San Francisco - Digital Anarchy, a provider of visual effects software for Adobe and Apple products, released ToonIt! for Avid, the company's first plug-in for Avid Systems.
ToonIt! helps to create cartoon-like images from film and video footage, giving Avid editors the ability to produce effects usually available only to animators. The filters use advanced algorithms from Toonamation to create the cartoon shading and line drawings.
With ToonIt!, Avid users can customize the "toon" effect for almost any footage. There are four filters in the set. The Roto Toon filter creates flat shades of color and provides control over details such as outlines, shading styles, and halftone effects. The Outlines Only filter uses edge detection to produce cartoon-style edges, removing color altogether from the footage for a black-and-white comic-book style.
Goth Toon makes use of internal color rotoscoping to create a high-contrast effect, while Blacklight Edges’ edge detection creates a fun, customizable set of neon-colored edges. One of the key features of ToonIt! is its ability to minimize temporal artifacts. Other cartooning software frequently produces an undesirable ‘vibrating’ image that is the result of color regions and lines jittering from frame to frame. In comparison, ToonIt! filters reduce these graphic issues and produce very consistent, pleasing results from one frame to the next. This temporal noise reduction and visual consistency drastically reduce the need to make adjustments via rotoscoping or other manual editing methods.
Features offered in ToonIt! for Avid include:
• Beautiful Variety of Styles: Create a number of sophisticated looks including Flat Cartoon, Graphic Novel, Line Art, Stipple and Pen Ink.
• No Resolution Limits: ToonIt! will work on footage of any resolution or size, from web to film.
• No Hand Masking or Rotoscoping: Each toon effect is generated automatically. While there are customizable controls in the plugin, no manual or frame-by-frame work is needed.
• Customizable Looks: With 40 different parameters available to adjust the plugin results, there are many possible approaches to get the best result for different types of footage.
• Temporal Noise Reduction: ToonIt! keeps the results consistent over time, frame-by-frame. There is no jittering when played back at full speed, which is a common problem for software trying to achieve the cartoon effect.
Regularly priced at $299, ToonIt! for Avid will be available for $249 through January 31, 2008. The filters work in Avid Media Composer, NewsCutter, Avid Xpress, and any other Avid application that supports AVX 1 or AVX 2 plugins.
ToonIt! for Film/Video supports Macintosh 10.3.9, 10.4, and 10.5 or higher, and runs natively on Intel and PPC Macs. The product supports Windows 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, and Vista 32-bit systems.