I’ve been a Digital Fusion user for the past decade and have seen the evolution of the software to its current form. (The Toronto-based company unveiled the Fusion 5.2 at the recent SIGGRAPH confab in San Diego’which boasts plug-in capabilities that support the native Fusion API, the After Effects API and the OFX API.) Now Eyeon has two new products based on the same mold as Fusion’they are roto’ and paint-specific Rotation and motion-graphics-related Vision. Whereas Fusion encompasses compositing as a whole with all the bells and whistles, Rotation and Vision focus on specific tasks.
Rotation is like the workhorse sibling of Fusion. It does all the mundane tasks that Fusion is capable of, but at a fraction of the cost. Take a full luxury car like a Bentley or Aston Martin: It’s powerful and has all of the amenities; that’s what Fusion would be. But you don’t want your fleet of pizza delivery guys driving $200,000 cars. So, you buy a bunch of 1984 VW Rabbits, throw in the Fusion engine, and leave out the stuff you don’t need. It’ll get you where you want to go and it will get you there fast. Plus, you can buy a lot of them for the price of the Aston Martin. Rotation is the VW Rabbit. Although, it looks exactly like the Aston Martin!
Rotation is designed to focus on rotoscoping, pulling matters, and paint work’like wire removals, dust busting and embedding your signature hidden in the visual effects shot. The rotoscoping features utilize both Bezier and BSplines. They have controls for the falloff of the edge of the mattes in order to control how soft or hard the edge may be. This is extremely beneficial for objects whose edge may change in quality over the same object. Motion blur on the edges can also be managed with shutter angle and weighting to match the motion blur of the rotoscoped item.
The keying tools are the ones found in Fusion for channel, chroma, blue/green screens, and difference. And, all the controls are there from Rotation’s big brother. Erosion, Dilation, Contraction mattes, spill suppression algorithms and channel Boolean fuctions for combining mattes’they’re all there!
The paint tools are just as robust, with tablet pressure sensitive vector-based strokes that have unlimited undos and the standard functions of cloning, smearing and copy/paste. Everything is animatable and strokes can be attached to trackers for automation.
Most important, everything that is done in rotation is portable to Fusion so that the compositors can finesse the elements into place. Rotation supports all resolutions and color depths, so there is nothing lost in the translation.
Now, if Rotation is Fusion’s younger brother, Vision is the little sister. She’s not as big or strong and may not be able to handle the image resolutions that the older siblings can, but she’s really creative. And she doesn’t play the same games that Fusion and Rotation do. She is used to design on-air graphics packages and motion design work for broadcast.
Vision is node-based, so the family resemblance is immediately recognizable. Fusion users will feel at home. Most of the tools from Fusion are available, like roto and paint, keying, image warping, and even an integrated particle system. However, Vision shines most in its title design tools and automation so that you don’t have to recreate frequently used designs. For instance, in sporting events for the score, or player stats, the data that changes can be easily fed into the design stream, and then spit out using the support for multiple broadcast or HD I/O cards like AJA, Blackmagic, Bluefish, or Matrox.
All in all, Rotation and Vision are nice little packages which deliver a lot of punch. Their integration into Fusion allows for all of their work to be done in the less expensive packages and then shuffled over to the big brother for finishing. This gives design and vfx houses the ability to provide many more licenses to artists. So, it would be wise to invest in the software that does the job for less money, and hire more artists. Everyone wins.
Website : www.eyeonline.com
Eyeon Rotation: $695
Eyeon Vision: $1,495 ?
