Nearly all microfilmmakers love the idea of being able to make high quality special effects for their films. Even if we might not want to use them on the film we’re currently working on, most of us would love to be able to write elements into our scripts that begin with: “LS of car exploding on the horizon”. We would love to be able to have one of our characters pull out a gun and fire it, without having it look like crap. We would love to be able to have a house burn down in a film, without having to actually burn down our home and go to prison for arson! (Editing films in prison is so darn complicated! Prisons rarely keep their G5’s up-to-date and are always forgetting to get the latest upgrades for their Final Cut Studio license! And if your DV deck goes down on you, forget about it! You know Earnest will never get that fixed right for you…)
As the editor of this magazine, I have seen lots of folks attempt these sorts of effects with everything from After Effects to Motion. Some have been successful and some have not. Well, while pre-planning is still the most important element of any type of filmmaking, the folks at FXHome have made it a whole lot easier to get those special effects you’ve always wanted and never been able to afford.
FXHome’s EffectsLab Pro is the stand-alone particle generator portion of the August-reviewed VisionLab Studio. (Click here to read that review.) It provides the ability to create virtually any type of generated particle and can be blended with composited layers, thus permitting anything from gunfire to fiery meteors to dust storms to C4 explosions.
With that said, let’s break it all down…
Ease of Use
The concept for EffectsLab is pretty simple: import your footage; then add effects elements to Photoshop-like layers over top of the footage. With a variety of blending options available, you can then composite these layers into a seamless whole. To make this as easy as possible, FXHome created a variety of presets from “Muzzle Flashes” to “Neon Lights”. This is all well and good, but those of you who’ve read my previous article on VisionLab Studio may recall that I mentioned that it was a bit confusing to navigate all the options for these different presets.
Well, the kind folks at Fxhome responded by providing a whole slew of new Flash training modules on their website after my review was published. This means that utilizing the features in both VisionLab Studio and EffectsLab Pro is 100% easier. It still has a learning curve, but this new training is a huge help! (Although, I do wish they would actually include these training modules in the initial download of your software, so you don’t have to be on an online computer in order to go through the training.) By going through this training, you’ll now understand all the different nuances of the options in the different generator presets, so that you’ll finally know what each variety of jitter in the ‘Muzzle Flash’ options do. This really helps you know how to play with effects to further refine what you want to create. (To simplify things even more, FXHome is currently working on some new full-blown tutorials for their effects software that will help you get even more out of your package!)
