One more separated and reworked plug-in of the former Depth Cue package, this one allows you to generate depth maps which then can be used to drive other effects, e.g. the always popular lens blurs.

Just like XMult, this plug-in will generate Alpha based on luminance of an image. It can be obtained when downloading the demo version for Knoll Light Factory or checking the free products category on the vendor’s web site.

Also originally a Puffin Designs product, after a short stay at Pinnacle Systems, who acquired the company, this plug-in set, which is probably the most versatile and most realistic lensflare generator on this planet, ended up here and luckily in good hands. Especially the introduction of hardware-accelerated routines made this previously rather slow rendering effect even more useful. Included are thefollowing effects:

• Light Factory – the complete tool with full customization options on a separate interface
• Light Factory EZ – simplified plug-in with only the preset flare types
• Light Factory Spectacular- filter that applies multiple flares to ares in your image, e.g. particles or specular highlights for those glam, glitter and bloom effects
• Unmult – creates Alpha based on the brightness of flares; also available as free download (see here)

For even more exotic looks, all elements that can constitute a lensflare, are provided separate effects (GlowBall, SpikeBall, StarFilter, Polygon Spread, Circle Spread, Elliptical Caustic, Star Caustic, Faded Ring, Stripe, Random Fan, Poly SpikeBall, Photon SpikeBall, Aperture Reflection, Chroma Hoop, Single Polygon, Disc, Ellipse, Sparkle, Chroma Fan) with individual animation controls.

Tip: To learn some basics about the inner workings of lensflares, download my free preset project here and study the associated tutorial on creativeCOW.

Integration with 3D programs is always critical and many solutions exist from Cinema 4D‘s AEC export to plug-ins like MAX2AE for 3D Studio Max to scripts for other applications. A more generalized way is offered with this plug-in. It uses the standardized Collada format to allow you to import scne data into After Effects and likewise, export data back to your 3D program. With that, any application that can read and write Collada files, which at this point should be most of them, will be able to exchange data.

This plug-in adds a complete 3D matchmoving solution inside After Effects, making it easy to integrate the program’s own 3D layers and third-party 3D plug-ins like Particular into camera footage. This is of course particularly interesting for any effects work, but can also be helpful when needing to mask specific regions of a shot using 3D items rather than conventional 2D rotoscoping. Based on sophisticated automatic algorithms also used in Nuke X, the tool reconstructs a 3D camera and is also able to attach 3D items to tracked feature points.

Kronos is a beefed up version of the features you can also find in the Timewarp effect included with After Effects. This code was licensed at some point, but obviously frozen in the given state at the time of licensing, not bringing it up today’s standards. This particularly extends to performance. Kronos makes good in that department by offering highly optimized routines that support full multithreading on conventional CPUs as well as allowing the use of graphics card acceleration features for near realtime processing. Therefore, at a reasonable price, the plug-in offers a good alternative especially when dealing with lots of footage that needs to be processed.

This is probably the one simple plug-in you have been craving for when dealing with your footage, yet this tool commonly found in pretty much every editing application never seemed to make its way into After Effects – a 3-way color corrector. It employs the tried and trusted Gamma/Lift/Gain model combined with additional controls for exposure and a simple masking system. Maximum color fidelity is ensured by full support for 16bpc and 32bpc modes. In version 2, extra controls have been added to provide secondary correction abilities, including a color key to limit the changes to specific ranges as well as an additional set of controls to operate based on a HSL model. These effects can be further limited by even more quick masks. The plug-in also features the Pop and skin tone controls introduced with Magic Bullet Mojo.

• Displace – a very advanced version of After Effects’ Displacement effect. Not only can you displace footage in both directions at a time but you can furthermore modulate the strength for each region using a greyscale image. Of particular note are also its elaborate sampling controls to prevent blurring in displaced areas.
• Distort – a spin-off of the Displace effect, but with the layer its applied to acting as the driver which produces abstract distortions.
• Inverse UV – using an UV channel image from a 3D program and a matching color image, you can unwrap the pixels into a plane to add effects after the 3D rendering like for example a "growing" tattoo on a face or body
• Planar – a massively beefed up version of Corner Pin. In addition to giving you motion blur, you can expand the edges, rotate the tracked result or constrain it to maintain the correct perspective, all of which is not easily possible with After Effects‘ onboard tools.
• UV – based on an UV pass image from a 3D program, you can apply your footage as a texture. Either you re-apply the modified data extracted using
• InverseUV or use entirely different items all together.

Apart from the Reshape filter and a few standalone shareware programs, this is pretty much your only option to get decent morphing inside After Effects as well as other programs like combustion* or Fusion. Using masks and a special odd/even stacking order, you can define source and target shapes and areas. You can further refine the alignment by animating the masks over time to acommodate changes in the footage.

• Morph – basic morph to transition from one still frame to another when the source and target are stationary
• Motion Morph – An advanced morph that will also detect the motion of your object and figure it in. A good example would for instance be a bird that flies across the screen and then transitions into a horse running on a meadow.
• Warp – "pull" pixels into a certain direction. Could be used e.g. to get rid of strong lens distortions by tracing curved edges in the footage and aligning them to straight target masks.

Very prominently used in the movie "What Dreams may come", this effect will turn your footage into paintings. Because it uses optical flow algorithms, paint daubs will not flicker as much as when using other tools. Another advantage is, that because of that, placement of the strokes is more natural and follows the contours of elements, which is how you would paint a real painting. the addition of a "Pro" companion effect also allows you to define your own brush shapes and use the same algorithms for placing them in a pleasing manner.