You Are Here: Home > News > SM Review

 

Pixelan is well-known for its range of "spices", grayscale images that are used to create soft transitions between clips in Adobe Premiere and other editing packages. The company has recently launched the next generation of the spice family.

Called SpiceMaster, the program gives infinite manipulation over the way you can create transitions, with controls for direction, speed, softness, edge, glow, shadow and strength. If you ever use transitions or include matted effects in your productions, SpiceMaster is a must-have application.

SpiceMaster is fired up as soon as you drag a SpiceMaster transition between clips on the timeline in whatever video editing application you use. From the intuitive interface, a spice (grayscale map) is selected as the basis of the transition, and then the controls available are used to fine-tune the transition to your taste.

Aiding spice selection is a very clever database utility used to collate all of your spices into logical groups. With this, selecting a spice is as simple as point and click. The type of effect that a particular spice will give can usually be deduced from the look of the grayscale map. Pixelan has also added an option to make the spices animatable when viewed in the database.

With the controls available, an infinite number of effects can be applied to a spice in the transition. For example, using the softness control lets you define how hard the edge is between the two clips as the transition occurs. With the border control, this edge also can have a glow or shadow applied to it, and the texture control lets you apply a texture over the top of the transition.

A very powerful speed control is available to keyframe speed changes as a transition progresses. For example, you can freeze the transition at a particular point for a period of time, or speed up or slow down the transition at will. By setting the speed control to a series of peaks and troughs, pulsating glows and borders can be created.

The orientation and position of a spice in the transition can also be defined. However, SpiceMaster is not restricted to transitions. With a little forward thinking and creativity, SpiceMaster can add superb special effects to clips without any keyframing, compositing or motion graphic gymnastics.

For instance, you can organically introduce a colour change to a subject or have a scene washed over with a softly blended blur. The excellent documentation supplied with SpiceMaster details on a step-by-step basis how these effects and others are performed.

In addition, these effects can also be applied to titles, layers and backgrounds. Even picture-in-picture effects are possible where you might, say, apply a spice to blur or blend the edge of the inner image with an outer one. Similarly, the hard edge between split screen images can be blended to a soft edge.

In all cases, the effect a SpiceMaster transition is giving you can be viewed instantly in the preview window without the need to render.

Pixelan offers a "demo" version of the program that can be downloaded free of charge at www.pixelan.com. The full version is currently at an introductory price of $US199 and can also be downloaded from the Web site. SpiceMaster comes with a variety of spices, and further spice libraries can be purchased from Pixelan.