Summary
The Final Effects Complete 5 package of plug-ins is deceptively powerful. It definitely has some uses for filmmaking, especially very artistic scenes in certain genres like Sci-Fi, fantasy, and for some distortedly scary and alienating scenes. It is more directly applicable to event videography, music videos, and advertising freelance work, where the use of motion graphics is more common.
HD is rapidly becoming a requirement for wedding videos and, with digital TV becoming the US standard, high quality effects that can play on HD screens is becoming a practical necessity. If you need to move to 16-bit color for these applications, FEC5 is an obvious package to consider. What puts it over the top are those time-saving presets that make these plug-ins practical for a production environment.
Ease of Use
FEC5 is quick and the presets make it incredibly easy to get sophisticated results without burning hours of time through trial and error.
Depth of Options
The number of effects, number of presets, and then the PixelChooser and MotionTracker provide nearly unlimited options for sophisticated motion graphics effects.
Performance
Great performance, I’ve seen plug-ins that turn AE into a door stop, crash AE, or crash the computer, and FEC5 rarely slowed down AE CS3.
Value
Again, for filmmaking alone, it would be hard to justify the expense. BorisFx has other packages that provide more realistic effects that would be more useful for filmmaking. But if you pay for your equipment through industrial training videos, event videography, or freelance advertising work, then the break-even is straightforward. Particularly if you have to move to 16-bit quality anyway, you should definitely be looking at FEC5 very seriously.
Final Comments
When I began this review, I couldn’t see the value, but as I dug into the effects in FEC5 I realized there are a lot of useful effects available, even for narrative filmmakers, and those presets make the package nearly painless to use.
BorisFx makes good products.
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Ease
of Use |
10.0 |
Depth
of Options |
10.0 |
Performance |
10.0 |
Value |
6.0 |
Overall
Score |
9.0
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