A few years ago, I was surfing the web and ended up stumbling on a website that was devoted to Fan Films. Of course, the largest demographic of fan film creators are Star Wars enthusiasts, so there was a pretty wide showing of these type of films. While some of the fan films were notoriously corny and amateurish, some of them looked surprisingly professional...at least, in the special effects department. In fact, I recall seeing a couple of fan films that actually had better looking special effects than Star Wars Episode II!
At the time, I recall noticing that some of these best movies used a software called AlamDV made by a company called FXHome, but, as I wasn’t thinking too much about special effects at the time, didn’t pay too much attention to it.
Now, a few years later, low budget special effects are becoming a reality for low budget filmmakers (like Alex Ferrari and ‘Broken’) and they are becoming a necessity for a never-ending supply of TV shows being created for every cable network on the planet. With demand increasing, software companies have started really cranking up the heat to create affordable, low-cost software solutions. Or at least, most software companies have.
FXHome doesn’t have to start creating affordable, quality special effects software…they’ve been doing it since they started. Not only that, but their understanding of affordable is quite a bit different than most companies. For example, Apple recently decided to lower the price of Shake, their compositing software, from $2999 to only $500. Great discount though this may be, if you want to be able to do any special particle effects with it (like blood spurts, explosions, etc.), you’ll probably need Apple’s Motion, which is another $500. That’s $1,000 compared to FXHome’s VisionLab Studio, which is £299 (or about $570), to do the same types of things.
Not only that, but unlike the Shake/Motion combo, VisionLab Studio combines both its particle engine (the standalone of which is EffectsLab Pro) and its composite engine (the standalone of which is CompositeLab Pro) into a single Graphic User Interface. Which means: no having to shuttle your footage back and forth between programs for your effects work! Additionally, you can get VisionLab Studio for both PC and Mac, a very nice benefit that you won’t find on Apple products until Apple goes the way of Sega.
We will be kicking off our reviews of FXHome’s products with VisionLab Studio, though we will be doing reviews of the stand-alone EffectsLab Pro and CompositeLab Pro in subsequent issues, which are the two component portions of VisionLab Pro for all intents and purposes. (AlamDV no longer exists, as it was the predecessor of what EffectsLab Pro eventually became.)
With that said, let’s break it down.
Ease of Use
Regardless of how it’s been hyped, this is a very powerful special effects software package. As such, you need to realize that there is a pretty decent learning curve. Now, while it is not as complicated to learn as After Effects or Shake, it also doesn’t have anywhere near as much training available as either of those programs. Currently, the company is working on creating a basic series of Flash tutorials for this package. Unfortunately, because of the vast array of options, after six months, they’re only about a quarter of the way through the basics for the program.
