Playing with the quality of light in video post-production, that's what you can do with Simulate Illuma from DigiEffects. You can get dramatic effects with this plug-in set, but also subtle enhancements of already perfect footage.
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.
Radiance is a glow effect that has the ability to operate with independent control of tonal range and intensity for each colour channel.
I tested each effect on the same video clip—a scene that I recorded from a TV commercial and imported into Final Cut Pro using my trusted Director’s Cut Take II. I started with Radiance. Now, to handle the effects, DigiEffects has developed a controller interface they call the Illuma Banner UI. In Final Cut Pro, this button-driven preset interface doesn’t really come into its own because there’s not enough room unless you enlarge the Parameters column considerably, but it does help make using the plug-ins easier than without—even within this cramped space.
Reuse Effects by Recording them
The buttons have colours on them and one of them—the Blue button (should we think about the Blue Pill in the Matrix?) acting as a randomizer. All of the other buttons act as reset switches, but they don’t reset the plug-in effects to the same state. Instead, they each take a different starting point. The result of using these interface capabilities is that you can quickly create an effect, without doing much in terms of adjusting parameters.
Personally, I find that it also takes out the fun a bit, but if you’re on a tight deadline, fun is the last thing on your mind, so these save time. A red button in the interface acts as a Record button, creating an ordinary XML file the recorded parameters are saved into. What this means is that you can just as well write an XML file yourself—you can use a recorded session as your template—and create endless variations of the parameters for each effect.
Some effects in the plug-in set have a large number of parameters, others only a few, but colour, brightness, and qualifier always come back. Qualifier is most interesting as it controls the source image’s greyscale range that will drive the effect. The timeline range to which the effect will apply is controlled by Final Cut key frames in its Filter tab, of course.
As I said before, I started with Radiance and “out of the box”, Radiance results in an almost invisible effect. Playing with the parameters (not the buttons) quickly revealed some nice, and quite dramatic results. Radiance has a series of blurring tools that change the pattern character of the effect, and multiple compositing modes, and the effect I created on a tiny part of the recorded video was a radial spin of the colours in the scene (see the attached screenshot).
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Fast Mac needed
Lightracer has ranging tools and bloom shaping that can simulate viewing a light source through a lens, but you can also go too far with this effect and create something that wouldn’t look bad in an Alien movie.
While the Illuma plug-in does enable you to play with light and colour, it also enables you to add subtle light effects to scenes that would look dull or desaturated without, and I believe that’s where Simulate Illuma really comes into its own for cross-media publishers who want their videos or online movies to look perfect regardless of the lighting circumstances in which the source material was shot. I’m not going to say Simulate Illuma can add light where there isn’t any, but it will allow a skilled operator to improve the colours and lighting of a clip that is not perfect.
Having said that, you should have a powerful Mac—preferably one of the latest and perhaps also fastest Intel Macs—to apply a Simulate Illuma effect on a clip for any period that stretches over more than just a couple of seconds. I tried to apply one effect on a clip that was 10 minutes in length—I know, that’s way too long—and rendering the effect would have taken 6 hours on my Power Mac G5.
On clips that last for a couple of minutes, the render time becomes reasonable.
DigiEffects Simulate Illuma plug-in set has just the right feature set to manipulate the light in your video or movie. It’s a plug-in you can live without, but won’t want to once you’ve seen what it can achieve.
