The performance of Tinderbox was quite solid, with intelligent previews and decent rendering speed. While the speed was pretty good for rendering, I would have really liked to have seen a small animated preview window for each effect, similar to the way Trapcode sets things up in Particular. (While not all of the effects are particle physics effects, like those in Particular, a small animation of the effect that doesn’t take up much too much RAM would be greatly appreciated in future versions of the software.)
The quality of effects is quite good and very professional looking, requiring only minimal key frames for most effects to work quite well. Unfortunately, every package is very random in its composition, which means that you often have to try out many more filters to find one that works for a given situation than you would if all of the effects in a certain package were of a specific type, like Particle Effects, Transitions, or Light Ray effects. This results in you either manually rearranging all your filters to get optimal performance, or wasting a lot of time wading through filters until you find exactly the one you need. I would like to see the packages re-arranged in a more connected manner, as this would streamline performance and cut down on waste.
Value
There is no denying the quality of each of the plugins in the Tinderbox packages. However, the problem comes in due to the radically disparate nature of the plugins in each pack, which means that you may only have a ready use for a couple of the 18-20 filters in each pack. This is a hard pill to swallow when each pack runs you $500. Oh, sure, you could be on the safe side and buy them all, but a $2,000 hit is an even harder pill to swallow.
The answer most of us would like to see would be to reduce the price on each pack from $500 to $250, as that would make each pack easier to afford and, therefore, less problematic that you may not readily use all the filters in a given pack. If that’s not feasible, due to the development costs, then refining the diversity so that each pack is more cohesive, in addition to improving performance, would help cut down on waste and insure that each user gets a package of filters that is related to the specific need one has. Even better, I think it would be a great boon to just sell the filters individually from their website for $25 a piece, much like a needle drop service in the music world, so you can buy only the specific filters you want.
As it is, even though their quality is very good, many lower budget filmmakers are going to look past Tinderbox because of its high cost and seemingly random structure, especially with more cohesive effects packages at more reasonable prices available from competing companies like Trapcode, Red Giant, Wondertouch, or FXHome.
Final Comments
The Foundry has always been well known for their high quality plug-in packages and their remastering of the Tinderbox packages for 32-bit procesing makes a previously good package even better. However, due to the high cost of purchase per package and the rather random assortment in each package, I would definitely recommend that you try the demo version of the effects out so that you can get the package that would suit your unique needs the best.
Ease
of Use
8.0
Depth
of Options
9.0
Performance
8.0
Value
7.0
Overall
Score
8.0
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
