RE:Vision Effects Releases Twixtor 5 for Avid : RE:Vision Effects

Debra Kaufman
Santa Monica California USA

©2011 CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved.

Software developer RE:Vision Effects just released Twixtor 5 plug-in for Avid Media Compser, Symphony and NewsCutter, including 64-bit support for Media Composer 6, Symphony 6 and NewsCutter 10. That will make Twixtor's slow motion shots - achieved quickly and at a high image quality - available to Avid editors.

View a comparison of Twixtor and Avid's Fluid Motion

Software developer RE:Vision Effects just released Twixtor 5 plug-in for Avid Media Compser, Symphony and NewsCutter, including 64-bit support for Media Composer 6, Symphony 6 and NewsCutter 10. That will make Twixtor's slow motion shots - achieved quickly and at a high image quality - available to Avid editors. According to RE:Vision's statistics, Twixtor 5 runs 30 to 40 percent faster than Twixtor 4.

Though releasing the Twixtor plug-in for the 64-bit Avid platforms is big news, it isn't entirely new news. "We've had Twixtor for Avid for the last eight or nine years," says RE:Vision President Litwinowicz. "But we hadn't been pushing it. This is our debut of getting Twixtor for Avid noticed more."

Litwinowicz points out that the market for Avid editing products looks bright. "We felt there might be new users soon," he says. "Who knows what will happen with the fall-out from FCPX? We haven't ignored Avid users up until now, but we're making a concerted effort to let them know that we are here."

Please click on image above for larger side-by-side view

In its recent debut of new 64-bit based Media Composer, Symphony and NewsCutter, Avid also made a point of stating its openness to developers. [Read our coverage in Avid Unveils Media Composer 6] "We had to move to the AVX2 plug-in architecture and Avid was very helpful with that," says Litwinowicz. "I have to say that Avid is making good on the promise of helping developers. Both business-wise and technical-wise, they've been very helpful in getting us up and running in Media Composer."

In the best possible scenario, using Twixtor enables a production to avoid renting an expensive high-speed camera. "Of course, if you can shoot with a high-speed camera, that's what you want to do," he says. "But if you can't, you have to try to slow something down using software." There are other choices in slo-mo software - Avid even offers its own internal Fluid Motion.

But Litwinowicz believes Twixtor offers some important distinguishing features. "Depending on the clip, Twixtor is 20 to 50 percent faster than other software out there," he says. "And I believe we can get better results." What Twixtor allows the user to do is tweak parameters. "We can provide a matte so you can tell the program what's foreground and background, which improves tracking a lot," he explains, adding that that particular feature hasn't yet been added to Twixtor for Avid. "Even without that feature, we have the ability to turn down how much something is tracked, so it doesn't pull the background as much. If you have low light or low contrast footage, we have a feature to get a better track out of it. And we also allow the user to animate by speed percentage and by frame number."

A demo version of Twixtor 5 is available here. Twixtor v5 AVX2 plug-in for Media Composer, Symphony and NewsCutter is available now for $329.95. An upgrade to Twixtor from a previous Twixtor for Avid systems version is $82.49. Volume discounts are available.

RE:Vision Effects focuses on software to create, modify, control and enhance digital video. The founders - Peter Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin - won a 2006 Academy Award® for Technical Achievement for the designer and development of their software products.

Pete Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin at the Academy Awards

Creative COW leaders Pete Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin won an Academy Award® for the design and development of the RE: Vision Effects family of optical flow-based image manipulation plug-ins. For RE:Vision's tenth anniversary, we asked Pierre to talk to us about what optical flow is - and isn't - and how it works in their products. Read all about it, in an article from Creative COW Magazine's Visual Effects Issue.

With Twixtor v5, RE:Vision has taken a logical step after Avid's unveiling of its major 64-bit Version 6 release of Media Composer and Symphony and Version 10 release of NewsCutter. It's great news that Avid is making good on its recent assertions of being open and helping developers. Although a product like Twixtor 5 is, in principle, competition to Avid's own internal tools, it's good for RE:Vision, Avid and all their customers to have choices.