The Junior Compositor

A quick post and link to an absolutely stellar free application; DJV Imaging.  A quick summary would be “a powerful image and sequence viewer that handles a tonne of formats and IT IS FREE!”  Yay!

This thing makes fcheck go sit in the corner and have a long hard look at itself.  I have used this in production before and have just downloaded it again after a recent update.  If you are someone who needs to look at sequences of images, and if you are in visual fx or animation I can guarantee you do, download it and give it a shot.  Guaranteed you will start to use it more and more!

Just passing on a link to a a great looking piece of software currently in development by Arvid Björn in Sweden.  From Björn’s website at http://vfxdesktop.wordpress.com :

 

“I call it the vfxDesktop, its main purpose is help anyone working with images and especially image sequences to get a good overview, to be able to play and scrub their clips, and also to make basic editing to watch a sequence of clips together. The other big purpose is to serve as a springboard to help importing these clips into other applications, such as Shake, Nuke, Boujou, After Effects among others. So overview, preview editing and importing.”

 

I have to say that if this (a) continues in development and becomes a fully fledged piece of software and (b) gets past the Autodesk lawyers then this will be a seriously helpful addition to your VFX arsenal.  Right now to do this kind of stuff you have to fire up fcheck which is, how do you say, “adequate” or your compositing app which is more than a little overkill when you want to quickly check multiple clips and frames and do quick edits and then import them.

 

I like the fact that the app is focusing on the GUI in terms of usability.  After using a Flame for a tiny bit (a really tiny bit) I really like the way it handles viewing and organising clips that you are going to work with.