AlphaPlugins is an interesting new company based in Russia and run by Maxim Chernousov, a computer programmer and graphic artist. I’d previously heard of their Engraver plugin for Photoshop, which seemed to get good reviews, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that I realized they also make plugins for After Effects. Maxim seems to be a prolific and talented programmer, and has already built up a roster of eight different effects packages for AE.
With AlphaStar, he has released what basically amounts to five different plugins, all combined into one package. The five different modules are Flare, Starsfall, Highlight, Rays, and Blink. They’re linked by the common theme of star-like imagery, but all five actually produce extremely varied results. And because of the focus on organic-looking stars and prisms, the majority of these plugins can produce some very 70’s retro sci-fi effects that could have come straight out of Xanadu.
The Highlight module uses the brightest sections of your video to produce a wide array of glowing stars, with results that are similar to a star filter, but with much more flexibility and customization.
Ease of Use
The plugins installed easily, although the installer did point to my AE 6.5 directory instead of the CS3 directory. Be sure to double-check this when installing.
I previously reviewed AlphaPlugins’ Curtains and LensProIII and found them to produce high-quality results, even though the huge number of parameters in each module made adjustments from the defaults pretty confusing. Well, not much has changed as far as the number of parameters; in fact, I think these effects actually have more parameters than the others I reviewed! However, AlphaPlugins have done something very smart and cool here, which is to create ton of presets in the form of little thumbnails that you can scroll through. Some of the modules, such as Flare, actually have two of these scroll-bars for different parts of the images (in the case of Flare, there’s one for the main flare, and also one for the trails). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a feature quite like this in a plugin, but it’s extremely convenient, and hopefully other software designers will start doing the same thing. Anyway, the end result of this is that even though the number of parameters is mind-boggling, you can safely ignore the majority of them and can get pretty much any look you want from the presets.
AlphaPlugins has also created a few very helpful tutorials on their website. The tutorials range from basic to advanced, and while sometimes the English isn’t so great, they’re easy to understand and well laid out.
