It’s less than a week away from NAB 2009 and the software updates are coming in fast and furious. I’m not sure how many of these updates are directly NAB related but since this is the biggest time of the year for our industry then it’s a good time to update software and generate some buzz. 

fx

 

Noise Industries has updated FxFactory to 2.0.7. As with most FxFactory updates there are a few new freebies thrown in. This update includes PDF Animator, a pan and zoom tool for PDFs which “preserves the sharpness of your vector graphics at any zoom level,” Alpha Merger which “lets you assign new alpha information to a clip by importing it from a secondary source,” and Perlin Noise. The latter is “a GPU-accelerated variant of the Perlin Noise algorithm, which earned his author, Ken Perlin, a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The output of the Perlin Noise plug-in can be combined with other effects to simulate a variety of natural phenomena.” That sounds like fun. Also included in the update is performance and quality improvements as well as the ability to “backup existing licenses as well as transfer them easily over the network.”  Check out their new promo video to see what’s new.

coremeil-v2

CoreMelt has upgraded their product line to V2. There’s a number of new features including: “the Second Generation V Twin FX Engine, Improved Curves based Color Correction with Onscreen Curves Controls, Easily change parameters across all plugins with Global Preferences and Transition Effects are Available as filters in Motion and After Effects.” There looks to be a lot of new stuff in this V2 version of the CoreMelt products. Upgrades are available as well as special introductory prices to May 1.

mocha

It looks like imagineer systems is going to be bringing their fabulous tracking system mocha to Final Cut Pro. They’ll be at NAB with the tool and will have a “10-day launch special” that will start on Monday. Keep an eye on their store.

RED has updated the RED Quicktime Codec. This update puts it at version 3.8 (but it is still in beta … go figure) with a couple of changes: Support for anamorphic recording modes (but no unsqueeze), and Reduced memory consumption.

These are just a few that I have been keeping my eye on. Lots more to come as NAB begins.