June 9
Digital Film Tools Launches Composite Suite 1.0
Supports Mac Avid and After Effects systems


Light Composite, one of the filters included in Composite Suite 1.0, allows you to insert light effects as if the light had been present at the time of shooting.

by David Nagel
Executive Producer

Digital Film Tools has launched Composite Suite 1.0, a set of tools for Avid AVX systems and Adobe After Effects. It includes effects tools that were, until recently, only available in house at Digital FilmWorks. (Digital Film Tools is an offshoot of Digital FilmWorks, a Los Angeles based visual effects facility specializing in feature film and television special effects.)

The new Composite Suite features 12 functions for working with mattes and color, creating effects and compositing. Features include:

  • Color Correct, which manipulates red, green and blue values of the overall image and separately in the shadows, midtones and highlights. Brightness, gamma and contrast controls allow for further control.
  • Composite layers a foreground over a background using a matte with the ability to add drop shadows.
  • Grain simulates film grain with individual control of red, green, and blue grain size and intensity.
  • Holdout Composite is a two-layer effect that composites images like fire, explosions and smoke.
  • Light Composite adds light to the scene with special matte extraction techniques to isolate of specific parts of the image. Once isolated, light or shadow is introduced. A pre-built light library includes windows, doors, leaves and abstract patterns.
  • Math Composite combines two clips using one of the image Math functions. You can choose from Add, Subtract, And, Or, Xor, Min and Max.

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    Matte Generator extracts and creates mattes using luma, chroma, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. Up to five mattes can be extracted and combined.
  • Matte Repair allows you to grow, shrink or blur a matte, as well as clean up impurities in the black or white areas of the matte.
  • Non-Additive Mix combines two pictures by controlling their luminance level relative to each other as well as a set mix percentage.
  • Paste Color takes the luminance values of the foreground image and pastes them as a color over the background.
  • Selective Color Correct uses matte extraction to isolate specific parts of the image, which can then be selectively color corrected.
  • Selective Soft Focus allows you to introduce defocus to certain areas of an image, which are isolated using image analysis.Ê

Composite Suite 1.0 requires an Avid AVX-compatible system (Media Composer 7.0 or higher, MCXpress 1.5 or higher or Xpress 2.0 or higher) or Adobe After Effects. The suite is available at an introductory price of $345 for After Effects and $695 for the Avid version. For more information, visit http://www.digitalfilmtools.com. An evaluation version is available for download at http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/html/downloads.html.

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