ImageFlow Fx by CoreMelt

What exactly does ImageFlow do? From the CoreMelt website:

ImageFlow Fx is designed to simplify and greatly speed up the common task in motion graphics of creating dynamic and fluid animations from still imagery. Going far beyond basic slideshows, ImageFlow Fx allows the creation of very complex animations by simply choosing a folder of still images, selecting a tempo and instantly viewing your result on the timeline. All effects are rendered natively on the GPU on both Intel and PPC Macintoshes. Twelve styles of animations are included for only $99US.

That description sums up ImageFlow, as it is quite simple to use. Load your ImageFlow generator of choice, navigate to an existing folder of images and then tweak the parameters until you get the desired animated still image sequence.

It’s important to note that the 12 different ImageFlow Fx effects are generators and not filters so they must be loaded in the Viewer first and edited into a timeline. The package is based on the Noise Industries FxFactory effects engine, so you must have FxFactory 1.05 or later installed. Thankfully it’s available as a free download from the Noise Industries website. If working in Final Cut Pro, you tweak the parameters using the Controls tab in the Viewer.

The parameters are quite straight forward. You’ll notice there are image wells above where you can drop custom masks for the images as well as custom frames. When working in Motion the parameters are adjusted via the Inspector.

Speaking of Motion, the effects available in ImageFlowFX are very much like Motion behaviors. The beauty of applying a behavior is that you don’t have to set and tweak keyframes. The trade off is you might not get exactly what you want, but you can very often get a nice move or animation.

Same with ImageFlow Fx. You can’t get as precise a move as you can with a dedicated pan and zoom tool but you can get some nice motion on a lot of images very, very quickly. And depending on your graphic card you can preview the moves in real or near-real time.

You are asked to set your FCP timeline to Unlimited RT, but I found the unrendered playback quite smooth in a dual core 2.7 GHz G5 with an ATI Radeon 9650. That playback is of course dependent on the size of the images you are loading – the bigger the images, the less realtime performance you get.

The CoreMelt site has some tips and tricks to help achieve the best performance. The generators also have the ability to save custom presets for future use. This is a handy addition when you’ve spent a lot of time tweaking settings.

What’s not to like about ImageFlow? It would be great if there was some kind of “fit to clip length” setting. While you can tweak the length that the images are displayed as the clip plays through, I usually saw a repeat of images. It would be great to, say, create a 30-second generator clip in the timeline and have all the images in the particular folder fit into those 30 seconds, with the effect playback displaying each image as slow or as fast as it needs to fit all the images into the 30-second clip.

It would also be nice to be able to flip between the different ImageFlow Fx without having to select a new generator and re-navigate to the image folder over and over. But since each different ImageFlow Fx is its own generator this might not ever be possible due to the nature of Apple FxPlug’s architecture.

There’s a lot to like about ImageFlow Fx. You can get a free trial as well as see an example of all the different styles available (plus a number of tutorials and tips) at the CoreMelt website. And at just $99, it might save you some time on just the right job. Since time is money, it might save you some money too.

This article was sourced from Scott Simmons’s blog, The Editblog (under permission).