If you are looking for a plug-in to give you a unique and different look for striking visual effects, then Storek Studio’s nVeil filter fits the bill. nVeil is an FxPlug filter for Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express and Motion and provides yet another tool that leverages the power of OpenGL and the FxPlug architecture.
The creative description of what it does is a bit harder to explain than what is happening technically. That’s because the results you can achieve are more like video artwork, than simply stylizing video clips with various effects filters. In short, nVeil uses scalable vector graphics (SVG file) to slice the image into polygons, which are then rendered using OpenGL and powered by the computer’s GPU. These SVG files are considered “veils” (as in a curtain) that become “cells” onto which portions of the image are “projected”. The company has tested nVeil on a range of graphics cards and Macs. I’m on a 15” MacBook Pro with the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT card. It was fine up to 720p projects, but I did receive a render warning when I tried applying nVeil on a 1080i timeline. Nevertheless, unrendered real-time effects played smoothly on this unit.
nVeil ships with a library of about 60 SVG files. These can also be created or modified using Adobe Illustrator, so feel free to create your own. The user guide and tutorials on the nVeil website provide concise descriptions about how to generate new vector files. SVG images can include line art as well as text.
In FCP, simply drop the filter onto a clip and access an SVG file from the filter tab. The stock SVG files will be installed in Applications / nVeil / SVG Veil Library. You won’t see any affect at first, so adjust Source Scale as a starting point. Sliding the Source Scale slider to one extreme blurs the image, so that your vector graphic is filled with fuzzy colors, much like a kaleidoscope or a stained glass window. Slide it in the opposite direction and the image becomes a serious of crisp multiple images, like an insect-eye effect.
From there it’s a matter of adjusting the Source and Veil Transform sliders to get the look you want. Since the nVeil filter is being applied to moving video, the natural changes of objects and color in the video create a vibrant effect.
You can set keyframes for each slider value, so nVeil filters can change over the length of the clip and may be used for interesting transition effects. Furthermore, as with any other FCP or Motion filter, you can stack filters for other effects. For example, place a blur, glow or vignette filter upstream of the nVeil filter and the adjustments are visible inside the segments of the veil graphic.
The are a few key settings that control how the veil and source clip are composited. The Add SVG Bounds toggle (Veil Generation) determines whether the outer shape is a rectangle or the drawn edges of the graphic. With Add SVG Bounds unchecked, a dragon graphic holds the shape of the dragon. With it checked, the dragon graphic appears inside the edges of the rectangular file boundary.
At the bottom of the filter pane is the Background Mode: Pass Through, Projected or Matte. Pass Through leaves the original clip untouched in the background with the veil effect on top. Projected applies Source Transforms, but no veil parsing, to the source clip to create the background. Matte leaves a black background. As yet, there are no provisions to change the matte color or for multi-layer effects. You can’t place a clip with a veil effect on V2 and see a clip on V1 as the background.
Storek’s nVeil is yet another example of how innovative designers have taken the groundwork created by Apple’s FxPlug to give you new tools that can enrich your productions. Check out the site for motion examples of what can be done with nVeil.
© 2009 Oliver Peters
