FX Packages for Vegas???

[John Rofrano]

> Pacakges in question are Magic Bullett Suite 2009, NewBlueFX, ProDAD, Tinderbox 1-4 and BorisFX.

Those FX packages do quite different things. Magic Bullet is for film looks. NewBlueFX has 100’s of high quality FX for almost anything you can think of. I don’t like proDAD because of their less than friendly user interface and they have horrible (and sometimes nasty) customer support. I’ve also had problems with their software activation. IMHO, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I have never tried Tinderbox but I believe that they only work with After Effects (not Vegas). Finally, Boris FX is like After Effects. It has some really powerful tools but there is a learning curve.

> Which one would you suggest, recommend and what you use?

Personally, I use NewBlueFX and Boris RED (big brother of Boris FX) mostly. I would suggest that you download the trials of all of the ones you mentioned and test them out for yourself. I also use After Effects so I find Boris FX/RED easy to use. You may open it up and scream running for the hills. By contrast, NewBlueFX is just drag and drop and pick a preset (or tweak the knobs). It’s dead easy to use but it doesn’t do motion tracking and rotoscoping like Boris FX can. Magic Bullet is also very easy if you are looking for film looks. VASST has a product called Celluloid that creates film looks from Vegas filters and renders very fast.

All the FX packages you mentioned are high quality professional tools. The bottom line is what FX do you need? If you want to start with a good general purpose FX package I would go with Boris FX (or RED if you can afford it). Otherwise you can purchase NewBlueFX packages as needed. Their three Video Essentials packages are quite useful.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com