Non-chalantly we approached a DL representative tending to the show room floor. "Are you guys planning any ports or development for NT?"

As an NT-only studio (such because of many years of familiarity with the OS and budgetary considerations) this was the key question we and many others had at this show. Now, this question had been asked of other package developers, large and small with the standard reply being "We’re looking at NT seriously but don’t have any products yet" or "Our NT version is due out next year."

But the reply from the Discreet Logic employee was bordering on rude. The answer was a flat "No" coupled with the furrowed brow associated with "Moi? How dare you? You can go about your business. Move along… These aren't the droids you're looking for."

Of course, as the makers of Inferno, Flint, Flame and Fire, Discreet Logic has had a reputation to uphold in the vertical field of high-res compositing and image processing. But the company has made a dramatic shift in the market place since that fateful NAB meeting. DL has signalled their new direction with the acquisition of two software companies whose products are solely Windows NT and/or Macintosh based: Denim Software and D-Vision.

Discreet Logic announced their acquisition of Denim Software on June 30, 1997. Denim is responsible for Illuminaire Studio, a suite of two packages aimed at pushing the level of paint and comositing to the next level on the NT platform.

"The acquisition of these products is a definitive step by Discreet Logic into the software marketplace," said Richard Szalwinski, Chairman and CEO of Discreet Logic. "Our clients and prospective customer base have cited the evolution of Windows NT as a platform which delivers cost advantages and a network-friendly architecture, and we believe the acquisition of these products enables us to begin offering these benefits to our clients."

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TWO SEPERATE PACKAGES
This suite consists of Illuminaire Paint and Illuminaire Composition. They both feature state-of-the-art, multiple-mode anti-aliasing for better-than-broadcast-quality output, virtually infinite sub-pixel positioning for super-smooth, motion results, unlimited resolutions, standardized, precision time line, controls keyframe manipulation, layer sequencing, clip trimming and scheduling, speed and velocity, special effects filtering hierarchies, configurable user interface and complete Alpha Channel support.

Illuminaire also supports industry standard plug-in architecture for compatibility with products such as those from Adobe and MetaCreations and features a powerful chain of operators that allows virtually unlimited effects.

ILLUMINAIRE PAINT
Paint is the object-oriented video paint program that greatly simplifies rotoscoping, matte creation and titling work. This type of program has truly been missing from the high-end Windows NT graphics workstations and although the software is not the most solid program I’ve worked with (it has crashed completely and inexplicably on several occasions), it has already saved my world with some wire/boom removal shots we did for some 2K resolution feature-film work.

The beauty of this program is its object-oriented nature. Each paint stroke or each letter of a title that you may type in is a fully controllable object that can be manipulated via keyframes or Bezier spline controls in the Timeline’s Graph View. This gives you ultimate control over velocity changes of an object in addition to ease-to and ease-from functionality.

During rotoscoping work, once you decide that all of your individual object-oriented brush strokes are where you want them, you can "Commit Edit" which will merge them together or flatten the image. This relieves system resources and speeds up the software and the editing process. You can also have your brush strokes automatically carry over to the next frame (that you can easily advance to by hitting Page Down) when you use Auto Duration.

Paint is not a composition tool. It is a powerful paint program and does not work on multiple layers. This is the job of Illuminaire Composition.

ILLUMINAIRE COMPOSITION
This is a very powerful program that works like other high-end Discreet Logic compositing software. In fact, there are several similarities between Illuminaire’s interface and that of other Discreet software like Fire and Flint - primarily the Timeline arrows, spline control curves and gray background.

Composition allows for true perspective, three-dimensional compositing of an unlimited number of layers of film clips and still images 3-D effects include shadow casting, reflections and refractions. The 2D mode allows for even faster and simpler rendering. Camera controls include positioning, direction and automatic targeting options.

The camera in Composition is similar to cameras found in 3D modeling and animation packages. You can move it around your graphic objects/layers, fly through them, lock to target objects and createother exciting effects. As you can guess, this is a very powerful advantage over other 2D comp packages like After Effects.

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Composition has powerfully animatable filter and transparency features. Also, you have a lot of control over NTSC fields and 3:2 pulldown issues when working with 24fps film footage.

CONCLUSION
This software is powerful but needs a little more work. Because it is not written as a multi-threaded app and does not yet take advantage of multiple processors, it runs a bit slow compared to the more mature Adobe After Effects. Running on a dual-Pentium Pro 200Mhz with 196 MB of memory, I was able to function fairly well in this software. I couldn't imagine running this on their recommended specs of a Pentium with 32 MB of RAM. Another problem is that the software crashes completely at times. For example, in Composition, I would click on the word "Effect" an object’s "Effects" layer only to have it crash each time. Saving frequently and not clicking on that word alleviates this problem!

But despite a few problems in the last month and a half that we’ve owned the software, it has been used to do compositing in our studio’s nationwide broadcast debut of digital FX in the action TV show "Nightman" from Glen Larson Entertainment Network and Tribune Entertainment and was used to do boom removal in the new thriller with Charlie Sheen called "Postmortem" from Filmwerks and Imperial Entertainment.

With the new support and features that a company like Discreet Logic will be able to inject into this software, I think this product will mature rapidly and become a force in the world of compositing and paint for the NT platform. Already it has become one of the powerful tools in our studio that we couldn’t live without.

Demo versions can be downloaded from:
 http://www.illuminaire.com/SUPPORT/download.htm

Visual Magic contributing writer Bryan Ierardi is one of the owners of and Creative Director for Engram Digital, a full-service digital production studio located outside the Los Angeles area.