Back to MacWorld today, but wasn’t able to get into the FireWorks session — bulldog at the door making no exceptions for press badges, though there were only 10 people in the room. Instead sat through an hour of the LDAP conference, but kept falling asleep. Headed back to the exhibits to take Ben Van Houtte’s recommendation and check out Synthetik Software’s Studio Artist.
We’re all jaded from a decade of easy access to graphical and video special effects, but this software is incredible. Examples on the web site are great, but you have to see the software in action – images under constant, unbroken transformation as controlled by a stylus on a Wacom pad, burbling through genres and styles as fast as the dude could swirl his wrist. 3000 presets, or generate your own and distribute them as plugins. All the effects work on video as easily as on stills.
Found myself itching to take a month off, make a short film, and run it through Studio Artist — create my own Waking Life. In fact the crew of Waking Life is now working with Synthetik to add custom features for their next movie. Anyway. I was blown away.