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A complete list of all the reviews published on IT Enquirer since January 1, 2008.
Magic Bullet Colorista is one of Red Giant’s plug-in applications. It is a primary colour-correction plug-in based on a new colour engine. Apple’s Color does both primary and secondary colour-correction, but it only plays nice with Apple software. Colorista works with Adobe After Effects 6.5 and 7, Premiere Pro 2, Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, Motion 2.1, Avid Xpress Pro 5.5 and Media Composer 2.x.
It’s a plug-in designed to make colour-correction easy and fast. It uses the colour wheel paradigm for ease-of-use and sliders alongside the wheel for selection of Gamma, Lift and Gain. The plug-in comes with a 34-pages manual --Apple’s Color needs half an encyclopedia to explain its functionality and workflow, entirely due to the fact Color is to colour-correction what Shake is to compositing. Nevertheless, Colorista is a good system to have for colour-correction, and it can also help with some special colour effects.
Ultimate Ears’ triple.fi 10 Pro are Ultimate Ears best earphones except for the custom-made to your ears. They have a frequency response that is low and high enough to accommodate all but the most demanding projects (10-17000 Hz).
The triple.fi 10 Pro comes in a black box, holding the earphones themselves, silicon rubber tips, foam tips, a cleaning aid, an extension cable, a 1"4 connector, and a sound attenuator plug. There is also a nice metal case to hold all this stuff together in the box.
Magic Bullet Looks can dramatically change the look of video footage, and make it more film-like or having a specific mood that you could not achieve when shooting (like horror or sunset). Looks uses the same new colour engine as Colorista. It works in 32-bit floating point mode, which implies that projects are up-converted automatically and transparently for performing the calculations. At output time, the project is down-converted again to its original bit depth.
The first thing I noticed about the new Zeiss zoom lens is its robust build. This lens weighs in at 975 grammes, which is heavy, but luckily not too heavy to shoot without shaking too much. I’m not going into technical details --you can read about those in detail on Sony’s site and on about every other photo site in the world.
The idea behind this review is to offer you my experiences with the lens and what I think about its value for product and portrait shots. But first let me tell you what you’ll find in the box. BEsides the lens itself, the box normally contains a thick synthetic leather pouch and a butterfly shaped lens hood. The box that I received from Sony’s demo unit had “lost” the hood, the result being that all photographs taken with light coming in at an angle, showed light streaks or lens artifacts.
Often smaller developers come up with the best ideas. They simply seem to be more creative in the way they think than the large teams of people who sit together and try to come up with good, new stuff at those moloch companies like Adobe and even Apple for that matter (although Apple may be regarded as an exception to the rule).
Vara Software is not that big. It’s a small company, and it has only a few applications, but it did merit an Editor’s Choice with its ScreenFlow program earlier, and it is dangerously close to getting another Editor’s Choice for its VideoCue Pro program --if the rule didn’t prescribe an Editor’s Choice can only be given to a product that I had the opportunity to compare with its equal, it would.
There are five effects in this set. Halo generates an effect simulating lens diffraction artifacts generated when shooting light-emitting sources at night or against dark backgrounds. Lightracer is an effect that simulates phosphorescence. It has ranging tools and bloom shaping that can simulate viewing a light source through a lens.
Luminus is an effect that simulates the visual impression of a glow. It creates fluid glow effects that can be made subtle or just exaggerated. Photogust creates point-origin radial and traditional blurs that, when used with the brightness controls for each channel (red, green and blue), can create effects that go far beyond most ‘light ray’ effects.
iStopMotion 2 Pro is a professional-grade stop motion animation program developed by Boinx Software. It has a nice and simple interface, but nevertheless allows you to create a stop motion animation project from beginning to end. It comes with some basic compositing capabilities and enables you to perform simple rotoscoping, add a soundtrack, etc. It makes the creation process a no-brainer using a clever implemented onion-skinning feature, and allows you to output into broadcast formats as well as web-efficient media sizes. And it takes input from still cameras as well as (SD or HD) camcorders.
HDR is the technique whereby you take three or more bracketed shots of a scene with a dynamic range that’s too high for any camera sensor to properly reveal the details in both the light and dark areas, and combine them in one image that shows all areas properly exposed. HDR reminds of the range of lightness values the human eye can bridge.
It’s also been said that HDR is the way of the future, because it can be used in a large number of applications. These range from photography for interior decorating magazines to panoramic stitching where some of the images that are used to create the panorama are much lighter than others.
LinkOptimizer is a plug-in that immediately launches Photoshop when activated. The first --and sometimes the only-- thing you’ll do is enter a number for the output resolution of your images. Then click the “Analyze Links” button and the plug-in will list all images that have a resolution higher than the one you entered. Those images can be optimized.
Mac OS X Server traditionally has a full-scale feature set that is easy to manage and maintain. The Tiger version of the server, for example, came with the Apache Web server, allowing administrators to publish documents on the web or support a complete intranet. The Leopard version of the server goes quite a distance further. It has a Podcast Producer module on board, a Wiki and an iCal server. You can also use Leopard Server for Spotlight searches on servers, and the whole system is fully UNIX compliant (UNIX 03), with many services --Podcast Producer, MySQL 5, Apache 2, QuickTime Streaming Server-- being 64-bit.
Telestream Episode Pro 5 is a professional transcoding environment which integrates with Telestream’s hardware offerings, and with a distributed solution, Episode Engine. By itself, Episode Pro 5 offers an easy to use application with high-quality transcoding, drag-and-drop capabilities, and a seamless integration with third-party (especially Apple) video editing and encoding software through a plug-in architecture.
Transcoding is the action on a movie file that converts it from one format into another.
InPreflight looks good. It has a clear interface, with the ability for the user to create preflighting Presets. The entire workflow of InPreflight is based on checking and selecting buttons or check marks next to the tests you want to run, and save the collection to a preset.
This is much the same way Markzware’s FlightCheck Ground Control works, i.e. the program is fully GUI-based. However, the similarity between InPreflight, and FlightCheck (and certainly to callas pdfToolbox (of which the preflighting part is licensed by Adobe to deliver Acrobat’s built-in preflighting tools) and Pitstop) stops at this level. InPreflight is in no way a prepress-level tool, and it even lacks some features I deem essential. For example, InPreflight lacks controls that warn when a file will generate trapping errors.
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