Synthetic Aperture is shipping Test Gear 1.0, a new plug-in for Adobe After Effects. The plug-in offers visual and audio test instruments for use by motion graphics artists and video editors. It’s compatible with Mac OS X (10.2 and later) and Mac OS 9.x. The cost is US$125, though you can download it for a limited time for $95.
Test Gear adds traditional waveform monitor and vectorscope displays to After Effects. The displays can be customized to your specific needs. The plug-in also provides image histogram displays that are available at all times, so there’s no need to apply an effect to a layer for viewing a display. In addition to the graphical histogram display, Test Gear shows the minimum, maximum, peak, and mean values in numerical form. All the product’s displays use standard After Effects-style dockable palette windows.
For those working with audio, Test Gear provides an audio waveform display for checking levels, a phase display for checking stereo imaging and an audio spectrum analyzer to look at the frequency content of your audio. The plug-in’s image slice display lets you define an arbitrary slice through your image data, allowing you to examine the individual red, green, blue, luma and alpha channels in detail.
Additionally, Test Gear adds a color picker palette to After Effects, allowing you to select colors using RGB, HLS, HSB, grayscale, and “Web safe” pickers. Colors that would exceed broadcast video limits are flagged and can be legalized with a mouse click.
Test Gear works with After Effects 5.0 and later, including the new After Effects 6.0.