You've been talking and we've been listening.  To all of you who thirst to wreak more havoc, the scores of you who wish to take all that is beautiful and render it visual debris, and for those of you who have been writing us about all the electronic carnage you daydream about if only you had a way to do it faster, with more options...

...we have the number of an excellent therapist. (...and we've reconsidered our company policy on 'personal sharing')

...AND we've created Damage v2.  All the ancient evil of analog signal defects in Skew and Interference, the modern, coldly unsympathetic digital malfunction of Artifact and Blockade...and now, we've harnessed the incompetence at the source.  Two new effects in the Damage toolbox, Destabilize and Overexpose, allow you to go back in time...and not only corrupt your footage, but also ruin the image of the camera operator...

Damage v2 is simply the hugely successful collection of Digieffects plugins that the industry has come to know with more effects, greatly improved speed, a streamlined interface, and now is CS5 compatible with 64 bit native operation and 16 bit-per-channel processing (8 bpc for Artifact)...but it's still only $99.00 USD, and only a $49.00 upgrade for current Damage customers.

Damage Includes:

Blockade: Who hasn't had one of those days when you wish you had a cheap cel phone that records video and all you have is a professional HD camera with crystal clear broadcast glass?  We've all been there.  Digieffects comes to the rescue once again with Blockade, which mimics the low color fidelity rectangular "quadrants' that come from a really crummy video camera feeding a steamroller of a video codec.  The color inaccuracy, block size, speed, and temporal frame stuttering are all completely customizable, so unlike your television remote, you have precise control over how much defectiveness you desire.

Artifact: The digital VTR has clogged heads...the network feed of your favorite TV show is being beamed through some nasty weather...or perhaps the mother ship is trying to transmit through a radiation storm in the gamma quadrant (and don't even pretend you don't know what we're talking about)...those are just some of the possible scenarios where Artifact will be your favorite solution.  With the ability to individually set properties like displaced pixel blocks, color errors, frame dropping, and video compression artifacts, you can choose what can, and can't be seen due to system malfunction.

Interference: Any of us who have been in video production for a period of time like viewing images on our Cathode Ray Tube monitors (CRTs).  There's nothing like a great big professional CRT when you want to see a great image...or throw your back out while carrying something heavy and awkward.  The good news for your eyes AND your back is that Interference brings you that CRT feeling without requiring assistance to put on your socks the next morning...  Take any footage you have and create effects like night vision, or imply the viewing surface of a green monochrome monitor, a security camera transmission, or  a consumer video format playing back like VHS or 8mm.  You have control over parameters like comb filtering, field line size, noise, tint, and luminance for alternating lines, which simulate two scanned, interlaced fields.  It will bring a smile to anyone who has forgotten what it's like for the talent to wear a herring bone jacket that appears to be crawling over their shoulders...

Skew: Take a low resolution analog signal, modulate it and send it out over the airwaves, grab it with a metal stick mounted on your roof, pass it through a cheap piece of coaxial cable with a teeny wire in the middle, wrapped in foil, demodulate it and...what the hell were we thinking?  Somehow we endured the image quality that standard definition, over the air broadcasts could sink to...  Even when it seemed we were looking through a screen door dipped in cooking oil, we were drawn in by the content (or at least, the lack of alternatives).  Digieffects preserves our heritage of analog, modulated badness with Skew.  You've got incredible control over analog noise (or 'snow'), image shearing, vertical rolling, loss of horizontal hold, and ghosting normally associated with weak or distant broadcast signals, and early consumer video tape playback issues like noise bars caused by malfunctioning tracking, etc.  Nostalgia for viewers, horrible flashbacks for broadcast engineers...there is something here for everyone to enjoy.
 

The two newest effects in the Damage v2 collection expand the possibilities for image corruption beyond transmission and playback to acquisition.  Sometimes you want a great image that was transferred or processed defectively, sometimes it should have been just screwed up from the start.

Overexpose:  Exposure is one of the keys to creating a solid image.  Messed up exposure is one of the keys to cutting down on pesky repeat business for a videographer.  If all your footage is annoyingly perfect, it can make your stuff seem the same as all the other skilled professionals out there.  We have the answer.  Unlike simple luma or levels adjustments which act on specific pixel values and just end up looking like a poorly adjusted digital process, Overexpose processes the image in way that mimics an optical response.  Overdriven whites aren't simply clipped, they bloom when a camera is acquiring an image that is “hot.”  Neighboring areas of the image are affected even though those areas might not have overdriven values, luma values are affected proportionate to their relative brightness...all factors that require specialized processing to create a convincing effect.  Add in the ability to vary a wide variety of parameters over time, and your ability to portray iris indecision on the part of your videographer is absolute.

Destabilize:  As more and more footage for our projects is acquired in close proximity to ghosts, collapsing overpasses, rapidly opening landscape-sucking crevasses and always-just-out-of-view prehistoric monsters, tripod-steady footage can suck the drama right out of the scene.  In these cases, it can be necessary to take matters into your own post production-skilled hands.  With the ability to create convincing camera shake with individual controls over each color channel, multiple axes of motion blur, and nodal rotation control, you can add a bit of uneasy drama, or jittery chaos to nearly any scene.  Using the ability to introduce individual random variation into each parameter set means the motion that results is convincingly organic, and a product of fine control.  (Monsters, molten lava, defective architectural structures, large carnivorous animals, malicious paranormal entities, and any other implied natural disasters not included.)

Blockade
Blockade's main role is simulating low fidelity camera feeds from maybe a cel phone...or PDA. The effect places random blocks of slightly tinted color around your image, which creates the impression that these areas are not being faithfully color sampled, which is a common occurrence in many of the low resolution video cameras in phones as the video has to be highly compressed to be transmitted over the cellular phone...and then stored in as small a file as is practical.

Artifact
'Artifact' is the term used when some sort of defect can be seen in a video stream. Since almost all modern video is digital (and all broadcast services will be digital very soon if your local service is not already), most of the artifacts a viewer sees on a daily basis are based on digital errors. Typically these errors are caused by data lost along the signal path due to weather interrupting a digital satellite feed somewhere, or perhaps the content has some encoding errors or file corruption that are causing the decoding process to choke. In any event, these errors are becoming familiar to anyone who watches video in nearly any circumstance, whether it is on free broadcast, cable, satellite, or even video content delivered through the internet.

Artifact is an effect designed to simulate these errors, and it does so very convincingly. (Warn your clients before they watch your finished product or they may think you’re trying to sell them corrupt files!) MPEG errors such as hanging frames and blacked out frames (data packet loss) and DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform, which means…uh….well, let's just say it's the blocks…) errors such as misplaced content blocks and missing color information all contribute to an effect that will have many uses, not the least of which might be just driving your favorite digital video engineer nuts…

Interference
Interference is a unique effect inside Digieffects Damage because of its ability to give the impression that your video clip is interlaced and being displayed on a Cathode Ray Tube monitor. Most television signals used in broadcasting have traditionally been interlaced. This system of scanning two ‘fields’ of horizontal lines (each field made up of every other line in the image, usually referred to as "Upper/Lower", "Odd/Even", or even "A/B") to make each 'frame' of video is both a form of analog video compression, and the reason why interlaced video motion looks smoother than progressive video or film motion. It’s also the reason why a ‘freeze’ frame of high motion interlaced video shows 'sawtoothed' edges as motion occurring between the instant of scanning the first field and the second field creates two different half-pictures being blended into a single 'frame'.

This effect will be particularly useful for effects you want to specifically portray inexpensive television receivers or stereotypical industrial video camera signals. Each field's attributes can be handled individually, simulating an image that's created electronically from scan lines.

Skew
This effect takes its name from the control on many professional video tape recorders which would affect the tensioning of the ribbon of tape that wraps around the playback heads. Altering the skew control during playback of video would cause various undesirable artifacts including image shearing, visual noise (or what a viewer might call "static"), vertical and horizontal hold issues, and more…

We’ve taken all this a bit beyond simple tape playback malfunction and we’ve added enough properties to allow you to use Skew to create effects reminiscent of a range of analog badness from weak analog antenna signals to consumer VCR tracking glitches.

There are a variety of property values to adjust to create your own variations to create a nearly infinite range of variations.

Check out more great videos and tutorials like this on the Digieffects Damage channel.

Reviews