We're constantly updating our store and Plug-in Finder with new information and checking over system requirements and compatibility with host applications and operating systems. The list of icons we use to represent that data is growing, so we've put together a handy guide to explain it all.

Labels: After Effects, Final Cut Studio, FxPlug, Plug-in Finder, Universal, Vista, Windows

There are tons of free plug-ins out there for you to download for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and other hosts! But where do you get them?

If you develop plug-ins and your goodies are not on the list, give me a shout and I'll add them. I know we're missing a few.

Labels: After Effects, Final Cut Studio, Free, Plug-in Finder, plug-ins

De-noise and de-artifact

This is an excerpt from a book I'm working on called Greensreening & Keying for Low-Budget Indie Filmmakers that will be out next spring. This has not been through the editor yet, so consider it a super early sneak peek! I had actually started this article a couple of months ago for Toolfarm and thought it would be great to put in the book. The book is about keying, obviously, so the article below is geared toward that glorious task. Reducing grain is something that can be used with any footage though, even if you're not keying. I know you knew that already.

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You will get much cleaner keys if you first reduce artifacting, noise and grain in your footage. This step may not be necessary if you have awesome footage, but if you're shooting DV, a quick clean up will help your key and your video look immeasurably cleaner.

Noise can come from bad lighting, JPEG and other compression induced artifacting, film grain, and half-tone patterns. In DV footage, blue will almost always be the noisiest channel and green is the cleanest channel.



There are several methods of reducing noise. A median filter set to a very low value will often do the trick. After Effects ships with a very nice Remove Grain filter, which I highly recommend using. It will soften your footage if you use it to high but in small doses, it can do wonders.

Angie Mistretta, visual effects artist and Apple Shake user, has this advice, which applies to pretty much any host application. "Be sure to degrain your footage via each channel." Sometimes a soft blur on the blue channel will do the trick, but do so very carefully. Most of the time, that won't be enough.

Angie adds, "If you need to Shift Channels, degrain each one and then reunite the channels then that is what you would do. Shake has a node that will allow you to tune for each individual channel."

In After Effects, to degrain per channel, try the Remove Grain plug-in, which ships with After Effects. Apply Effect > Noise & Grain > Remove Grain. Remove Grain does a great job of figuring out the algorithm behind the noise and getting rid of it.

Remove Grain and several third party plug-ins have a Preview Region, which is a white box that shows you a preview of the plug-in. Inside the box, you'll see the effect working and outside the box is just the regular footage. This helps speed up render and screen redraw time. By clicking and dragging the center point of the preview region, you can drag it to the area that you want to use as reference.

Under the Noise Reduction Settings > Mode, you can specify whether you want to reduce noise in all channels (multichannel) or in one channel at a time (single channel). Because noise in video is mainly in the blue channel, the noise reduction can be set higher than the other channels.

When reducing noise is useful to see both the combined RGB and a single channel, so you don't have to switch back and forth between channels. This feature is useful for a number of other purposes too.



To open a second comp viewer:

1. At the top of your comp viewer, click on the title of your composition. A pulldown menu will appear. Select 'New Comp Viewer'.
2. Drag the new composition tab to the right side of the comp viewer window, until it highlights purple and let go.
3. To change the channel being viewed for the new comp viewer, use Show Channel at the bottom of the comp window.

Remove Grain doesn't work well with dirt or dust on video, because it works with the full frame of video. You can adjust the Sampling points under the sampling menu. The sample points should be placed in an area of mid-tonal ranges and with no natural texture, such as over trees, water or a stucco wall. It will calculate the noise based on the texture and will not help your cause. Mark Christiansen's book, After Effects CS3 Professional Studio Techniques, talks about the Remove Grain plug-in used to give an aging actress a tighter face, so occasionally using this plug-in for a digital Botox on a skin texture can be very useful! By default, the sampling points are taken from the first frame. You can adjust and keyframe the source frame also.

You will also want to adjust the Noise Reduction Settings and the Fine Tuning in Remove Grain. Be careful not to be too heavy handed with the effect because it will flatten your textures. Before rendering, switch the Viewing Mode to Final Output.



When you're removing noise specifically for keying, many keyers have built-in noise suppression. The Foundry Keylight has a Screen Pre-blur and Screen Softness Options.

Sometimes Remove Grain just isn't enough and you need a third party solution for reducing noise. Check out Reduce Noise, Grain and Artifacting in our Plug-in Finder for a long list of plug-ins for several host applications. There really are a lot of great choices. Here are a couple that I use.

• RE:Vision Effects DE:Noise - Peter Litwinowicz, Co-Founder of RE:Vision Effects said, "Noise in the green screen areas can hamper your ability to pull a great key. DE:Noise is a great plug-in to help pull a better key, because it helps eliminates noise while keeping sharp the details and edges of your objects of interest." De:Noise works with After Effects, Premiere Pro, Boris Red, Combustion, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Fusion.
Digital Film Tools Composite Suite - Deartifact is handy for cleaning up artifacts caused by DV and HD video footage. In fact, it is useful for cleaning up images that have aliased or jaggy edges.
• Boris FX, Inc. Continuum Complete has two noise removal filters, BCC DeGrain Filter and DeNoise Filter. BCC DeGrain removes grain-sized noise from an image by analyzing a sample of the grain, then filtering out image noise that has similar frequency (spectrum) and amplitude. The BCC DeNoise filter removes unwanted pixel noise from an image. DeNoise is especially useful when working with archival materials, as it lets you correct dark areas that show artifacts from film emulsion or video compression. You may also want to use the BCC DeNoise filter when resizing 4:3 images to 16:9 aspect ratio. BCC is available for pretty much every host app you might use.


• Red Giant Software Key Correct Pro is made specifically for keying and quickly clean up noisy images and mattes. Use the simple Denoiser and Alpha Cleaner tools to fix low-light noise problems in poorly lit footage

Labels: DE:Noise, Keylight, Plug-in Finder, Re:Vision Effects, The Foundry

Simple is best, right? Check out our new, simplified Plug-in Finder home page. Find the information you need much faster.

Labels: Plug-in Finder

You have probably noticed the terms node-locked and floating licenses being tossed around a lot lately. You might have noticed that we currently have a pre-order deal on Mocha AE and the versions are node-locked, floating and node-locked with dongle. What does it all mean?

We've set up a page that defines Node-Locked and Floating licenses.

A dongle is a not just a fun word to say, but it is a small piece of hardware that works as a security device and can be moved between different computers. Software companies are moving away from dongles. Any questions? Please ask!

Labels: Forum, Imagineer Systems, mocha, Plug-in Finder

Artifacting isn't fun, but it can be helped with plug-ins. Check out this list of plug-ins to help deartifact your footage in our Plug-in Finder.

Labels: Plug-in Finder

We've put together a page in our Plug-in Finder that addresses the issue of flicker removal in video, caused by your camera lens, lighting changes in stop motion or anything else. There are several plug-ins out there for After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Combustion and other host apps to help you out of your flicker jam.

Got any tips or tutorials we can link up? Email Michele Yamazaki with the information.

Labels: After Effects, Combustion, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Plug-in Finder, Premiere Pro

Questions about plug-ins and software for upconverting footage is a question that we answer quite often. Check out the page Up Res (SD to HD conversion Choices) in our Plug-in Finder to help you with the available choices.

Labels: Plug-in Finder

We've added a new page to our Plug-in Finder about working with Subtitles. We link to plug-ins that help you create subtitles in a variety of host apps, some tutorials on the proper way to create subtitles, and information about standards, the XML interchange format used in FCP and more.

Labels: Final Cut Pro, Plug-in Finder

It's taken a few months, but the new Plug-in Finder is launched. It still has a few bugs - especially in the search - that I'm working out, so it's still in a beta state.

We'll be updating the links from the store and redirecting when we can, so please be patient. It was a huge undertaking. I'd like to thank Chris Wynia for his hard work on copying the old content over from the old Plug-in Finder to the new one.

We do have big plans for this Plug-in Finder. We plan to add tons of video and images and examples. Please stay tuned.

Labels: Plug-in Finder

You may encounter slowness and problems connecting in our Plug-in Finder. We are aware of the issue and are working diligiently to fix it. We apologize for the problem you may be experiencing.

Labels: Plug-in Finder

New Toolfarm Web Site Launched

Toolfarm, Inc., the leading third-party distributor of After Effects plug-ins and visual effects tools today announced that it is now managing the forums for Red Giant Software, including Trapcode plug-ins, and just launched a new web site.

Quick Links to Red Giant Software Forums

• Magic Bullet Suite, Magic Bullet Editors, and Magic Bullet Colorista
• Trapcode Plug-ins (Published by Red Giant Software)
• All Other Red Giant Software Plug-Ins

Users can log onto these forums to get help from the Red Giant Support Team, Toolfarm, and some of the top motion graphics artists, including: Dean Velez—awarded two Emmy's for animation and has been nominated seven times for various graphics projects and Matt Silverman—Creative Director at Phoenix Edit, Effects, and Design in San Francisco.

Check out the Toolfarm site for other forums, including Adobe applications such as After Effects, Premiere Pro and Photoshop, and Apple Final Cut Studio, including Final Cut Pro and Motion.

The new Toolfarm web site provides a streamlined look and feel, plus offers a cleaner navigation. There is also a brand new database of tutorials at Toolfarm, which allows visitors to search by categories and see what is new or popular. The tutorial pages have been redesigned for better retention and new tutorials have been added. The free demos area has been re-programmed with stronger security features and updated with new demos. Plus, The Inspirations section is now broken into categories for easier reading. Harry Frank, of Gray Machine, has joined the Inspirations team to post the most interesting, creative and technical videos on the web.

About Toolfarm Inc.

Toolfarm.com, based in San Francisco since 1999, is the leading third-party reseller of After Effects Plug-ins and visual effects tools. Known also for distribution, publishing, service and training, it has become the de facto standard as the one-stop shop for Adobe After Effects Plug-ins as well as motion graphics tools. It also hosts a Plug-in Finder, an online database and search engine of all plug-ins for Adobe After Effects, Premiere, and Apple Final Cut Pro.

Labels: Plug-in Finder, Red Giant, Toolfarm

Studio Monthly has a terrific and long list of plug-ins for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Shake, Sony Vegas and loads of other hosts. The list shows each plug-in with a summary, URL to purchase, host application, platform and notes where necessary. It's a very nice guide and we're happy to be mentioned in the list.

If you're looking for more indepth information about plug-ins, all in one place, look no further than Toolfarm's Plug-in Finder. The Plug-in Finder is updated and modified just about every day, so the information is as up-to-the-minute as you'll find anywhere.

Labels: Plug-in Finder, plug-ins