Sweet special effects program check it out

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Wow, sure sounds a lot like SPAM.

[Alan Okey]

I hate this type of “marketing.” I have much more respect for people who state their affiliation up front instead of trying to pass themselves off as some Joe Schmo who just happened to stumble onto some “really cool product.”

I browsed the FXhome website and it’s chock full of effects examples from some really cheesy indie videos. It’s also pretty telling that there are no screenshots of all but one of the applications. Just showing results tells us nothing about the workflow of an app, or how easy it is to use.

Travis, I’ll give you some advice: if you want to interest professional users like those who read and post on the Cow: treat them like professionals, not 16-year-old “enthusiasts.” Professionals have plenty of great software options out there already. If you truly want to offer something of value, offer a great tool at a reasonable price and be very up front about who you are and what your affiliation is with the products you promote.

The muzzle flash plug-in actually looks pretty interesting, but there is nothing shown of the other applications’ user interfaces, just examples of shots that were presumably created using them. Customers should not have to download and install a demo of an application just to see its user interface and features.

In the spirit of the OP, I’m cross-posting this response to multiple forums.

[Travis Kelly]

I respect your opinion but you are wrong in this case, I apologize that they have no images of their software, I never looked at it like that, but my intentions were honest, it’s just software that I love to use that I thought I’d share with the cow community, I’ve only been a cow member for a little while and never saw anyone talk about it, So my sincere apologies for any offense towards any cow users, it was not my intentions.

I get absolutely nothing out of promoting it, maybe I should have not used the banner for a link and that would have made it less uninviting. And IMHO the muzzle flash generator is second to none. No disrespect to Andrew and his action essentials.

So once again TO ALL COW MEMBERS, it was not my intentions to offend anyone, just make them aware of a great program that I really like, Sorry Alan

[Simon Jones]

We weren’t actually aware of these posts until today.

Unlike Travis I do indeed work for FXhome. We’ve been around for a fair few years now and spamming forums is definitely not our style – around the Christmas period we were busy with rather more standard and productive marketing techniques. 😉

Travis – we thank you for your enthusiasm and support, but it is very important when contributing to a community to get a feel for the place and find out what is and is not accepted before posting. We’re really glad that you enjoy using the software, though!

Alan – many thanks for the feedback on the website. Your point about screenshots is a good one, I’ve passed it on to the web team and we’ll be looking into improving that on the next site update. In the meantime there is a free demo, numerous written tutorials containing screenshots and video-based tutorials where people can see the programs ‘in action’, if they don’t have time to try the demo.

We’ve had a great relationship with Creative Cow over the years, with the writers here always being very supportive of our work, and we’d never do anything to damage that.

Thanks guys!

[Alan Okey]

Simon,

In hindsight, perhaps I was too harsh with Travis. I respect his enthusiasm for the product, but with the current state of marketing it’s all too easy to find examples of companies paying people to write fake rave reviews of products, like the recent well-publicized example of a Belkin sales rep paying people to write favorable reviews for Amazon.com.

Apologies to Travis and FXHome if I overreacted.

Simon, does the muzzle flash application work with Autodesk Combustion? Combustion uses the After Effects plugin model, but not all AE plugins work in Combustion.

Please advise, thanks.

[Simon Jones]

Alan,

I hadn’t heard of the Belkin example. That is pretty shocking! It’s strange how some companies completely fail to understand how the Internet works and that you can’t get away with that kind of thing.

Unfortunately MuzzlePlug doesn’t work in Combustion. We’ll look into it though and see if there’s anything we can do for a future version – although it likely wouldn’t be for a fair while.