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Remember the Asymmetrical Dissolve Debate?
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Yes, we do have a Premiere version in beta, but for now we are going to wait and see how it goes.”
Such great plugins. I would love to see all your plugins going OpenFX.
Now I am going to have editors ask me to replicate this when finishing in Resolve. It is going to be very time consuming layering clips and doing asymetrical opacity ramping keyframes whilst dissolving through to split clips with changed blend modes. 🙂
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I don’t really have a need for an assymetrical dissolve, but this plugin looks really fantastic. If I ever need one, I know where to spend my money 🙂
I did buy Simon’s (Hawaiki’s) Picture-in-picture plugin and I can vouch for excellent customer service from Simon!
Simon: if you are looking for people to know about the plugin, maybe contact Peter from FC.co to put an article about it on his website? It will give extra eyes to the existence of the plugin.
https://mathieughekiere.wordpress.com
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Simon, when you code it for PPro, make sure it requires at least 4 TRACKS to make it work. ‘Cuase you know thems PPro folks odn’t want nuthin’ what don’t got no tracks. 😀 So mo’ tracks = bettah.
“Constituo, ergo sum”
Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
CMX-Quantel-Avid-Premiere-FCPX-AFX-Crayola
“What a long strange trip it’s been….” -
OK, so I watched the clip after posting the fun dig above, so I’ve got to get serious and say…
WOW.
Nicely done. Yeah, gonna buy that.
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[Mathieu Ghekiere] “I don’t really have a need for an assymetrical dissolve, but this plugin looks really fantastic. If I ever need one, I know where to spend my money :-)”
Creatively this plug in is a lot more than just an asymmetric dissolve
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You’re right, it is. The demo looks very impressive. In my work up until now, I haven’t needed more then a standard dissolve, but it’s a great option for if I ever want or need more. I’ll surely keep it in the back of my head.
https://mathieughekiere.wordpress.com
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You’re right, it is. The demo looks very impressive. In my work up until now, I haven’t needed more then a standard dissolve, but it’s a great option for if I ever want or need more. I’ll surely keep it in the back of my head.
It’s both impressive in capability and in the user interface that they found to make the power of the plugin visual. It seems like a small thing, but I can imagine this taking a lot of resources finding a user interface to let you animate stuff or see how a preset will look like and how you can change parameters.
https://mathieughekiere.wordpress.com
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[Mathieu Ghekiere] “I haven’t needed more then a standard dissolve, but it’s a great option for if I ever want or need more. I’ll surely keep it in the back of my head. “
In my opinion, this is more than just a dissolve. Yes, it’s a dissolve as technique (simplified as opacity transitions between two clips), but this plugin involves compositing techniques, as do many of Simon’s plugins. They introduce the basic elements of mattes and compositing to allow for very powerful and unique features.
The split matte function of the dissolves allow some really cool looks.
This plugin is very deep. It’s good to be able to set aside some time to spend with it.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “In my opinion, this is more than just a dissolve. Yes, it’s a dissolve as technique (simplified as opacity transitions between two clips), but this plugin involves compositing techniques, as do many of Simon’s plugins.”
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said this might be the biggest innovation since the original optical dissolve. Dialing back the hyperbole the tiniest bit (what? WHY?), I’ll say it’s definitely the biggest innovation in the digital era.
Compositing is the key, and here’s why. Our old friend mixing pixels and pigments versus mixing light.
Light, “all on” = white.
Pigments & pixels, “all on” = black.What’s going on behind the scenes in a digital dissolve is a grayscale alpha mask, so at 50-50, you have the images at their dimmest, viewed through an invisible, but now perceptible, 50% gray mask.
Compared to an optical film dissolve, EXPOSED by LIGHT, rather than HIDDEN by a pair of masks.
The addition of compositing modes (aka blend modes, or apply modes) allow you to add back in the brightness in ways that are customized for the relationship between the clips — to oversimplify, two bright clips have a different relationship to the light than two dark ones, or a transition between a dark clip and a bright one.
I think any spot producer, certainly any trailer producer, anyone working on bumpers, opens, title sequences, a good many folks working with graphics, ANY kind of high-impact editing, will find this a powerful toolset for adding a spectacular level of finesse with just a few quick clicks, without sacrificing extraordinary control.
That’s an awful lot of adjectives, but I honestly think that the artistic and technical implications of this are far-reaching enough that Simon and I have been chatting offline for a separate article about the art and science of dissolves over the years. I’ve already teased my primary starting point, but I’ll save Simon’s for the article. 🙂
This whole area is a feast for any visual nerd, as is this plug-in. Even for someone with no particular interest in raising their dissolve game, this is a delight for anyone who cares about imaging in general. Very much worth exploring for its own pleasures.
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A huge thanks to Tim and everyone else for your extremely (even excessively!) generous comments. And an even bigger thank you to the intrepid few who have already put down good money for this crazy adventure into the unknown. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements or additional features.
I should stress that we embarked on this very much as a “proof of concept” – a way of exploring not just what we mean by a dissolve, but what it could be if you disregarded a lot of the “rules”. As such it’s still a work in progress, and we already have a few more interesting ideas of how to take it further, particularly in terms of the response curves which are one of the really key factors in my view.
One thing I would say though is that although I do harbour a certain nostalgia for what you could do on film, I certainly wouldn’t hold up film optical dissolves as an ideal – not least because they necessarily involved considerable generation loss, leading not just to loss of picture quality but also an exaggeration of film response characteristics that was not necessarily very attractive at all. (Contact-printed dissolves done in the lab fared a lot better of course because you avoided the generation loss, but there were limitations there too not least in terms of duration choices.)
So with Super Dissolve we’ve definitely not taken film emulation as a starting point – I’m always a bit suspicious of the whole notion of film emulation anyway, but that’s a whole other story. (Although I should add that you can probably achieve most types of filmic look pretty easily.) What we wanted to do was explore the widest possible range of options as to how a dissolve could be composited and I think factoring in all the variables over which we’ve given you control, you’ll see that the possibilities are multiplied to a very considerable degree. I also think that the ideal dissolve depends not just on personal taste (I know I have some very strong dislikes!), but also on the exact nature of the two shots you are combining – and that’s almost never going to be the same from one transition to another. So having a really wide range of possible approaches has to be a good thing … I hope.
Many thanks again.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com
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