Buena Software Releases Au Naturel for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Combustion
Buena Software, Inc. today announced the release of Au Naturel, a new plugin for Adobe After Effects, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and discreet Combustion for both Mac OS and Windows. The plugin, which sells for $79.00US through the end of SIGGRAPH (August 12th, 2004), includes tools for producing realistic lens blurs, adjusting the exposure of your footage in f-stops, performing extremely high quality transformations, and compositing with multiple alpha channels. Users can download the plugin and obtain a free time limited serial number by going to the Au Naturel web page at http://www.buena.com/aunaturel.shtml.
Buena Software, Inc. president Darrin Cardani explains how Au Naturel works: “When you film a scene, then convert it to a digital format and bring it into your host application, the data has gone through many different transformations. Between the electronics in the camera, the conversion to digital data, and the compression applied to it, the data your editing or compositing application receives is no longer representative of what really happened in the scene you filmed. Au Naturel strips away the transformations that were added to your footage and allows you to work in linear RGB, which more closely mimics how light works in the real world.”
Au Naturel works in a 32-bit per channel floating point linear RGB color space, giving it a realism not found in other plugins. Blurs produced with Au Naturel cause the same type of blooming in bright areas that defocusing your camera’s lens does. Motion blur produced with Au Naturel’s directional blur looks more realistic than the host application’s built-in tools, too.
In addition to reproducing real blurs, the plugin also includes an extremely high quality transformation tool that allows users to scale, rotate, skew, and translate their footage with sub-pixel accuracy. This produces much higher quality results than the transform or motion tools built into most host applications. And unlike other plugins that only improve the scaling, Au Naturel lets you perform transformations that include rotating, skewing, and translating, too, giving you the most freedom with the highest quality.
But it doesn’t stop there! You also get the ability to perform composites in linear RGB. Since linear RGB mimics how light interacts in the real world, this gives you results that are far superior to compositing with other tools. And you can even choose to have a separate alpha channel for each color channel, allowing you to create even more realistic results.
