|
This week's issue looks at a variety of masks and keys. To get started, my lead story is a review of Hawaiki Keyer 5, from FxFactory. This is a high-quality chroma-key plugin for Premiere, Final Cut, Motion, and After Effects.
Link: Review: Hawaiki Keyer 5, from FxFactory
But, what if you need to remove a background, but weren't able to shoot it with green-screen? That's where Background Remover, from FxFactory, comes in. It's magic in a mouse-click.
Link: Review: Background Remover, from FxFactory – Magic in a Mouse-Click
My saga of multicam editing in DaVinci Resolve continues. Last week, I wrote that I could not get multicam editing to work. I still can't. Within a day of last week's newsletter, several editors wrote with suggestions, links and statements that multicam editing works for them. I'm grateful to all of them. In this process, we also discovered that the Resolve User Manual left out some key steps. But, still, multicam does not work for me.
Blackmagic's Director of Training reached out a few days later to offer help. But, by that time, BMD support had also contacted me. So, I thanked the training director and told him I would work with support. In retrospect, this was a mistake.
BMD support redefines the word "slow." So far, I've had three emails from them - each 3-4 days apart. We have established that, during installation, Resolve failed to install a local library/database, which is needed for operation. And, that's it. I'll get an inquiry, answer it within an hour, then hear nothing for days.
I'll leave it to you to decide if waiting almost two weeks to get a feature working in a time-critical application is acceptable.
In the news:
OSBytes released ff•Works 4, adding dozens of features to this front-end for industry-standard media compression engine FFmpeg. New features include: drop zones, subtitle support, improved overlays, improved color adjustments, support for up to 8K frame sizes and more.
Link: https://www.ffworks.net/index.html
Digiarty published a list of the Top Eleven Best AI Video Upscaling Software. It's a bit self-serving in that they ranked their own software #1. However, the list and general reviews of the other software are useful.
Link: Top 11 AI-Based Video Upres Software
Apple released the Vision Pro, their latest entry into what Apple calls "spatial computing." While not directly related to traditional film or video, as iPhones start to incorporate lidar ("Time-of-Flight") data into their cameras, photos, and video, the ability to actually record in 3D using a single camera draws closer. We can experiment with this now using the latest phones, but the future holds the promise of much more control over depth in the single-camera editing process.
Link: https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/
Wikipedia time-of-flight link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera
| 
