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As part of an ongoing Mobile Studio Series, this review copy of Tinderbox 1 was tested on a top of the line 500 MHz G3 Apple PowerBook with 256 MB of RAM as well as on the traditional desktop.
The creator of Tinderbox 1 is an organization called The Foundry, an English firm that has been developing and producing high-end visual effects tools for the inferno, flame, and flint series of Discreet products as well as Alias|Wavefront's Composer, Softimage DS (now renamed Avid DS), and Avid Media Illusion. The Foundry's staff is composed of film and television postproduction professionals with partnership ties to the Academy Awardwinning effects house Computer Film Company of London, England.
With a series of 20 plug-in effects for the Adobe After Effects crowd, The Foundry is making its first foray into the postproduction mass compositing market. Its stated goals with this effort were to produce a set of useful tools with good production integration, easy learning curves, fast rendering, and high output quality. Anyone familiar with After Effects or any other 21) compositing package will know these are not modest goals to achieve. I'll go over the filters and their performance in what follows with an eye to those objectives. I'll also endeavor to focus on those plug-ins I believe will be of most interest to production pros and their needs.
Filter Interface
One welcome attribute of the Tinderbox suite is the common interface look shared by all filters. In general, a CONTROLS menu holds all parameters for applying effects and a VIEWER menu contains a clear graphic preview and all onscreen interactive controls.
Eleven major parameters common to many of the 20 plug-ins make the entire line faster to learn and implement into any After Effects pipeline. The eleven controls are: ASPECT for precise adjustment of an effect over the x and y of any image plane; CHANNELS for control over specific color channels; GRADIENT for controls over color grads and ramps; LIGHTING for light color, position, brightness, fall-off, etc.; FILTERING for reducing "jaggies" and improving picture quality; BLENDING for process controls in mixing images based on values such as add, subtract; difference, multiply, etc.; PROCESS ALPHA for control on how an alpha channel is treated (and therefore affects a...