Power Window

This plugin allows to create a power window on the source clip. Both rectangular and elliptical shapes are supported. They can be repositioned and rotated. Both the inside, and the outside can have offset, gamma, gain and saturation adjusted globally, and if need be, on the channel-by-channel basis (RGB).

Premiere Pro version supports 8 and 32 bits (Maximum Bit Depth). In After Effects only 8 and 16 bit depth is supported so far.

Power Window Interface.

Supported software

  • Adobe After Effects CS5, CS5.5, CS6, CC
  • Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, CS5.5, CS6, CC

Supported OS

  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • Mac OS X 10.6.x, 10.7.x, 10.8.x

Installation

The plugin comes without an installer. Please unpack the downloaded file and copy it to Adobe’s Media Core folder, so that both applications will see them.

The folder can be found on Windows here:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\CS6\MediaCore

and on OS X here:

MacHD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/CS6/MediaCore

Substitute CS6 for your current version or 7.0 for Creative Cloud. If you have multiple versions installed, simply copy the plugin to each of the folders.

The plugin will show up as “CI Power Window” under “Creative Impatience” group of effects.

If you keep getting error messages on Windows platform, or the plugin fails to show up, you might need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable package, available from the Microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=14632.

Download the plugin here.

How to use it?

The plugin is a bit more sophisticated, than the others, and the detailed instructions and tutorials can be found here: Power Window – Instructions and Tutorials.

Known issues

  • Feather handles will behave a bit erratically if the shape is heavily rotated.
  • The effect might not work properly with layers smaller than sequence size in Premiere Pro.

Road map

Below are the proposed features that could be added to this plugin in the future. If you are interested in further development, please donate. Feel free to propose additional features in the comments. The change log is also available.

v1.3

  • 32-bit and smart rendering in After Effects
  • fix problems with footage smaller than the sequence size

13 Responses to Power Window

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  2. Chip Nowacek says:

    Having trouble with with PowerWidow. As soon as I apply the effect, the memory footprint of PP CS6 (latest) goes sky high and CPU hovers around 60%. The clip is a still that is a small fraction of sequence length and is animated – if that makes any difference. Everything returns to normal when I clear the effect. Feathered Crop works great. Thanks.

    • Chip Nowacek says:

      Having a similar problem with Vignette.

      • BartW says:

        Hi. Please provide more info about your system, and footage used. Are you getting any errors in the event viewer (red icon in the lower right corner of Premiere)?

  3. David Arbor says:

    Hey Bart,

    Love the plugin but I just noticed that it’s causing green blocky artifacting whenever I render. If I shut off GPU acceleration then I get a solid green screen (no rendering required to see this) but if I turn GPU acceleration back on I have to render to see the issue. This went away when I dropped the gamma back down to ‘1’ on the inside of the shape; adjusting any other my other parameters didn’t have an effect.

    I’m on a mid-2010 iMac with a 2.93GHz i7, 16GB RAM, and the Radeon 5750 with 1GB of RAM.

    Thanks,
    David

    • David Arbor says:

      Sorry, forgot to say that this was happening on both HDV and Canon XF 1080p footage in a 720p sequence. My previews are set to the I-Frame Only MPEG but I was exporting to ProRes and still saw the green blocks.

      • BartW says:

        Hi David,

        Yes, gamma tends to have some strange issues with color values slightly below 0. I am going to fix this in the next build, although I’m not sure when exactly when it will be, since I’m pretty busy at the moment. As a workaround, you can raise the blacks of the clip before applying the plugin, and then drop them again, or you can use 8-bit processing by applying any 8-bit filter before the Power Window.

        • David Arbor says:

          Thanks so much, Bart! Raising the blacks before the plugin did the trick.
          Looking forward to that next release, let me know if you need any beta testers 🙂

          • BartW says:

            Glad it worked for you. Thanks for the offer, but there won’t be much testing to be done, since it’s mostly a bug fix with an additional control to clamp the blacks on input.

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  5. Hello, looks like animating using Key Frames does not work. It just shifts to the new position with no transitional movement. Any work arounds?

    • BartW says:

      It certainly worked last time I recorded tutorials. Are you sure you’re not having the “hold frame” option? Which program (Premiere/After Effects), system and version are you using?

  6. Ryan Farnes says:

    Great stuff. Thank you. Copied to the location specified and fired up Premiere CS6 on the Mac and voilá!

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