As is typical for all of the NewBlueFX products, the package is split out into individual effects, and each effect has a very limited number of adjustable parameters. This is actually a good thing, as you can tell pretty much right away whether a particular effect is going to do what you need. You don’t spend a bunch of time fiddling with parameters trying to get a specific effect; instead you scroll through the presets and if nothing is catching your eye you can just move on to a different plugin. The presets for each effect are also very nice, and provide a pretty comprehensive idea of the range of what each effect can do.
Pixelator adds a typical "Cops" blur to the screen, and can be keyframed to match yoursubjects' movements.
Depth of Options
Included in Video Essentials are ten effects, some of which overlap those found in other NewBlueFX packages, some of which can already be found in your editor/compositor, and some of which are unique to this package. I’ll briefly run through them all and give my thoughts on each:
Detail Enhancer is able to take overly soft or diffused video and clarify the details by adjusting contrast mostly in edges while leaving the rest of the picture alone.
Color Fixer Plus is a mini-color corrector of sorts, but also provides a quick and easy film look. In fact, the Kodachrome preset is quite convincing and the Outdoors preset looks spectacular on all footage, regardless of whether or not it was filmed outdoors. Tint and Video Tuneup both pretty much do the same sort of thing, and I feel like they should have been combined into one effect to avoid rendundancy.
Crop Borders will get rid of borders on the top or bottom of your video by enlarging the entire picture. It could be useful for converting your footage from letterboxed to anamorphic video, and I think it’d be useful for cropping out booms or other unwanted objects on the edges of your shots. It also has a preset specifically for getting rid of overscan borders. I found the enlargement algorithm to be quite good, creating little to no artifacts. I would even trust this to crop 16:9 video to 4:3 if I needed to do a pan-and-scan of a movie.
