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RE:Vision Effects’ Video Gogh
Paint Effect Plug-In for Editing and Compositing Program
Have you ever had a project where you've said to yourself, "Geez, if only this video clip looked more like an oil painting?" Or, maybe it's a watercolor effect you've been longing for. Whatever your painterly desires, and regardless of whether you've even looked at a real paintbrush, RE:Vision Effects claims to have the solution: Video Gogh.
So, what does RE:Vision Effects say about it? From their own web site:
"Providing an easy and intuitive interface, Video Gogh employs the powerful technology used in 'What Dreams May Come,' 1998 Academy Award Winner for Best Visual Effects. How it works: Simply open a movie with Video Gogh, make a few choices and Gogh! Out comes a painted painted (sic) animation. Couldn't be simpler."
Frankly, that's a pretty high bar to set. And while two of RE:Vision Effects' other plug-ins, ReelSmart Motion Blur and ReelSmart FieldsKit, lived up to their lofty expectations in a previous review, unfortunately, the same can't be said about Video Gogh. The product does have some genuinely nice aspects that do make it worth serious consideration, but ultimately most of the good stuff is canceled out by a couple of real downer features. So, let's dive right in, shall we?
What It Does
There are a couple of different categories of plug-ins. On one side, you have plug-ins that provide functionality that expands upon or replaces features underdeveloped or non-existent in the host program, functionality that can be used every day in a wide variety of situations. RE:Vision Effects makes some plug-ins that fall into this category, including the previously mentioned FieldsKit and Motion Blur. On the other side, there are plug-ins that provide very specialized (and sometimes gimmicky) features which you may use from time to time for a single specific function. Video Gogh falls into this second category, as it is designed solely to turn moving images into animated art pieces. That said, it does manage to do its job pretty well. Figure 1 shows the plug-in interface in After Effects. As you can see, there aren't a whole lot of options for getting the job done here, but there are enough controls that you can literally spend hour after hour (if you're so inclined) tweaking away to get a lot of different results. Let's take a quick tour of what you can do with each setting:
Figure 1: The Video Gogh After Effects plug-in interface.
Style. Surprisingly, Video Gogh only offers three paint styles: Oily, Watercolor, and Chalk, and each creates pretty much the effect you would expect. Figure 2 shows each basic style, with default settings, applied to the same still frame so you can see the difference.
Figure 2: Side-by-side comparisons of Video Gogh's three styles: from left to right, Oily, Watercolor, and Chalk.
Maximum Brush Size. Pretty self explanatory here - bigger setting, bigger brush. I was even able to correctly predict that a smaller setting also meant smaller brushes. Sheer brilliance. However, this setting can be a tad misleading, since Video Gogh's brushes always "grow" into place instead of appearing initially at the size you specify, so you don't always get the exact brush size you may expect.
Opacity. This setting is probably a bit misnamed, because changing it from 0 to 1 pretty much had the effect of changing brightness of the surface that the brushes are painting on. A setting of 1 was more of a bright canvas look, while moving closer to 0 got more into the "Velvet Elvis" style (an entertaining, if not good, style, but not for everyone).
Extra Distance Between Brushes. Changing this setting means the difference between tightly or loosely packed brush strokes.
Rate Of Color/Angle Update. This setting controls how "busy" the painting seems over time by setting the rate at which the brushes paint the effect on. One thing to note is that Video Gogh's animation is completely reliant on the movement and color changes present in your source clip, so if you're trying to use this setting on a still frame or background don't expect a whole lot to happen here.
Render Current Over Last. This setting has two main uses. First, it can be used to achieve a multiple-exposure effect by "ghosting" the previous frame while rendering the current frame. Second, depending on how far apart you've set the distance between brushes, this setting can help cover up some of the non-painted areas that can appear with widely spaced brush strokes.
Force Rerender. This is actually a pretty big liability, so I'll come back to this in the "Limitations" section.
As the company itself says, it couldn't be simpler, probably because there isn't a whole lot to mess with here. However, the tweakability factor is very high, as you can animate any of the above settings, including the style, to get some pretty interesting effects. For example, changing the rate of color/angle update settings over the course of a clip will result in a slow, almost lazy brush motion giving way to a rapid, frenetic pace.
But the burning question remains: How well does Video Gogh do what it says it will do? The short answer is, "depends on the clip, but pretty well." I tried four different kinds of clips to see what Video Gogh would do to each: one with people, two depicting outdoor settings, and an animated line drawing. I played around with the settings a bit to give you a flavor for the kind of results you might expect (See clips 1-4). In each clip, the original footage is on the right part of the frame, and what Video Gogh did is on the left. Without being any more long-winded than I have already been, here's a brief list of what I found:
- The first frame in any sequence is pretty much a throwaway, since the effect builds on the first frame over time in most cases.
- This is subjective, but aesthetically, clips that have locked-down subjects and a moving camera produce smoother motion effects than clips that have a stationary camera and moving objects.
- Video Gogh actually worked pretty well on CGI clips (see clip 4). In this particular instance, Video Gogh would have saved me at least three steps in getting a nice chalky outline going with the write-on effect that you can see in the clip. I wasn't real sure Video Gogh would be effective on CGI clips as opposed to live action, but I was pleasantly surprised here.
All that said, you can see from the clips that some pretty nice effects are possible. Ultimately, Video Gogh is one of those plug-ins that begs to be tinkered with, so the more time you spend with it, the better the results for your individual clips.
Limitations
There are a few big issues here that, frankly, detract significantly from all the nice stuff we went over in the "What It Does" section. First off, I'm not sure if this is a common occurrence, but every time I tried to run Video Gogh from within After Effects after I first installed it, it would freeze my computer. I trashed the plug-in, reinstalled, and all was well after that. Not a good start, but not really a huge deal either, so we'll call that Minor Issue Number One. Minor Issue Number Two is that Video Gogh ain't quick. Expect to add a significant amount of time on to your project when using it. If you're using it as part of a larger comp, I would strongly recommend saving yourself a headache by rendering out your Video Gogh clip first and then importing it back in as part of another comp. I would also like to see a greater selection of styles other than just Oily, Watercolor, and Chalk, but as that request falls in the "nice to have" category, we'll tag it Minor Issue Number Three.
Of course, there are some pretty major issues I had with Video Gogh as well. The fact that Video Gogh fails to live up to its own hype is Major Issue Number One. After reading that Video Gogh is based upon the technology used in "What Dreams May Come," one might expect to pay the $89.95, slap it on a piece of video, and viola! You magically have something that looks like the same effect that took dozens, if not hundreds, of artists months of laborious work to achieve (quite spectacularly, I might add) in that particular film. Not so. Video Gogh is nice and can add value to a project, but you're not going to get the equivalent of Robin Williams traipsing around a field of paint flowers just by knowing how to use it. Like any other plug in, it's not magic, so you have to expend time and effort tweaking the settings, sometimes painstakingly, to get the look you're after.
Major Issue Number Two is that Video Gogh has a problem a lot of other plug-ins have: it more or less screams, "I used a plug-in!" Plug-ins are supposed to enhance your creative options during the production process, not replace them, and as such, I would hesitate to use Video Gogh on its own in a project. It would have been a great time saver as part of the process I went through to produce the write-on effect mentioned earlier, but it would have been a convenience step and not a replacement for everything done to achieve the final result. Video Gogh is, at the end of the day, a one-trick pony, and I would usually expect to see a product like Video Gogh bundled in with a suite of other similar plug-ins, not roughly equivalent in price to its everyday-use cousins Motion Blur and FieldsKit.
The last Major Issue, Number Three, is the Force Rerender setting I promised to get to earlier. With one setting, Video Gogh manages to introduce a couple of problems, stemming from the fact that the paint effect is generated randomly. The first problem is that the setting isn't really a setting - it's a manual method of clearing the image cache so Video Gogh can, in effect, start calculating fresh. And that's just the After Effects version. If you're in Final Cut or some other NLE, you have to use whatever method of clearing the image cache resident in the host program. If you don't do this, you'll end up with final clips where the paint effect can jump around randomly. As a result, you actually have to remember to set your clip back to the frame you want Video Gogh to start doing its thing, click Force Rerender (or clear the cache), and then render. Huge pain, and it's something that can very easily fall through the cracks when it comes time to render. The second related problem is that Video Gogh can't be used in a multiple machine render, since each computer would generate its own random number to start the painting process, resulting in a disjointed clip. Add in the fact that it is literally impossible to reproduce the same results twice, and Major Issue Number Three can come close to being a dealbreaker.
Conclusion
Let's face it: if you have an immediate or future need to create the kind of painterly effects Video Gogh provides, it's definitely worth checking out. Despite the rough spots, Video Gogh is good at what it does. And as it doesn't pretend or claim to do anything else, we're letting Video Gogh squeak by with a Buy rating. Why not a Neutral rating? Well, if you can live with the issues, as well as the price, Video Gogh fills a nice little niche. Just be warned that you're probably not making an investment in something you're going to use every day, and you and Video Gogh can enjoy a nice, if infrequent, relationship.
Video Gogh at a Glance
Maker: RE:Vision Effects
Price: $89.95
Supported Applications: After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Commotion, Premiere 6, Combustion, Digital Fusion, and other After Effects plug-in compatible programs
Platforms: Macintosh, Windows
URL: http://www.revisionfx.com
Overall Impression: Decent paint effect plug-in that suffers from some problematic issues.
Key Benefits: Renders video clips like animated paintings. Small number of settings keeps it simple while still allowing for a good deal of experimentation.
Disappointments: Slow. Force Rerender feature is a potential rendering nightmare. Questionable everyday usefulness.
Recommendation: Buy
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