Top 5 Nodes November

5. Action Gmasks. There's still some bugs in them (I had one that refused to create any more keyframes last night, and when you manipulate the verts off-axis, say on a plane rotated 80 on the Y, they get gummy) but they've got a lot of promise and allow you to do some pretty clever things when combined with a camera track. Admittedly, you can do this with old gmasks, which are also 3d, but having everything live inside of Action makes 3d gmasking much more viable.

4. Matte Edge. I think I overuse this guy a bit, but it's so so useful.

3. Sapphire MatteBlur. No other node will do a blur inside a matte as nicely as this guy. I keep waiting for the day when i can not use it, but that day is not here, so it gets on the list.

2. Point Cloud. It's a damn shame this feature only works with flame generated camera tracks, because it is beyond useful. Hold Shift and drag an axis manipulator over it to snap the axis to the point cloud, or parent an axis and define how the point cloud places the axis. A very smart and very useful feature. Needs to be opened up so any axes can be converted into one.

1. Color Warper. A bug in the CC's curves sent me back to the warper and I remembered that it's curve function (which works on NURBS instead of bezier curves) has a live histogram that will warp as you push values around. Awesome.

Top 5 nodes for November

It's been a while and I just installed 2011 extension 1 today. It's a subtle release, but there is some fantastic new stuff.

5. Sapphire Lens Flare Track/TrackMask. Damn this thing is awesome. Using Action's multi-out for the comp, the lens flare locator and the occlusion mask make this guy lens flare magic. Still not as awesome as having sparks see the same channel editor as the rest of batch, but a reliable workaround.

4. Sapphire Lens Flare. Redundant? NO! Lately I've been using the basic lens flare to add nice washes of color over shots. It's a great way to sneak color into shots in a naturalistic manner. I like "california sun" with the rays setting dialed waaay back.

3. Blur. The new blur node. It's also the new defocus node, the new glow node and a ton of other cool stuff. A ton. There's a built in stabilizer for tracking the center of your blur, the ability to logic op the blurred image over itself for glows or other effects and you can weight the different colors (like in the Glow node) for some really quick pretty looking stuff.

2. Matte Edge. This is a new one for 2011 extension 1, but it's aaaawesome. It's a more complex version of the old edge node, with some more intelligent edge detection, the usual shrink erode and blur, but after that are two sweet new features, a luminance curve and a noise button. These are awesome for a number of reasons, but you should now be sticking these after every gmask you make with softness on it. Here is why:

Gmasks have a linear gradient, which appears abrupt when it hits black and white. I covered this in my post about the RGB blur. The two ways around this are blurring (good, but may spread out your edges too much) or flattening the 'curves' white and black tangents in a color correct (constricts edges a bit, and won't kill some of the polygonal artifacts that gmasks make). This node allows you to use both of those for an effect that is both soft and lovely AND rectify the issues of the other (blur kills polygon artifacting, but you can use much less of it since curves do most of the edge softening). Quite awesome.

The other problem with gmasks in a film (or video noise) world is that they're very inorganic. By being able to noise up the edge without affecting it overall your gmasks will sit in the scene better. Damn this is awesome. (see also sapphire "MatteOps", though it lacks the curve control)

1. Action. Holy shit are multiple outs more usable than I ever imagined.

Top Five Nodes February

1. Sapphire Warps. Specifically the "Bubble" warp. Holy mother is it useful. The default makes it look like ass (see also: many other Sapphire defaults) and a reasonably useless random distort. But if you dial the octaves up, then mess with the frequency and aplitude you get controllable and scalable fractal edges. It's great for making gmask shapes organic and noising up edges at high frequencies. At low frequencies, it's great for general distorts.

All around, just fantastic for getting some organic nature into your comps.

2. Matte Curves. This really should be on my top five for December, but this is the first post, and Matte Curves are totally sweet. They're basically a glorified "blend" logic op. The curves affect the gamma in your foreground and background mattes. Whenever your key's edges are just a little too dark or light tweak this before you start wading through edge erodes, flashes and blurs. I've had it save some nearly impossible keys.

3. Batch Paint. Much like the modular keyer and batch and all the "nodey" stuff, people are generally scared of Batch Paint. I know I didn't use it for years. That's a shame, because it's awesome. While it doesn't have all the features of desktop paint (autopaint, some of the wash modes) it's so much better. You can add layers, clone from layers, repo layers, scale them. Then you can swap your inputs and all the effects are still applied. Works great in proxy mode to boot. Never have to re-paint something because a grade changed again. Always always always start with batch paint now.

4. Color Warper. I used to be about 50/50 on the CC/CW front in my setups. Lately I've been going more to the warper. Most of my work involves some look creation, and it's so much faster to whip around the trackballs, pull secondaries and bend gamma curves in the CW. The CC's still a great node, but for trying out different color looks, the CW is number one. (or four)

5. Sapphire Textures. Substance Noise is a nice addition, but it's still rather clunky in it's interface (loading different textures as opposed to a drop down menu), and few of the textures animate in any useful way--most just break up into layers. Sapphire, the old standby, again, has awful defaults, but once the octaves are dialed up and the frequency adjusted, Textures really shines. The basic "Folded" is my favorite and the one I use 80% of the time, but the others can come in handy from time to time as well.