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DCP BlogrollDigiEffects' CineLook for Adobe After Effects
Sep 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Frank Capria
Last fall, I began working with DigiEffects' CineLook plug-in for Adobe After Effects. Simply enough, CineLook takes video and gives it a film look. The CineLook interface is intuitive, while its output is spectacular. Unfortunately, rendering any significant amount of footage was an overnight endeavor. More than a few minutes of material, along with some CPU-intensive settings, and you could be measuring your render time with a calendar instead of a watch. Getting acceptable results early on the learning curve could be a week-long affair.
Most of our clients are documentary filmmakers producing for WGBH (Boston PBS), WNET (New York), and The Discovery Channel. Such clients often find themselves with a couple of video shots they need to edit into a sequence originally shot on film. The film stocks vary from archival 8mm and 16mm to Super 16 and 35mm. The goal is to make the video shot fit seamlessly into these sequences. Many have tried the proprietary systems offered by post houses and have had mixed results. Those that have been pleased have spent up to $200 a shot. Those that have tried less expensive routes (the take-what-you-get-unsupervised-at-night-with-the-new-kid approach) have been disappointed often.
CineLook promised to change that, but our small effects company was ready to pass on this revolution. We did not want to dedicate a top-of-the-line Macintosh workstation to full-time CineLook rendering. The bottom line would not justify it as we were already using our Macs for overnight
3-D rendering. Soon after one of my Internet raves about CineLook's output and a rant or two about its sloth speed rendering, the folks at ICE announced they were selling an accelerated CineLook called "ICE'd CineLook." They boasted about rendering speed improvements of up to eight times on some of the most commonly used presets. I remembered ICE from the NAB floor earlier in 1997. ICE had been showing off ICEfx for After Effects, which was a nifty multi-processor board and software system that accelerated about a dozen After Effects' filters by a factor of ten. I was impressed-until I saw the $8,000 price tag. It also took two PCI slots.
By the time fall 1997 rolled around, ICEfx for After Effects now sported a slimmer $4,995 price tag and a one-PCI slot configuration with more than four dozen standard filters. These included the most common After Effects standards like Tint, Blur, and Glow along with some cool effects unique to ICE like Light Blast, Lens Star, and Video Look. Now the package looked more attractive. On the software side, ICE'd CineLook is $500 to registered CineLook users. I was still on the fence, but this past spring they offered a free two-week tryout. Like it? Buy it. Don't? Ship it back. My plan was to use the board for an upcoming CineLook project for a very demanding director with over five minutes of material to be treated. I knew I would need the extra horsepower because he would never buy the first pass.
I took the board home and installed it in about 10 minutes. It actually took longer to clear away the junk piled on top of the computer than it did to slide the board in and install the software. Immediately, I got to work and was blown away. ICE'd CineLook's interface was exactly the same as standard CineLook. All my custom-made CineLook presets were available to me in ICE'd CineLook. Screen redrawing was so much faster, and the software was so much more responsive that it took me about a tenth of the time it usually did to set up a shot. Render times were four to nine times faster.
The system was now so much faster. I was able to tweak longer and experiment more, and my end product was remarkably better. (So much so that the director actually bought the first pass.) The footage was well-shot Beta SP of Nantucket beaches.
I still had over a week left on my free trial. I figured I would try to pick up another job before deciding whether or not to buy it. My attitude was already shifting. When I had first picked up the board, I had been convinced that I would be returning it at the end of the trial.
Word spread that CineLook really worked. A producer for WGBH's NOVA series gave me a call to CineLook some Beta SP footage of the making of Titanic shot by Digital Domain. Again, the results impressed everyone. Of course Leonardo DiCaprio would still look good on fourth generation VHS. But that got me thinking. What if I tried to make something less-than-spectacular look like film? In a few days the friendly ICE rep would come calling.
Fortunately another NOVA documentary was being edited down the hall on special effects. It was using some footage shot on S-VHS in Antarctica. It looked OK, but it was not of the caliber of the other two projects. Now CineLook does not promise to make VHS look like 35mm. It specifically warns that it can not. I figured I could try to make it look like a grainy 16mm stock, and, with the power of the ICEfx board and software behind me, I would have enough time to try several variations. The postproduction supervisor was skeptical, so I had to offer to do it on spec. But I figured it was worth it to see if the board could really expand my capabilities.
The task was harder than I had thought it would be. Some clips took half a dozen tries. None looked like 35mm. But all the shots did look better and cut almost seamlessly into existing film sequences.
Aside from the CineLook performance improvements, my standard After Effects production work got a real boost from ICEfx for After Effects. One client was blown away by the Light Blast effect added to what could have been a very typical flying logo. Another was stunned at what the ICE'd Film Damage module of ICE'd CineLook did to an image that was "projected" onto an animated piece of film. The animation was more than 30 seconds long and under a tight deadline. Without the ICE board, I would have had to settle for a little noise and a little sepia tone on the "projected clip."
Since then, ICE has expanded the product line with a variety of other ICE'd 2-D and 3-D tools including ICEfx for Avid Media Composer/Xpress, ICEfx for Discreet effect* (formerly Illuminaire Composition), and a bunch of other add-on modules for third party products and some cool edge treatments ICE developed itself.
The company shipped a new generation hardware board called BlueICE that has three times the performance of the existing system upon which I did my work. The beta version was more stable than many other vendors' shipping products. And, if you believe what you read in press releases, ICE is soon to deliver an ICE'd 3-D modeling and animation tool (ICE'd Cinema 4D XL), an ICE'd version of the motion tracker within Puffin Designs' Commotion paint and rotoscoping tool, ICE'd Boris Effects DVE package, and ICE'd Final Effects Complete from MetaCreations. With each successive addition, the value of my investment increases.
It ended up being a pretty straight forward business decision. Buying ICEfx for After Effects has allowed me to take on work that my company had neither the manpower nor the machines to do previously. It has served as a speedier platform within a platform for accelerating all sorts of work I do on the desktop.
Frank Capria, president of Kingpin Productions out of Northboro, Massachusetts, has been an editor and graphic designer/animator specializing in documentaries for the past 11 years in Boston. He can be reached at: fcapria@earthlink.net.
