Buena Software, Inc. has announced a price cut on its
Effect Essentials
package — a collection of plug-ins designed work with Adobe After Effects, the popular video effects package. Effective immediately, Effect Essentials is available for US$249, $100 less than before. What’s more, if you buy before May 1, 2002, you can get another $50 off.
Effect Essentials is a set of 10 different effects plug-ins designed to work with After Effects 5.0 and higher. The plug-ins work with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and support 8 and 16 bit per channel modes. They’re AltiVec enhanced for G4 systems, too.
According to the developer, Effect Essentials include:
Super RGB Curves – An improved RGB Curves plug-in that allows the user to zoom in on the curve, place points at exact values, and have up to 1,000 points on their curve.
HSV Curves – sports the improved curves interface that Super RGB Curves has, but allows the user to work in Hue/Saturation/Value space. It also allows the curves to have different input and output channels.
Radial Glow – Produces a glowing light from or around a single point in the image creating radiating and halo effects without the need for 3D software or lighting tools.
Feedback – Simulates a video feedback loop like you get when pointing a video camera at the monitor displaying its output.
HSV Manipulator – Allows you to apply an effect only to a specific color range, such as blurring skin tones to smooth out wrinkles, or smoothing out a chroma key.
Frame Manipulator – Creates associations between different aspects of your video such as having the volume of the soundtrack affect the scale of the video, or having the brightness control the amount of blur.
Pixel Manipulator – Creates associations between different aspects of individual pixels, such as having each pixel’s location affect its brightness, or having the distance from an object affect its saturation.
Edge Manipulator – Allows the user to apply effects such as blurring, sharpening, brightness, or contrast only to the edges of objects in scenes. This allows you to sharpen the edges without adding noise to the rest of the image, for example.
Camera Flash – Creates a classic flash-bulb style transition.
Digital Interference – Simulates the types of corruption found in digital video and digital broadcasts, such as stuttering or dropped frames and blockiness.
If you want to kick the tires before you drive it off the lot, you can download a free demo from the Web site, too.