I produce a number of politically-themed programs throughout the year and was considering buying Digital Juice’s "International Flags" Jump Backs to use in my productions. While this may have filled my need for $99, I soon discovered that Zaxwerks 3D Flag gives you a whole lot more for just another $30. Zaxwerks 3D Flag lets me turn any flag into one that waves in the wind, with or without a flagpole. It also lets me turn any still or video into a textured waving flag.

As an editor, I’m pretty comfortable building complicated layered effect compositions in Adobe Premiere Pro and, if I must, building a comp in After Effects. After receiving the 3D Flag plug-in for Premiere Pro and After Effects, I set out to test them on my HP xw8200 workstation, (2 x 3.0 GHz dual-core Xeons, 4 GB RAM, Matrox RT.X2 editing card, ATI x1800xt 512 MB graphics card). I dove into the Premiere Pro version first. Initially, 3D Flag bogged down Premiere Pro 2.0 so much that it was unusable. After communicating this to Zaxwerks, the company found the bug in how the program worked with Premiere 2.0 and e-mailed me an update so I could get things running again.

Rendering was still quite slow in the Premiere Pro version. I turned to the After Effects version to see if it was any faster. I’m happy to report I had much better luck there. Within ten minutes, I was turning a client’s logo into a beautiful flag blowing in the wind. I rendered it out as an uncompressed QuickTime file with alpha channel to import into my Premiere Pro sequence, where I layered it and another AE comp over a Digital Juice Background. Rendering was pretty quick on the four-core system. Having tried it on single- and dual-core systems, the more the merrier when it comes to 3D Flag.

Zaxwerks told me it was actually good to be getting one second per frame. Because it’s a 3D application, you can expect longer render times than with 2D video effects.

Learning the control panel is pretty much the same in both versions. Both have a medium learning curve. Low if you actually read the instructions, medium if you want to jump in without literature. I found being able to change some of the main parameters in the preview window for faster feedback in the AE version (v1.32) a great help. According to Zax Dow, the owner of Zaxwerks, 3D Flag has been used everywhere, from the World Series to rock concerts. Because of the render being at least two-to-four times longer in the Premiere Pro version, I highly recommend getting the After Effects version.