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Buena Au Naturel
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The Stats
- Developer: DigiEffects
- Version: 1.1.1
- Platforms: Mac, Windows
- Host Applications: Adobe After Effects CS3, Adobe Premeire Pro CS3, Apple Final Cut Pro 6, Autodesk Combustion 4
- 32-bit float point color space
- Note: Part of Buena Effects Pack
- Compatibility with After Effects CS3, Compatibility with After Effects 7, Mac Universal Binary
Purchase Buena Effects Pack
This Product has been discontinuued
Description
Au Naturel is a plug-in for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, Apple's Final Cut Pro, discreet Combustion and compatible hosts that allows you to work on your footage in a 32-bit per channel floating point linear RGB color space giving you much more natural looking results when compositing, blurring, or correcting your footage.
In the process of converting the light in a scene into bits in your computer, the data describing the scene goes through several conversions. From the lens on your camera to the electronics that recorded it to the codec used to compress it, the data that your editing application has is no longer a very good representation of what really occurred. Au Naturel strips away much of the extra junk that was added to your footage and lets you operate on your raw footage using meaningful values. The results are much more realistic looking.
Extended Dynamic Range - You may have heard about high dynamic range or extended dynamic range image formats which allow you to keep brighter highlights and darker shadows without sacrificing image quality. Au Naturel uses those same techniques when doing its thing so you keep as much of the dynamic range of your footage as possible when applying the effects in Au Naturel.
New in version 1.1.1 Au Naturel now works with Premiere Pro 1.5 and later. We've also improved the demo dialogs, especially on Windows, so using the demo and obtaining a new 1-day trial serial number should be much easier.
Features
Au Naturel comes with 7 built-in effects:
Adjust Exposure
Au Naturel works in a 32-bit per channel floating point linear RGB color space. What does that mean for you? It means that the results it produces are much more like the results of doing things in the real world. You can adjust the exposure using f-stops; blurs causing blooming in bright areas; compositing mimics real light interaction. But don't just take our word for it - see the difference for yourself.
See the Difference
Here's an example of exactly what we mean. This photo shows a typical night scene:
If we use our editing application's built-in brightness function to increase the brightness, it mainly makes the scene look foggy, whereas Au Naturel's "Adjust Exposure" function does what you'd expect.
Furthermore, the units for brightness are some mysterious set of values that vary from -100 to +100. But 100 what? With Au Naturel, rather than increasing the brightness in some random units that were convenient for the developer, you can adjust the exposure in units you're used to using: f-stops.
And it doesn't stop there. Blurs look more realistic, too. Here's the same photo blurred using the host application's built-in Gaussian Blur and again with Au Naturel's Gaussian Blur effect:
Notice how the bright areas bloom out more in Au Naturel's blur than they do using the built-in blur? When you combine effects, the results are even more dramatic. Here's a comparison combining the 2 examples above - increasing the exposure (or brightness) and blurring the image:
Levels
One of the main advantages of working in a 32-bit per channel floating point color space as Au Naturel does, is that you can keep values that go below the minimum or above the maximum displayable pixel values. Au Naturel's Levels tool does just that, expanding the usefulness of many other tools, like the blend modes used in compositing.
When you composite two clips together using a blend mode like Add or Linear Light, for example, many of the values that are produced are super-white or super-black values that the host application would normally clip to white or black.
For example, combining these two images:
results in regions that appear black or white when the blend mode is set to Add or Linear Light, as seen here:
But with the Levels tool in Au Naturel, you can bring those super-white and super-black values back into the visible range by adjusting the input or output white and black points. Here's the result:
Notice that the flatness of the blue channel in the Added version is removed, bringing the original detail back into the image. Even more dramatically, the dark black area covering most of the Linear Light blend has been brought back into the visible range, too. This is possible because you can set the white and black points above 1.0 or below 0.0.
Because of this, you can recover additional dynamic range from your footage during the compositing process within Au Naturel, allowing you the freedom to choose how the results should look.
Directional Blur
Just as with the Gaussian Blur effect, Au Naturel's Directional Blur gives you much more realistic looking results than your host application's built-in versions. Here's an example of what we mean:
And combining the results of Au Naturel's other tools with its directionalblur gives much more realistic results than using just the built-in tools. Au Naturel's tools simply produce more realistic looking results than the built-in tools. Here's an example of increasing the brightness and applying a directional blur in the host app vs. increasing the exposure and applying a directional blur in Au Naturel:
Transform
Are you often frustrated with the low quality of transformations that are built into your editing and compositing applications? Wish you had another option when scaling, rotating or transforming your footage in other ways? Then Au Naturel is for you.
Au Naturel's Transformation tool allows you to translate, scale, rotate, and skew your footage using sub-pixel accuracy, just like the built-in Transform or Motion tools. However, unlike the built-in tools, Au Naturel uses an extremely high quality resampling algorithm to give you the best possible results. (As a matter of fact, it uses the same resampling algorithm found in much more expensive compositing applications!) In addition, since the resampling happens in linear RGB, the values it calculates are closer to the values you'd actually see if you zoomed in or out on the scene.
And unlike other plugins, it doesn't stop at just improving the scaling! Below, we've zoomed in on the footage by 150% and rotated it by 35 B0. You can see the difference for yourself:
As you can see, Au Naturel's Transformation tool produces a sharper result than the host application's built-in tool. Here's a close-up from the above images which shows the difference even more dramatically:
Notice the sharpness of the transition between the mountain and the sky? And see how the detail in the rock stands out much more with Au Naturel's transform? That's the benefit of linear RGB, floating point pixels, and high quality resampling combined into 1 neat package!
Composite
Au Naturel offers one of the most unique compositing tools available today. With it, you can composite in linear RGB, which produces much more natural results, and with an individual alpha channel for each color channel. You may be wondering why you would need an alpha channel for each color channel. The main reason is to more accurately simulate the interactions of light in your scene.
When a lighting crew lights a scene before filming it, they'll often use colored filters placed over a white light to get the right color balance in a scene. You can do this same thing with Au Naturel. For example, by starting with an entirely white layer placed over your footage, you can then use a solid colored layer as a filter for each color channel. Here's how it works. Start by placing your footage on the timeline, then place an all white image (or a white solid) over it, (see below)
Next, apply Au Naturel's Composite effect to the white solid and you can select a layer to use as the alpha channel for each color channel in the 2 input clips. We select a layer with a red circle in it as the alpha channel for the white solid's red channel. Then we select a layer with a green circle and another with a blue circle and apply them to the green and blue alpha channels of the white solid.
We don't need to do anything special with the blend mode to get the desired effect. The result is that the red alpha channel cuts out a red circle, the green alpha channel cuts out a green circle, and the blue alpha channel cuts out a blue circle from the white solid. Au Naturel then mixes the result with the background layer. You can see that where the red cirle is, the resulting composite is redder. Where the green circle is, the resulting composite is greener. And where the two overlap, the resulting composite is yellower. Where all 3 overlap, the result is white:
Applying a separate alpha channel to each color channel is a somewhat complex process, but a very powerful one that allows you to simulate light passing through filters in much the same way it would if you applied an actual filter to your lens before filming.
Time Lapse
The time lapse filter produces effects that mimick long exposures by blurring your footage temporally rather than spatially. This has the effect of producing streaks where you have bright objects moving through the scene, and producing softer areas where you have localized motion. As you can see from the movie at the right, this produces the classic "light streak" effect you get when you leave a camera's aperture open for a long period of time.
The Time Lapse tool allows you to choose whether to apply the blurring to all the color channels or only a specific one. And it also allows you to decide how to handle edge frames. And, of course, you can combine it with any of Au Naturel's other powerful tools to create a wide variety of different effects. In the above movie, we've also increased the exposure of the footage along with applying the Time Lapse filter making the light streaks more dramatic.
View a Quicktime sample of Time Lapse
Support
Tutorials
- Composite Tutorial - How to use Au Naturel's Composite tool to create different film looks.
Manual
Forum
- Digieffects Forum] hosted by Toolfarm and moderated by Robert Sharp, president of Digieffects
Reviews
Press Releases
- This page was last modified 01:31, 23 April 2008.
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