A ‘realtime’ visual effects software program for the Mac is causing quite a stir among Canada’s CG animation types.

Commotion, from California-based Puffin Designs, was written by ex Industrial Light and Magic staffer Scott Squires and offers Mac users the ability to preview realtime, full-screen video or film on a desktop platform.

Commotion also ships with standard tools such as wire removal, rotoscoping, and matte creation – all for about $3,500 for version 1.1.

Playback spoke with a couple of users, Chris Bobotis, co-owner of Montreal-based Mettle Communications, and Jack Tunnicliffe, co-owner of Regina sister companies Film Crew Productions and Java Post. Both Bobotis and Tunnicliffe are big fans of Commotion.

‘The only system you can compare Commotion to is a quarter-million-dollar Flame,’ says Tunnicliffe, who has been using the software since September on jobs including radio station commercials that required famous rock stars being composited onto Regina cityscapes and one assignment which called for a change of seasons.

A client had some footage of Regina that was shot in the winter but needed to look like summer. ‘I was able to use Commotion and a tool call Super Clone to paint in trees with leaves and grass,’ recalls Tunnicliffe. ‘The combination of masking tools turned a winter scene into summer with the same registration.’

The super clone tool works much like Photoshop’s clone tool except it has the ability to clone pixels from another clip or clips entirely.

‘The super clone brush that they have is unbelievable,’ adds Bobotis. ‘It’s night and day compared to working in Photoshop format.’

Still, the biggest plus with Commotion for Bobotis is the realtime preview on a Mac platform that Mettle uses on its Media 100 systems, saving much valued job time.

‘In the case of Commotion, all you’re doing is loading to ram,’ says Bobotis. ‘It saves you five times the time with the four or five steps you’re saving if you wanted realtime playback on After Effects.’

Tunnicliffe says the Puffin Designs software has almost replaced Java Post’s use of masking work on After Effects.

‘I was doing extensive masking work with After Effects, but as soon as I heard what Commotion could do I wanted it in my arsenal,’ says Tunnicliffe. ‘The masks in Commotion are four times faster than in After Effects. One of the assets is that they incorporate a style of masks called natural that are more like SGI systems.’

Commotion’s ability to move masks around particularly appeals to Tunnicliffe.

‘If you’re talking about masks on the human body, say if somebody bends over and you’re doing a traveling matte with that person, with AE you have to move every little control point and you can’t grab and rotate them,’ says Tunnicliffe. ‘Whereas with Commotion you pick an axis point, say at the waist, then you grab all the control points above that and it interprets between the two positions and all you have to do is go in and do some cleanup and in-betweening and you’re done.’

Tunnicliffe also likes Commotion’s motion-blur feature which can be added to traveling mattes’ paths. ‘Now objects in motion don’t look like cardboard cutouts,’ he says.

Bobotis runs his ‘RAM-dependent’ Commotion software on a Genesis system offering about one gigabyte of RAM, which comes in handy when working at film resolution.

‘We used it on an independent film where we did the whole intro and we used Commotion essentially for playback and some compositing,’ says Bobotis, who uses the software primarily for Mettle’s corporate video work.

Java Post runs the program on a Mac Power Tower Pro 250 with 256 megabytes of RAM and an IMS Twin Turbo Graphics card.

‘Commotion just flies on that,’ says Tunnicliffe, who adds that the only time-consuming application on Commotion is when you have to load a big clip into the system. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to go and get a coffee to let it load, but once it’s in there you’re up and running, and with the graphics accelerator on my system I can run 40 odd frames a second – full frames, full screen.’

Another plus for Commotion is its ability to work on a small selected area of a long clip.

‘With any other program you have to launch the whole movie full resolution,’ says Tunnicliffe, who used the application to remove a microphone stand on a stage that was bouncing up and down within an eight-second clip. ‘All I did was load a small subclip into RAM by selecting the portion of the screen I wanted to work in. It was eight seconds long but it loaded really quickly because it only had to deal with those pixels in that area of the screen. I didn’t need the rest of the picture.’

With an updated version of Commotion that may include a motion tracker expected to be launched at NAB, both Bobotis and Tunnicliffe have wish lists for some improvements in the software.

Bobotis says he would like to see Commotion come out with an NT version and be able to integrate with other programs such as Forge’s upcoming FreeForm, a 3D plug-in for After Effects.

The Mettle principal would also like to see more filter applications on Commotion. ‘We’re very well known in Quebec for realistic renditions of things where it’s completely seamless,’ says Bobotis. ‘But the demand in the market is going much further towards stylization and the artistic interpretation of footage; the filters would help with that.’

Like Bobotis, Tunnicliffe would like Commotion to be able to integrate with other programs like After Effects, giving the ability to display compositions in realtime. He also says that because Commotion eats up so much RAM, it’s not as stable as is could be. ‘It crashes sometimes,’ says Tunnicliffe. ‘I would like to see the program automatically save your parameters and remember what you did in case it crashes.’

Tunnicliffe admits that the ramp-up time on Commotion was somewhat significant, but adds, ‘The realtime paint is awesome. With the ability to build your own brushes it’s basically Photoshop in a live environment, so if you come from a Phototshop background it’s familiar.’