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Studio Artist
at a Glance
Maker:
Synthetik
Price: $329 (boxed with color manuals); $295 (CD-ROM with
PDF manuals)
URL: http://www.synthetik.com
Overall
Impression: Studio Artist will make you feel the way you felt
the first time you used your Mac. It's something unique and powerful,
and it will unquestionably unleash some of those pent-up creative
energies all digital artists have stored away. This is a complete
set of tools for anyone in the visual arts.
Key
Benefits: Studio Artist does a bit of everything—from painting,
warping, morphing and effects to animation and rotoscoping. It has
a powerful set of tools for each of these.
Disappointments:
No layer transparency, slightly cryptic interface, incomplete documentation.
Recommendation:
Strong Buy
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Studio Artist Resources
Online
User Forum
Tutorials
Using
Alpha Channels
Brush
Interaction
Animated
Brush Strokes
Animations
PASeq
Processing
Rotoscoping
Example
Example
(Sword Dance)
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REVIEW
• FEBRUARY
14 , 2001
Synthetik Studio Artist 1.5
Painting
and rotoscoping software for the Mac
by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
It occurs to me that
with all the squawking I've done about the virtues of Synthetik Studio
Artist, I haven't yet done a review of version 1.5 or explained its broad
range of features all in one place. I'll rectify this now.
What
it does
Studio Artist does everything, so it's a difficult application to pin
down. However, it's not too hard to describe the overall effect of Studio
Artist. Since it's only available on the Mac, I'll describe it this way:
It makes you feel the way you felt the first time you used your Mac. That
is, it's the kind of thing you use and then have dreams about. (Yes, I
have dreams about my Mac and Studio Artist. Further details are unavailable
at the moment.)
Studio Artist is,
in some ways, a painting application. In some ways it's an animation program.
It also happens to do a very nice job of rotoscoping—actually unique
in the world of rotoscoping—as well as morphing and warping. So,
basically, it does everything.
Studio Artist's
interface, showing the Source Image (top left), Presets (left)
and Paint Action and Layers windows and timelines (the two lower windows).
The large area is, of course, the canvas. Click here
for larger view.
Studio Artist does
a bit of everything, and it does it incredibly well. (In this review,
I'll just focus on its two primary functions—paint synthesis and
rotoscoping.)
Probably the first
thing you'll notice about Studio Artist when you launch it is that it
doesn't look like anything you've ever used. For one thing, it uses the
concept of a source image and a canvas. A source image can be either an
image you will be tweaking in the canvas or simply an interactive source
of color, meaning that Studio Artist will grab color from various portions
of your source image corresponding to the points on your canvas where
you're painting.
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