Digieffects Aged Film & CameraMapper Review and Giveaway!

So Digieffects have had a few new products out this month, one which is quite a useful tool in working with still imagery and 3D space, and the other which can give you some nice looking old film effects, as if it were from the Super 8 era.  Both of these plugins are quite useful in their own ways, and even better than that… we got some copies of them to give away to YOU!  That’s right, check out my review on CameraMapper and Aged Film, leave a comment down below with your Twitter username, and you will be entered in to win a DigiEffects Bundle with the two plugins in today’s review!

Aged Film

So, onto the review portion of the deal.  I am going to start off with the newest of the two plugins that got released last week, Aged Film.  This is an awesome looking, easy to use plugin, that you can literally apply, and know exactly how to work it, without a learning curve at all.  All of the parameters are pretty straightforward, and there actually isn’t too many of them, not that it needs more than it has, but it doesn’t overwhelm you like some plugins have the tendency to do.  You basically have your opacity for the effect, seeding options for more or less aged-ness, control over the color of the effect, Dust Control and Vertical Line Scratch control, which inserts more or less of the specks and lines you see in old film, and finally Frame Jitter, which randomly offsets the video like it is playing slightly off the film reel.  There are other minor little features to turn on and off and tweak, but those are the basics for the effect.

My thoughts?  Completely cool, and complete in what you would expect from a plugin called Aged Film.  Although, I wouldn’t use this a whole hell of a lot, but for the price of only $29.00 it could probably save you a few hours of work, especially if you are putting together old war sequences for a short film, or faking a grandpa playing some old movies… or maybe you are working at a news station and they like “Blast From the Past” segments for those slow news days… (I find myself wishing I had this about a year ago from now for that exact reason), now that could be VERY useful!  Bottom line, for the effect it is supposed to be simulating, it is a killer deal and a huge time saver.  Although you might not use it too often, you never know when you might be called upon to make some vintage graphics, and when that time comes, if you got this in your toolbox, it’s just going to make your job that much easier.

CameraMapper

Now onto CameraMapper… now this is a plugin a lot of us have been waiting for.  I mean there are workarounds littered across the net on how to achieve this effect without a third party plugin, but that’s no fun, now is it?  Now, this plugin was designed for you to make subtle camera moves, such as pans, tilts, dolly ins and outs… that kind of thing.  The way it works is to project your footage onto solids in your scene that you position and rotate in 3d space to act as the planes that you are going to move past, toward, or away from, thus creating the illusion of individual 3d elements in a scene made up of one piece of 2d imagery.  This isn’t made to do drastic camera moves, although if you plan out your shots correctly, then you can get some pretty amazing results.  Although now that I understand exactly how to use the plugin, it was kind of confusing at first, but with some experimental procedures, and watching Mark Christiansen’s tutorial over at Digieffects (he’s one of the co-developers of the plugin by the way), he laid it out there on how to position your solids and set up your camera movements, and what to avoid so you don’t “break the image.”

Overall I am highly impressed with both products and I highly encourage you all to at least check out the trial versions for both products (you can find them on the product pages), just to get an idea of what they are both about.  You might not need them right at this moment, but they could down the line, prove to be indispensable tools for certain projects.  They are definitely worth an hour of fiddling around in After Effects to see if you like them or not.

Now for the giveaway portion of the deal.  Digieffects have generously given us two bundles of CameraMapper and Aged Film to give away to two of our lucky and loyal readers.  This is almost $110 worth of plugins, and there are just a few things that you have to do:

• Follow @VideoHive & @Digieffects on Twitter (recommended because we are AWESOME, but not mandatory)
• Leave a comment below with your Twitter username
• Let us know what you could see yourself using these plugins for

That’s it!  Seriously, its that easy.  We will announce the winners on Friday, and for a chance to double your entry hit up my website, VisualFXtuts.com for the same contest and another chance to get your name in the hat!