Feathered Crop tutorial – 01. Basic usage

Taking advice of other creatives, I decided to forego the unattainable expensive gear, and use whatever I had at my disposal to create a series of short tutorial on how to use my plugins.

The first installment is already available, and I plan on putting out one of these every week, keeping under 3 minutes for all of you impatient types. I’m pretty happy with the result, since it’s my very first screencast. The audio quality is not very good, but I hope the content will defend itself, and that you will find these series useful.

Comments and donations welcome.

Power Window plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro

Power Window Interface.

Since it’s the Christmas season, I hope you’ll appreciate the new addition to the Creative Impatience toolbox: meet the Power Window filter.

After creating the Vignette plugin, I decided that even though it did most of the things that I wanted it to, there were still some image manipulations which were pretty hard to achieve. For example, a simple operation of lightening the inside of a selected shape, turned out to be pretty problematic to perform in a decent manner.

Therefore, I set out to create a variant of the CI Vignette, which would manipulate directly lift, gamma, gain and saturation values of the pixels inside, and outside of the shape. Most of the code was reused from the Vignette, and the rest was pretty uncomplicated to write. Frankly, I spend most of the time trying to figure out how to circumvent something that I perceive to be a bug in Premiere. But then, this is the life of a software developer. We have to live with what we are given.

Without further ado: Power Window plugin for After Effects and Premiere is up and running. Be sure to visit the download page for the file, read the instructions on how to install it, and if you have problems operating the plugin, take a look at Instructions and Tutorials.

Power Window Interface.

Hopefully some day I will manage to create some decent videocast on how to use these tools. In the meantime, feel free to experiment, and let me know how it goes.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Fixed rendering bug in Feathered Crop for OS X

Thanks to the generosity of Adobe I received a time-limited licence for CS6 Production Premium on OS X to test and debug my plugins. The response to my inquiry was immediate, with no additional questions asked. I admit I am totally impressed with their reaction. Kudos, guys!

I was able to fix a really nasty render bug that made the Feathered Crop almost unusable with the latest version of Premiere, what a few users pointed out to me, some in a kind manner, others not so much.

As far as I was able to test it, the version 1.2.1 of the Feathered Crop should be production ready. Download it here and enjoy:

Feathered Crop CS6 OS X v1.2.1 (2268 downloads)

 

There might still be a few issues with displaying when the paused resolution is less than full, which I will try to address in the future, but if you find out that there are still some big problems, please let me know. And yes, test the plugins within your workflow before you start applying them en masse.

Feather crop in Premiere Pro

I think the idea of feathered edges on a piece of footage that was cropped with standard Premiere Pro crop effect is as old, as the crop effect itself. I know that I’ve been waiting for Adobe to make it since I started using their software, which means version 6.5 of Premiere (not yet “Pro” then). And I know I’m not the only one.

How many of you have fallen prey to the hope that “feather edges” effect would actually work as it should with cropped footage? Or wished for more control than blurring the alpha channel via the “channel blur”? Or used titler or photoshop pictures as track mattes?

Fortunately, there’s no more need for this. Not because the guys from Adobe actually decided to focus their efforts on this non-critical, although pretty non-complicated, task. Drawing on my background of a would-be computer scientist, physicist, and – of course – video editor, I decided to delve into the dreaded Premiere Pro/After Effects SDK, and created the effect myself.

So, without further ado – here’s the Feathered Crop effect that I’ve written. It seems to be pretty popular (even more than the Vignette) and has gone through a few iterations already, each one adding new functionality.

The effect is free, but I appreciate donations, especially if you like the results that you are getting. I’d like to thank everyone for their generous support, and kind words. Enjoy!