, Midtones and/or Highlight values of any clip. The Fine detail slider should be used sparingly; this provides the most grain as it attacks blurry regions at nearly the pixel level. As usual, don’t expect a sharpener of any kind to rescue blurry footage – that technology is still in development at Adobe. But for borderline images or for special
effects, this tool is terrific.
Each title has a quick-reading user guide prepared for it and every product at DF allows a fully functional 15-day free trial period. And they are tools, not toys. Absolutely cool tools from Digital Film Tools.
Loren S. Miller reports for Imagine News and is a veteran professional freelance editor of longform documentary, drama and series TV, coast to coast. He teaches editing and post theory and practice at undergrad and graduate levels. Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.