New Pixelan Plug-in Interface *is* the Spice of Life!!
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Perhaps one of the biggest improvements in the Spicemaster2 application is the ability to control beveling, lighting, angles, borders, and more. The tool is completely loaded with hundreds of presets for each attribute, giving users a springboard to tweak and fine tune settings to their personal tastes. Or not. The presets are brilliant, and numerous, and many users will find them enough to create the exact look desired, or find the Spices generate even more creative genius and understanding of possibilities with video production.
Presets applied to a text event quickly gives life to otherwise static text without appearing to be obtrusive. With the new Bevel/Ripple tools, SpiceMaster2 lends 3D atttributes to text, graphics, or other images including the Spices found in the SpiceMaster2 library. Along the same lines, mattes and static images/still photos may be greatly enhanced by applying a motion matte over top of the still image.
Combined with motion from Vegas' Pan/Crop tool, or using a still animation application such as the Canopus Imaginate®, stills and graphic become focused and alive. The image from New York's Javits Center provides the blues and whites used in the border, taken by using the color picker found in the SpiceMaster2 border tool. Framing an image with the Spices becomes a creative exercise with all the choices available in the library.
Last, but certainly not least, SpiceMaster2 provides an enormous number of transitions to users of any application that is supported by SpiceMaster2. Transitions are often the most noticed, overused, and poorly thought out part of any video production, yet the scalability of any of the Spices found in Spicemaster make transitions either exceptionally transparent or exceptionally obnoxious, depending on the user's preferences. Figure 8 shows a very soft and nearly invisible transition from one event to another. The bezier curves apply to transitions as well, allowing the velocity or timing of a transition to take place exactly as the user defines it should happen. Prebuilt bezier choices are also available in the Completion Presets drop-down menu.
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There is one drawback to the new SpiceMaster2 interface as implemented in the *Vegas application; removing a Spice is not a single button removal as it should be in the event that it's decided that a transition or filter is not needed on a specific event if preferences are changed in the SpiceMaster2 interface. Most applications will find this less of a hassle, but it is worth noting, and hopefully Pixelan will take this into account in a future update for Vegas. If preferences for opening display of SpiceMaster is altered, removing a Spice from an event is a couple of steps. Otherwise, removing a Spice is the same as any other tool. This is minor in the face of all that SpiceMaster2 brings to the editors palette. Hundreds of presets are available and documentation, tips, techniques, and demo videos are all part of the enormous help file section. Put a little salsa into your video mix with Pixelan's SpiceMaster2!
SpiceMaster2 now shipping for most applications. Non-downloadable/only available on disc. Overnight shipping available.
Retail price 299.00
upgrade from SpiceMaster 129.00
For tutorials, tips and tricks for the SpiceMaster2 application, visit www.pixelan.com
All video images ©Artbeats. Visit the Artbeats website for more examples of their High Definition stock footage.
*To make removal of SpiceMaster2 easier, be sure to leave "Auto-Open SpiceMASTER window unchecked in the SpiceMaster2 preferences tab.
More tutorials and reviews by Douglas Spotted Eagle may be found here on the DMN Forums or on the Sundance Media Group website, home of the shared veg files and other training media. More tutorials similar to this may be found in the Vegas 4.0 Workshop book available from CMP Publishing, authored by Douglas Spotted Eagle.
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