Tinderbox 4

After a lengthy hiatus (Tinderbox 3 was released back in June 2002), The Foundry is back with a new suite of 20 After Effects filters. And, like its three forerunners, it’s a real grab-bag of tools, transitions, generators and effects.

There have been some noticeable improvements: for natural phenomena, you have Rain, Snow, Water and Fire, and for once, the Fire filter actually looks like real fire. It can be used to generate candle flames, welding torches, solar flares and such like. The downside is that the flames are a little soft-edged and aren’t affected by movement of the source. For this you’d need a full-on volumetric solution, such as the now-defunct eFX Pyro.

While Snow creates magical swirling snowfall that ‘sticks’ to masks, Rain is much simpler and lacks the splashes and wind of other systems. However, the result is heightened with diffusion, where bright regions create a realistic flare through the rainfall.

Using the Water effect, you are able to create a rippled surface on a layer either with automatic drips, or using a source layer to generate waves. These can either distort the surface directly or can be used as a greyscale displacement map for anything from flowing fluids to the demonic looking heat haze, which is ideal for disastrous scenes.

Tinderbox 4 features a number of similar filters – Cartoon, Line Drawing, Median, Quantise – that alter your image in certain ways, creating the look of an animation cel, pencil sketch, watercolour or popart, and can be mixed and matched to create some nicely stylised (or increasingly abstract) imagery.

For real-world photographic effects, SoftGlow creates a really lovely bloom effect, while LightWrap adds light bleed around objects on a bright background layer, which is useful for softening matte shots. Convolve can also be used to create an authentic lens blur, but the user-definable kernel (the camera diaphragm shape) means that you can apply it to any imagery containing bright areas, such as particles, with funky results.

Film tools include BleachBypass, which replicates the silver retention process used on Alien 4 and Saving Private Ryan, and Colourist, for automatic colour correction.

The likes of MuzzleFlash, Security, Kaleid and Bars all work as you’d expect, generating muzzle flashes, CCTV noise, kaleidoscopic patterns, SMPTE colour bars and ramps for monitor calibration.

Finally, Infinite Zoom performs a zoom into an image, which breaks up into tiny copies of itself. You can then zoom in on the central copy until it fills the screen, and so on.

Our only issue with this release is that this collection uses similar techniques – edge detection, quantising, convolution, etc – from previous versions, so there’s a bit of overlap with existing filters. Overall, though, this signals another quality release from The Foundry.