Depth of Options
There are myriad options for adjusting your electrical effects to get the desired look. Starting with the beginning and ending points of the electrical burst, you can adjust how fast the flicker occurs, how many branches there are, how many trunks there are, what colors are present, and even how the lightning is overlaid on the current image.
When you first look at this and play with it, it feels as though there's not an option that FXHome overlooked as pertains to electrical and lightning effects. However, after testing it out for awhile, there were two things I would dearly love to see them add in a future version.
The first addition would be the option to add a burst of brightness across the current video layer or another video layer (such as an adjustment layer, for example). Since lightning in any ilk causes light to wash over buildings and objects, a simple option to provide a quick flare of light that could be mapped across the layer or another layer would be very helpful. Because this was lacking, I had to manually keyframe opacity and darkness on a number of layers to get the sky and the foreground to lighten up in conjunction with the lightning for this test clip.
The second addition I would love to see implemented in a future version is what I will call “light tracing”. What I am referring to is when light coalesces beneath a cloud and a lightning bolt bursts forth. (Yes, I know. Visible lightning is actually the electrical surge coming from the ground back to the sky after the strike, but that’s not the way it visually appears, so go along with me.) Since there are a few different lightning strike presets in PowerPlug, it seems very logical to have this light tracing effect converge around the start point of the lightning strike, where it would presumably be coming from the surrounding clouds. Since this was absent, in order to get this effect, I had to pull the finished footage into Photoshop CS3 and video paint the sky so that the light flickers to where the lightning will emerge from the clouds.
With my manual adjustments the final composite was pretty believable, but these would be excellent additions to this program, especially considering its fairly steep price.
Performance
Our test machine was a 1.86 GHz Core2 Duo PC with Windows XP Pro x64, 3 Gigs of RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1500 card (which was kindly provided by the folks at Nvidia). To speed things along nicely, we used After Effects CS3 with Nucleo Pro 2. In this configuration, the program functioned smoothly, although it exerted quite a large drain on the processor and RAM. As I added a few lightning strikes to the scene that I’ve included with this review, things began to noticeably chug when I nested the original .PSD composition into the overall animation composition. By the time four lightning strikes had gotten applied to the 7 second clip, each frame was taking about 2-3 seconds to refresh when I would drag the playhead to a new place. As I know that lightning effects are quite complex, I can understand that some serious rendering power is required. However, when I use other particle generation software, like Particular (another AE plug-in) and ParticleIllusion (a standalone program), and run similarly complex effects, the render times are quite a bit shorter. As such, I would love to see some improvements in the rendering algorithms in a future version to speed this up.
