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NEWS • JULY 24, 2000
The Foundry Ships Tinderbox 1 for After Effects
20 plugins include new blurs and matte tools

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

The Foundry, a software developer based in London, has started shipping Tinderbox 1, a set of 20 filters for Adobe After Effects. It includes blurs, effects and tools for working with mattes, including one called T_Dilate, which allows compositors to grow or erode matte edges at the subpixel level. The company says it designed the package for speed and consistency to to aid in workflow, and, to this end, the filters share a common interface, with 11 major parameters shared across all 20 plugins.

Filters in the new Tinderbox 1 set include:

• Beam, which draws a single animatable beam of light in 3D space. Controls are provided for direction, elevation, color, falloff, softness and intensity.
• Blur, which the company says uses a fast Gaussian algorithm that works fast and animates smoothly, regardless of radius. It can also be used to sharpen an image.
• Caustic, which simulates the reflected light patterns seen at the bottom of swimming pools.
• Deflicker, which removes color or luminance flicker from a clip.
• Degrain, which removes grain from film images and noise in video images.
• Diffuse, a pixel-scattering effect with radius and aspect controls.
• Dilate, which is used to erode edges of mattes. It can also be used to grow or generate outlines from mattes.
• DirBlur, which smears pixels in a particular direction. Tracking information can be used to automatically set the amount and direction of blur to simulate motion on fast-moving objects.
• Distorto , which deforms one clip using the luminance of another.
• Droplet, a single droplet ripple effect with amplitude, wavelength, phase, speed and other controls.
• Etch, a charcoal emulator.
• Grad, a tools for creating linear, circular, radial and polygonal gradients.
• HeatHaze simulates the layered rippling distortion caused by hot air.
• Lens, a fisheye lens effect.
• Pattern, which generates a variety of wipe patterns with softness, scaling and rotation controls .
• Rays, a backlighting effect through a matte using streaked light rays that pick up color from the foreground image.
• Sky, a sky simulator with controls for the 3D camera position, clouds, sun, haze, fog, atmosphere and sun flares.
• Starburst , a lens filter that adds radial streaks of light to the highlights. It includes parameters to change the number of rays, rotation and luma clip levels.
• Stutter randomly rearranges frames in a clip.
• Tile translates, scales, rotates and shears clips with edge controls to provide repeating (wallpaper) patterns.

Tinderbox 1 is available immediately for $595 in the United States, £395 in the United Kingdom. It requires a PowerPC-based Mac running OS 8.1 or higher, Adobe After Effects 4.0 or 4.1, QuickDraw3D 1.6 or later and 128 MB RAM (recommended). The Foundry will be demonstrating Tinderbox 1 during Siggraph 2000 at booth No. 2935, July 25 at noon and July 26 and 27 at 11 a.m. For more information, visit http://www.thefoundry.co.uk.

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