The world is awash in data. It often falls on video editors and producers to find ways to communicate that data in documentaries, news programs, commercials, and corporate work.
Data Storyteller is a data visualization plugin set designed to easily turn data into animations. It lets you explore small or large data sets, making it easier to enhance the stories you’re telling with data. By working directly in widely used video editing apps, it’s easier than ever to integrate it into your production. There’s no need to manually animate elements or try and wrangle a chart from Excel or other source not designed for video production.
In particular, we wanted Data Storyteller to make it easier to animate large data sets or data sets across multiple files (e.g. years, countries, etc). Of course, it can do basic chart animations, but some large data sets can be incredibly interesting and beautiful when the visualization is animated.
Data Storyteller Charts and Data Storyteller Maps integrate with After Effects, Premiere Pro, Resolve, and Final Cut Pro. The data visualizations are all vector based graphics, so can be rendered at any size, including HD, 4K, 8K, 12K or higher.
You can upload Excel or CSV files, select a chart type, and animate one – or multiple – data sets with minimum effort. Data Storyteller simplifies data visualization, from the creation of basic animated charts to much more complex visualizations that use large data sets and multiple files. There’s no need to be a data scientist to create interesting and clear animations/visualizations for video productions!
Select from five charts: Bar, Line, Scatter/Bubble, US Map, and World Map. Setting up your chart works much like creating graphics in Excel or Apple Numbers, with the advantage of all features being tightly integrated with the video editing platform. After uploading a file, users can choose what data to include in the animation, how color or size of the data elements change, how the elements animate on/off, transition effects, position on screen and more.
Data Storyteller was designed with video editors in mind, no matter what you’re working on - documentary filmmaking, marketing, corporate or social media. Good data visualization can add a powerful element to your productions, no matter what kind of stories you’re telling. Charts and Maps that change over time, reflecting the underlying data, can almost tell a complete story by themselves. And this can all be created without leaving the NLE you’re working in.
Data Storyteller Charts and Data Storyteller Maps are both part of the Data Storyteller package. It supports the most widely used professional editing platforms – Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects, and Da Vinci Resolve. This integration makes it easy to apply changes and show the animations in your production, without the need to export/import files back and forth.
Light Wrap Fantastic on ProVideoCoalition.com
If you're a member of the press and would like a review copy, please contact
Kevin McAuliffe gives Light Wrap Fantastic a spin and talks a bit about how to use it effectively. (and says some nice things about us as a company, which we appreciate!) Here's the link to the article on Pro Video Coalition:
http://The Light Wrap Fantastic is a brand new plugin! so, we're looking for gallery footage! Do you have some awesome composited footage that LWF really helped you out on? We'd love to see it and give you a hat tip! Email sales@digitalanarchy.com with a link to your video clip.
In the meantime, we'll show you a couple of the videos we put together. Of course, you've probably seen those elsewhere on the site, but we gotta put SOMETHING here. (hint: help us out and send us something!)
This shot consists of three layers: The woman on a green screen, a train window with a hole cut in it, and the background layer which is footage shot out of a moving train. All put together to create a shot of a woman reading on a train. So exciting! Well, it is if you're a compositing geek! We have light wrap applied to both the window and the woman. This causes both foreground elements to get lighting adjustments based on what's in the background footage.
In this shot, we have a woman merrily providing tech support in a brightly lit office. The office is a still image. We want the woman to look like she's part of the environment, so a little light wrap fantastic is going to go a long way. We've used a mask (nifty feature of LWF) to make the light wrap more pronounced on her left side, which is the side closest to where the light source is.
The Light Wrap Fantastic plugin is easy to use. You almost don't need tutorials to use this video effects software! It's always good to see how you can push software to perform even better than we imagined, so read on.
You can download the Light Wrap Fantastic Manual PDF manual here. It'll give you an overview of the parameters, how to register, and some tips on trouble shooting!
Render: This allows you to select either Composite mode or Wrap. Composite will render the light wrap on your image, Wrap renders just the light wrap itself.
Background Layer: This tells LWF what layer you wish to use to sample the light wrap from. If this is set to None, a solid color will be used for the light wrap. (the color chip)
Size: How large the light wrap is in pixels.
Blend Mode: Sets how the light wrap will be composited on to your origial layer. ADD will be most pronounced, while Soft Light and Overlay will be more subtle. The other modes are for darkening.
Brightness: Increases/decreases the brightness of the light wrap.
Masks: This gives you a built-in way of masking off the light wrap. Very useful if you want the wrap to only affect a certain part of the image.
This tutorial talks about how to use Light Wrap Fantastic in After Effects to make better composites for blue or green screen footage. It goes over the parameters and explains how to use them. LEVEL: BASIC
This tutorial talks about how to use Light Wrap Fantastic in Final Cut Pro to give you an overview of this fantastic tool for compositing masked or keyed footage. It goes over the controls and explains how they work. LEVEL: BASIC, Duration: 17 min.
This tutorial goes over Light Wrap Fantastic within Adobe Premiere Pro to show how you can create much better composites using light wrap. It explains the parameters and basic functionality. LEVEL: BASIC
Our friend and master trainer, Rich Harrington, takes you from the basics through to advanced compositing techniques using Light Wrap Fantastic. He shows a wide range of blue and green screen shots within different situations. LEVEL: BASIC to ADVANCED
The two minute reel is a quick intro to the plugin. It's mixture of different types of blue and green screen footage and breaks down how it's used. Also keep in mind that The Light Wrap Fantastic can be used on footage that has been rotoscoped. Any keyed or masked footage will work great with Light Wrap Fantastic.
This will quickly show you how powerful light wrap is for making incredible composites.
| Product | Price |
|---|---|
| The Light Wrap Fantastic 1.0 | $79 USD |
These charts explain which Operating Systems are supported by LWF, as well as the host applications that are supported.
While we try to keep these charts up to date, with so many new versions of OSes and applications coming out sometimes we forget to add something. All of our products are kept up to date and run in the latest versions of the OS or host application.
NOTE: OpenFX and Avid are still in beta and aren't released.
'CC' includes all versions of Creative Cloud. All our software is compatible with the latest version.
This chart gives the release date and version number of each release of The Light Wrap Fantastic.
The Light Wrap Fantastic 1.0
Go to our updates page to find easy steps on how to update your plugin.
Have questions about this fantastic tool for better composites of masked and keyed footage? Contact Digital Anarchy any time with our simple Request Form.
Don't see the answer you need? Contact us with this Request Form.
PLEASE report any issues you run into to sales@digitalanarchy.com
Plugins don't recognize masks that are applied to the same layer as the plugin. The plugin does not see the alpha channel created, which is what Light Wrap Fantastic uses to create the wrap.
The solution is to take the masked layer and 'pre-comp' it. You create a sequence that has the masked layer inside of it and apply the plugin to the sequence. The way Light Wrap Fantastic will see the alpha channel and create the effect appropriately.
The initial release will be for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro. Avid, Davinci Resolve, Sony Vegas, and probably NUKE will be coming shortly afterwards.
The crosshatch lines that appear are the demo watermark. The plugin is fully functional and you should easily be able to see how effective the Light Wrap Fantastic is. However, you'll need to purchase it to permanently remove the watermark.
The plugin is GPU accelerated and really shouldn't add much rendering time to your project. Usually it should be real time or near real time. On 4K footage it may play back at 10-15fps.
Of course, this depends on the speed of the computer. On older machines or less powerful graphics cards you may see some minor rendering times.
Overall is should be very fast. If it isn't, please contact us.
Try