Jim Tierney
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Beauty Box has been used on many national shows and commercial spots, including a spot for Avena skin care products:
https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/gallery.html#faq14
It creates a very realistic look that is very customizable. This includes multiple parameters for maintaining skin detail and texture. You can also render out the skin tone mask and use that as a Track Matte for other effects. For example, on the photography side of things, where extreme realism is necessary (video can be a bit more forgiving than stills), we have many photographers that use Beauty Box as a base layer and then add in a texture layer and/or additional retouching on top of it. This technique could certainly be used for video.
There are a lot of people doing excellent work using Beauty Box and other retouching plugins. Most people have time/budget restrictions that make frame-by-frame retouching difficult and such methods rarely produce significantly better results that would justify the significant extra expense.
cheers,
Jim
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Jim Tierney
President
Digital Anarchy
https://www.digitalanarchy.com -
Also take a look at Beauty Box:
https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html
It’s designed to specifically solve skin problems and to be easy to use. We use face detection to automatically identify the skin tones and track them through the clip. It’s won multiple awards including Videomakers Plugin of the year for 2010.
There’s a free trial. So check it out and let me know if you have any questions.
cheers,
Jim
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Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy -
Just to add to this post (which I realize is old) since it came up in a search.
We develop the Beauty Box plugin for AE/FCP/Premiere which is developed specifically for skin retouching videos. While plugins may or may not be the total solution they do offer the ability to do some things that aren’t possible in After Effects by itself.
The masking part of Beauty Box is something that can be accomplished in AE or FCP, but the smoothing algorithm we’re using is not something that you’ll find commercially available. For the purposes of skin retouching there’s nothing in AE that’s comparable.
Given the amount of time you’ll save for this type of task, I would recommend at least looking at the various plugin solutions.
You can get more info on Beauty Box here:
(https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html)
cheers,
Jim
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Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy -
Bob,
I’d recommend downloading the demos of all three and trying them. All three products have free trials, so you can see the results on your footage and how intuitive it is to use each of them.
cheers,
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy -
Just an fyi, regarding Beauty Box speed…
We’re working on a GPU-optimized update that should be available around NAB (April). It’ll be a free update and should improve the render times significantly.
cheers,
Jim
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Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy -
The filters are particle systems that are designed to let you generate, control, and use large amounts of text/font characters as design elements. The Matrix stuff is a good example of that, but it’s far from it’s only purpose. Definitely not as powerful as Particular for general purpose particles, but for text they’re very useful.
Obviously there are couple filters, such as Cool Text, in the set that are now redundant. And some, like TypeOn, can be achieved in AE7 but the filter offers an easier and more robust way of doing it.
So I still think they’re useful, but I’m also mildly biased. 🙂
fwiw, the Combustion particle system, which I believe is Particle Illusion 2.0, is very limited when it comes to text. It does do a matrix like effect with numbers, but I don’t _think_ you can make changes to the font or characters.
cheers,
Jim
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Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com -
Not sure where you saw $200. It’s always been $99. You can get it through http://www.digitalanarchy.com
cheers,
Jim——————
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
415-586-8434 -
This was posted by Gary Reisman awhile ago:
>>why doesn’t someone come out with a very basic Line,Circle, Square
plug-in that lets ya create shapes via simple target points and all?like Circles are Awesome! :
https://windowseat.ca/circles/index.php
<< Neat idea, useful, and should be reasonably easy to code. Find a way to automatically animate the circles around, and on/off and you should have a nifty little filter for doing motion graphics. cheers, Jim Tierney jim@digitalanarchy.com——————
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
415-586-8434 -
Here’s a good place to start:
https://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.15/15.09/AfterEffectsPlugins/
Also, download the SDK from the Adobe web site. It provides a number of examples.
As pointed out, take a look at Bruce Bullis’ blog. You can also contact him for additional resources.
To do anything interesting, you will need to be very familiar with C, math, particularly vector math and linear algebra, and have an ok understanding of graphics algorithms. There isn’t much that hasn’t been done for AE, that will be a good first programming project (i.e. relatively easy). I would focus on perhaps something that has been done and can be improved, perhaps using GPU acceleration.
cheers,
Jim——————
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
415-586-8434 -
You can run AE now on an Intel Mac through Rosetta. It’s a bit slow, but not horrible. Whenever Adobe releases a Universal build you can upgrade. Adobe’s upgrade prices are usually very reasonable.
Every time Apple changes something, it’s a pain in the ass for developers. You can’t really expect developers to drop everything and fall all over themselves every time Apple makes another change. The Windows plugins we wrote in 1999 still work with Windows. We’ve had to do FOUR different mac builds of the same software in that time. It ain’t cheap or easy being a Mac developer… let me tell you…
cheers,
Jim——————
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
415-586-8434