I’m almost embarrassed to admit this but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way: There is something oddly delightful in wrecking perfectly good stuff. And it’s even better when you can un-wreck it and then do it all over again. Consequently, Digieffects new Damage plug-in/filter is immensely satisfying.
Damage is a filter that reproduces editable, real-world “issues” with your footage. Need to make your perfect video look like it was shot on a cell phone? No problem. Need to fade out a sequence imitating a bad satellite feed? Can do. Throw in broken VHS machines or broadcast TV with bad reception and you’ve got a good picture of what a bad picture can look like.
The team at Digieffects has crafted an easy to use tool that takes a lot of the hand keying work out of destroying, um, embellishing your footage. While I have some other plug-ins that can be used to visually compromise footage, the Damage product has introduced some control that I didn’t even know I was missing.
Ease of Use
Hands down, these guys have done their homework, which directly translates into making your life easier. Not only have they made real-world types of interference with an easy-to-use interface, but they’ve also made it easy to reuse - and sometimes that’s even more valuable.
Interference is a complex subject and honestly, I don’t really care why it happens. However, when the need arises to reproduce it for my projects, I do want it to look believable and appropriate to the technology or faux technology I’m styling. Digieffects has done an excellent job of taking this complex subject and making it easy to reproduce and entertaining to do -- not that you should be having fun while you work or anything.
First, they’ve divided interference into four main categories:
- Artifact - which emulates dropped digital information like from satellite operations
- Blockade - this is the quintessential cell phone and low bandwidth type of look - think YouTube on a dial-up
- Interference - This simply introduces real broadcast video realities into live or still imagery for that CRT look
- Skew - All of your worst broadcast nightmares come true plus VCR’s that have had sandwiches inserted into them or old world TV. This categorization is simply a hallmark of the way the Digieffects team has approached this product, that is, from a user needs standpoint and not a developer standpoint. Cool.
Additionally, without even touching the controls for any of the four categories mentioned above, you can simply hit a randomizer button that cycles through options to help you rapidly experience some variations of the options.
Here is a huge time saver: the effects are dynamic and don’t need to be key framed for variability unless you want to do a fade-in or fade-out of the effect. The effects have their own random seed/timing parameter that grabs each of the plug-in parameters and plays with it during the filter render. That takes some significantly mundane key framing requirements of other similar products and totally obviates the need to get personally involved - unless you want to.
Have you ever been working on a new project and realized that you’d like to reuse a “look” that you spent hours tweaking on a previous assignment? However, you have to go through your archives to open the old assignment and then track down the effect and see what you did? Oh, you haven’t? Well, um, me neither. My memory is much too strong for that. But if I was of a weak mind, Damage’s ability to save settings as an XML file that you can simply load would be a huge benefit - especially when using these effects from sequence to sequence.
