Depth of Options
The effects found in EffectsLab Pro 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 FXHome’s previous compositing software, AlamDV. (AlamDV users have created a wealth of different effects composites that can be downloaded as image streams and incorporated into EffectsLab Pro and VisionLab Studio 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, as I mentioned in my VisionLabStudio review, I would like to see 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 bunch of alpha-channel video stream effects that create things like holes in car doors, bullet holes 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 security lasers, blaster bolts, and mystic arrows. Lens flares can be anything you can imagine, from new stars and suns to the burnoff from jet engines to sunlight coming through tree branches. 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 it’s not a program that is capable of movie-based special effects; it’s a program that was created for 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 muzzle flash, 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. That’s pretty huge! Not to mention, the muzzle flash generator even has the ability to generate natural-looking automatic weapon fire, without you having to go through and create each individual flash separately! That’s possibly even more huge!
