Knoll Light Factory Review
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Publisher: Red Giant Software Demo Downloads: Click Here Review Date: November 15, 2006 Reprinted with permission from MicroFilmmaker Magazine Final Score: 8.5 |
Famed visual effects creator John Knoll (the co-creator of Photoshop and the Effects Supervisor of Star Wars/Pirates of the Caribbean) returns with a brand new version of Knoll Light Factory, which will now work with Motion and Avid, as well as FCP, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and After Effects that it’s worked with in the past. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the software, it is specifically designed to allow you to make custom lens flares that can be used to simulate everything from shooting starts to warp fields. With that said, let’s get in depth with the newest version of Knoll Light Factory Pro!.
Ease of Use
For most of the basic options, KLF Pro 2.5 is very easy to use. You can lay down your KLF effects on the track you want and then pull up the general options, like motion, scale, hue, and the like, which can be keyframed anywhere you want across your piece. Once you’ve done that, you just click on the ‘Options’ tab and pull up the Lens Editor which will let you load any of the 70 presets, which you can then tweak to your hearts content, or build your look from the ground up with any combination of the 22 primitives available. Primitives are individual parts of lens flares, and cover things like Glow, Disc, Ball, Fade Ring, etc. All of these Primitives are set on a central axis, so that when you drag the source flare around, the positioning of the other flare elements realigns with that source to simulate real light sources hitting the lens of the virtual camera.
The only small caveat to ease of use is for folks who puchase the disc version of this software (as opposed to downloading it from Red Giant’s site) and who are using MacDrive on their PC. The disc version is designed to sense the operating system it’s put in. MacDrive fool’s the disc’s programming into thinking that your computer is a Mac, which causes the disc to only show you the Mac files on it. Turning off MacDrive will allow you to see the correct PC files, which you can install in your computer and then restore your MacDrive settings.
Depth of Options
The depth of options on KLF Pro 2.5 are slim, yet very deep. They are slim because you’re dealing with a single type of effect: a lens flare. However, it’s deep because of how that effect can be combined with other layers and other programs. Additionally, the amount in which you can adjust each of the 22 flare primitives is impressive, as are the amount of ways you can combine them to get subtle effects. The combinations range from suns in the sky, to additional stars in the night, to photon torpedoes racing across the sky, to warp trails, to creative dissolves for credits. The 70 presets also allow you to try out a number of looks before going in and tweaking primitives, which further aids you picking the right options to use. Plus the Alpha channel options and the new Unmult options to create the correct Alpha channel for your flare will further allow you to create even more in-depth effects, like flares glimmering through smoke and atmospheric dust.
While the main options for the program are very good, they become amazing if they are combined with Trapcode’s Particular, which generates a variety of different particle streams that KLF can interract with either passively or dynamically. Passive uses include creating the central core of fireworks in the night sky, whereas dynamic uses a part of KLF called Knoll Light Factory Spectacular that creates sparkles on particles, which can yield a colorful explosive or twinkling background for motion graphics and titles. In fact, Particular’s interaction with KLF is so good that it’s a core part of the KLF Pro training that Red Giant creates. I really hope that, now that Red Giant has partnered with Trapcode, that there will be a combo package featuring both plugins. (That might also bring down the price of buying the two separately.) Especially since competitors like VisionLab Studio offer both a flare package and particle package in a single unit.
Performance
The crystalline radiance for the flares and reflects in KLF Pro is clean and clear, with a more jewel-like tone than some of the other light-flare competitors. Additionally, the presets that it includes are more complex and visually pleasing than many of the other competitors and the rendering is actually surprisingly fast. (On one of our lower end test machines, we compared a 10 second clip with KLF Pro 2.5 in Premiere Pro 2 and a 10 second clip in VisionLab Studio. The 10 second clip took about three minutes to render in KLF Pro 2.5 on Premiere Pro and about 21 minutes with VLS.)
Value
For what it does, Knoll Light Factory Pro does a really nice job at a decent price. However, with some of it’s most spectacular uses requiring Trapcode’s Particular particle-generation software (which costs another $300), Knoll is starting to lose ground to some of the other visual effects packages, like VisionLab Studio, that includes many of the light flare capabilities of Knoll and the particle generating abilities of Particular for just a little over $500.
Of course, you can get the new Knoll Light Factory Editors for half the price of Pro, but you lose all the ability to combine your own custom primitives to create unique flares. Instead you have only the 70 presets to work with, which may be fine for many users, but folks who want to create more customized looks are going to need Pro. (The Editors version also lacks the Light Factory Spectacular features that allows interaction between Light Factory and the particle generation of Trapcode’s Particular.)
Final Comments
2.5 offers an additional 30 light presets from what 2.0 did and the Pro version continues to allow you to custom tweak those presets through the lens features. The polish and finesse of Knoll Light Factory still looks good, but reliance on other plugins for some of the coolest effects and an increasingly competitive market are making Knoll Light Factory Pro a less black and white decision. Still, with a crystal clear results, fast rendering, and interaction with both common editing programs like Final Cut Pro and motion graphics-focused packages like After Effects, you definitely should download the demo of this package and check it out.
