Their HD section includes a variety of great options, like these spectacular explosions!
Quality
The quality and style of the animations are understandably a mixed bag, because effects from years and years of FXHome products and acquisitions are all included. The HD clips are actually filmed in black-box studios in true HD, as opposed to being created with particle generators. This yields amazingly realistic effects (although you may have to do some masking on some of the effects, because certain elements of the pyro pots are slightly visible in some of the explosion and gunshot effects). The other effects range from very computer generated looking to cinematically realistic enough to use in a high quality action films. As you might imagine, a sizeable portion of the more dated-looking animations just won't stand up to being used in most film work, unless you're using them as backgrounds for titles or in animated films. Of course, with better organization, the quality would be easier to readily see because similar quality effects would all be in a similar location.
For adding nostalgic fun, Batman-style sound effect text effects are also included. Unfortunately, they're not in a Photoshop file, so you can't alter them to say what you want!
The other thing that I would love to see them change for a future release as far as quality goes is how they distribute still graphics. As I mentioned before, all the still graphics are released as Quicktime clips, requiring you to extract the video clip into AE or into Photoshop CS3/CS4 in order to make a workable graphic. Besides impacting the ease of use, it greatly impedes the quality capacity for things that have a text basis, like title overlays. For example, currently they have some news graphics for the TNN news channel. Most of us would want to customize the text, but this isn't possible due to the fixed nature of Quicktime clips. (Yes, I know you can screen grab the graphic in Photoshop, paint over the current text, and create new text, but that's not much faster than creating your own graphics from scratch.) As such, I really want to see either .PSDs (with an attached set of Fonts in a separate folder) or layered .PDFs (with embedded fonts) in a future release. That would make the power of this set much more immersive!
In the upcoming film, The Guardian, we needed to augment a scene that was shot without smoke with a wafting smoke cloud to match a following crane shot. While they don't have HD smoke in the new FXHome set, they do have an HD Fog which suited our purposes. We needed a white smoke, so it worked well as is. A little color grading could make it darker if need be.
