With that said, let’s look at more of the specifics in the different categories. The special effects largely break down into particle generated effects, muzzle flashes, neon & laser lights, and lens flares. Additionally, you could include the compositing of alpha-channel effects that you’ve designed in Photoshop or that you’ve imported from Alam DV. (AlamDV users have created a wealth of different effects composites that can be downloaded as image streams and incorporated into VisionLab projects.) These composited effects are the little touches that make the muzzle flashes and particle generated effects work, by and large. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, the muzzle flash generator can create realistic gun discharges and then the particle generator can create the bullet-time effect from the Matrix, to give you a really cool gun battle. However, the effect doesn’t work so well if you don’t put in some alpha-channeled bullets at the head of those bullet-time streams. (Nothing fancy, just a trimmed pic of a bullet from the appropriate perspective.) I actually saw a trailer that one guy had used this program on and it followed from behind the bullet as it flew at a person with the bullet-time trail flying behind. Very cool.
(Now, I would like to see the special effects portion in a future version upgraded to have a built in alpha channel effects section. This would include a nice selection of production-grade alpha-channel bullets, bullet holes, cuts, and the like. To have the basics included in a section so we don’t have to import our own or download AlamDV image streams would be very cool indeed. Perhaps the folks at FXHome could team up with the folks at VideoCopilot, who’ve created a whole slew of alpha-channel video stream effects that create things like holes in car-doors, bulletholes in windows, gashes, and the like, complete with green screen internal sections if something needs to be seen through said holes.)
Neon and laser lights are designed originally to be laser swords, but are so easily customizable that they can be a plethora of things, including blaster bolts, mystic arrows, and fantasy magic. Lens flares can be anything you can imagine, from new stars and suns to the burnoff from jet engines. If you use the gleam command, you can turn those same stars into moving star trails, just like in Star Trek: TNG when they go to warp.
One thing I think is really cool about the effects engine part of this program is the simple fact that this program is not just capable of movie-based special effects, it was specifically designedfor movie-based special effects. That means that muzzle flashes don’t require you programming light-based particle physics expressions into Shake in order to create them. It means that you just choose a "Muzzle Flash" preset, how long you want it to last, and how you want each version of the flash to differ. That’s a difference of 20-30 minutes per flash to about 20-30 seconds per flash. Now, t hat's a very big difference.
The compositing portion of the program is specifically for compiling layers of video, effects, and alpha-channeled components to create a believable total scene. One of the big parts of this is green and blue screen keying, which is necessary for most types of special effects creations. This is definitely the most complicated part of this program, as it seems specifically counter-intuitive. However, if you mess around with it for awhile, and go through the included training, you can get some pretty clean keys, even on some pretty badly mangled blue and green screen sets. I would also include in the compositing section the inclusion of some pretty customizable garbage mattes (for getting rid of unnecessary information and backgrounds in scenes), masks (for creating realistic obstructions to effects), and composite effects (which allow you to further manipulate your image and the way it interacts with other layers).
Finally, the color grading feature allows you to tweak color prior to applying effects and after applying effects. The purpose of grading before applying effects is primarily for green and blue screening, where the picture may need to be artificially enhanced to ensure a clean key, although it would be useful for any type of hard to see footage that you need to properly lay effects on. Post color grading allows you to tweak colors to match your shots better and to provide a final “look” for your film. This is very useful and very necessary for professional projects. While the color grading takes some fooling around with, they include some nice presets to get you started with (many of which compare favorably to color grading presets found in Magic Bullet and Nattress plug-ins) and you can save your own custom presets for future use. Additionally, you can download presets that other users have created online to give you a plethora of additional color grading options.
