Delirium v2 is a collection of 45 different effects for After Effects, FCP, Premiere Pro, and other similar programs. The effects are divided into six categories: Natural Forces; Special Effects Elements; Color & Style Filters; Patterns & Distortions; Lighting & Glow Effects; and Compositing Tools.
How did they measure up? Well, let's break down the specifics!
A test of the Fire effect on a short comedy.
Ease of Use
Some of the plug-ins are easier than others, and it depends on what you are familiar with. The Natural Forces are easier for me because I have used similar plug-ins and I also know what the effect should look like. The Delirium plug-ins are certainly easier to use than the Boris Continuum plug-ins, but part of that is because the Boris ones do more and are more complex (along with being much more expensive). Delirium has a good online manual, which covers each effect and there are some really good tutorials and samples on their web site. With any plug-ins, what you need to do is start playing with them, but the manual and tutorials will be there for when you get to a problem.
Fireworks. Notice the small artifact on the rockets.
Depth of Options
As you can imagine, due the number of the effects in this set, there are a lot of options for us to cover here!
Natural Forces consist of: Snowstorm; Fog Factory; Bubbles; Fire and Rainfall. And are just that: natural forces. I love these type of effects as they are very handy for movies and short films. The snow works great but you must add the Alpha Tool to get rid of the black edges around the snow and other particle type effects. This is an extra step but is easy enough and the Alpha Tool is useful for all sorts of things. Fog Factory allows one to animate layers of fog. You can add multiple layers of fog. The Bubbles are also self explanatory. They work pretty well, but it seems that you can't have the bubbles stop and start like a diver breathing. Fire looks pretty good, with a fair amount of controls, but lacks a way of changing the color of the fire, outside of adjusting it with AE's color tools. Rainfall is useful. All of these effects require the use of the Alpha tool.
Fog Factory used to make the smoke.
Special Effects Elements consist of: Sparks; Electrical Arcs; Fairy Dust; Fireworks; Muzzle Flash; and Smoke. Sparks works very well and, with some tweaking and the addition of AE blur effects, can make some nice water jets, lava spurting, rocket engines, and, of course, sparks. Colors can be adjusted in the plug in and the gravity effects are nice. Electrical Arcs seems to make straight lines of electrical arcs and branches. It would make a great electrical spear or sword. Seems limited as far as making lightning bolts, however. Fairy Dust can make fire flies, floating sparks, and supernovas, making it fun to play with if you want to do something with either a Disney or Harry Potter feel. Fireworks work decently well, but there are some odd artifacts. Muzzle Flash is limited to three or four types of guns and the flashes are very small, but they do work pretty well. Smoke seems limited to a smaller size than I would like, but it might be useful with some tweaking.
Muzzle flash is limited but works well.
Color & Style Filters consist of: Gradient Designer; Color Fill; Color Space; Colorize; Solarize; Grayscaler; Crystallizer; Newsprint; Vangoughist; Edgex; Channel Nose; Channel Offset; and Channel Range. Gradient Designer allows you to create custom gradients. Color fill consists of several sliders for adjusting a color. Color Space provides access to several standard color models: rgb; hls; hsv; cmy; cmyk; xyz; xyy; yuv; yiq; lab; and luv. Colorize allows you to assign different colors to the shadows, mid-shadows, midtowns, mid-highlights, and highlights. (There are a number of great presets for this filter and this plug in should allow you to do some of your own Magic-Bullet-like of coloring.) Solarize is a "photographic process simulation for creating the look of double exposed photographic paper". Probably most useful for music videos and drug or fever dreams in films. Grayscaler changes images to grayscale with some nice controls for tweaking them. Crystallizer is really fun to play with. It can turn your stills or video into a pointillist painting, filled with little dots of color. Newsprint adds halftone dots or lines to your video for a newspaper print effect. Vangoughist is Crystallizer with some more cool brush types. Edgex posterizes the image by channel, which yields fairly harsh results. Channel Noise is a great effect for fine tuning the addition and color of noise. This can be a way to add a touch of noise to still photos used as backgrounds in video. Channel Offset moves and rotates and blurs the red, green and blue channels. I've read about using the RGB channels in order to fine tune keying. I've never done it but this effects seems pretty straightforward for this purpose. Channel Range looks like it could refine the grayscale in a matte. I played with it for awhile but couldn't figure it out.
HyperHarmonizer looks cool.
Patterns & Distortions consist of: Multi-gradient; Nexus; Visual Harmonizer; Hyper Harmonizer; Schematic Grids; Perspectron; Stargate; and Wave Displace. Multi-gradient is an elaborate way to make multiple gradients. Nexus generates animated geometrical constructions. Probably best for creating backgrounds for titles and the like. Visual Harmonizer makes patterns that look like they came from an oscilloscope. Hyper Harmonizer is easier to show than describe, so check out this picture of it.
Nexus. Not sure what to make of it.
Schematic Grids makes complex grids. This might be useful for creating transitions like those featured in the TV Show numbers or perhaps for creating tutorial DVDs showing projected earnings or something like this. Perspectron is basically a cornerpin that seems to work backwards. You can use it to distort the corners of your images and animate them. Stargate is the slit scan effect from the 2001 film by the same name and is a pretty cool effect. Wave Displace makes sine, triangle, and square waves. While this is my least favorite category, since I don't do much with abstract effects like this, it could be powerful in the right hands.
Lighting and Glow Effects consist of: Specular Lighting; Glower; Glow; Lightwrap; Nightbloom; and Channel Lighting. Specular Lighting makes bump maps. The glass and plastic filters in Photoshop do sort of the same thing. Glower makes the whole image glow with simple easy to use controls. Glow allows you to really fine tune your glow and it could also be used for digital make up to soften skin tones. This is a powerful and useful filter that has lots of options. (MFM editor Jeremy Hanke used it to add a hyper realistic glow to the explosive muzzle flash in a sequence in the next World of Depleted Creative Community film, Day 419.) Lightwrap is designed for use with keyed or matted elements, providing the effect of light that is in the background plate wrapping around the edges of the person beinf filmed. It is my favorite filter so far. I tried it on the music video I am working on at the moment in which we had our singer in a parked car with green screen windows. The windows were keyed out and driving footage that I shot was put in the keyed areas. I used Lightwrap numerous times to add a light to the edge of the faces where they were against the brighter window and it worked great. I played with the setting a minor amount and got what I wanted. Nightbloom makes bright areas and lights bloom and seep their brightness out to the surrounding areas. The default settings are way too high for most images, so I recommend turning them all back to 0 and start moving them up until you get a nice blooming effect for your film. Channel Lighting uses separate render passes from a 3D program like Lightwave, or Maya. You can use this filter to tweak the various layers this generates.
Stargate is the slit scan effect from 2001.
Our last category is Compositing tools and consists of: Channel Viewer; Channel Composite; Super Histogram; Alpha Tool; Color Composite; and Composite. Channel viewer lets you look at the different channels in different color spaces. this looks interesting. Channel Composite combines two channels together, but has a fairly steep learning curve. (I wasn't able to get it to work properly as I worked through the program, but it does look like it would be useful.) Super Histogram are just that, a super powered histogram for RGB and other color spaces which allows you to create cool color views. Alpha Tool is a must have with most of these effects, as it allows you to premultiply and unmultiply black. This takes the black fringe off of the particle effects in the particle effects and others. Use with rain, snow, sparks, fire, etc. anything that seems to leave a dark edge. Color Composite lays a solid color over your image. You can pick the color and how it is composited/blended. Just by accident I discovered that I could use it to apply red to a green screen image and adjust it so the red was everywhere but the green. I then used keylight on it, which allowed me to essentially create a secondary edge matte that in turn gave me a better key. Something to remember. Composite is simply a filter to add to layers together.
Keyed Image without Lightwrap.
Keyed image with Lightwrap added to the alpha channel.
Performance
Most of the plug-ins seem to work pretty well. I did run up against some limitations with some of the particle systems. Controls I would expect to be there were missing, and some of the effects seemed really slow. The Fireworks plug in seems to have some artifacts on the rockets.
While obviously, as reviewers, we're never able to spend as long with every element of a program like this as the programmers did creating them, so some of the things that were more problematic in my testing might well resolve themselves with extended use in the future. However, the real world value of reviews is that they show both companies and potential customers what educated users see when they initially work with a specific product. Hopefully, this will inspire some adjustments and tweaks in future versions to lessen learning curves for new users.
The Delirium v2 plug-ins cover a wide range of areas and some of the plug ins do quite a lot. I have already used Lightwrap on a project and will use it over and over.
Smoke is useful for small smoke.
Value
Delirium v2 is an excellent value and contains many very useful effects. For me, the most useful so far are: Lightwrap; Glow; Alpha Tool; Colorize; Crystallizer; Vangoughist; Channel noise; Sparks; Fairy Dust; Snowstorm; Fog Factory; Fire and Rainfall. I look forward to delving further into the Channel plug-ins, as I do a lot of realistic matte paintings and green screen composites so these are plug-ins that would be of especial use to me. However, your needs could be quite different. The wide range of plug-ins means most users will find some useful things and might discover something new, as well. There are more powerful Plug-in collections out there. I have been using Boris Continuum Complete for many years and couldn't live without it. But Boris Continuum is $995 whereas Delirium is only $299. I would recommend Delirium v2 as a first purchase, and it may be all you need.
Final Comments Excellent value, with a nice range of useful plug-ins. Good tutorials and manual. Not as fully developed as Boris or Trapcode but not nearly as expensive either. Good starting point for feature, shorts, and documentary filmmakers. Some really cool visuals for motion graphics and commercials. You will easily get your money's worth.
Ease
of Use
7.0
Depth
of Options
8.0
Performance
6.0
Value
vs. Cost
8.0
Overall Score
7.3
Craig
Herron is a filmmaker and artist who loves the world of visual effects and matte painting. He has worked on many indie movies as well as local commercials. His first two, award winning, shorts; A Fall From The Clouds, and Freedom Dance were full of 2d, 2.5D and 3D animation, matte paintings and other VFX. His current project Bermuda Triangle ― A Love Story is all green screen and pre-shot location backgrounds. He is the owner of Herron Designs.
