Pinnacle Alladin
John, You CAN use the 3D shapes to make transitions. What's more, you can use
them to make "cookie cutter" mattes for key effects.
Basically, the main effects screen of the Alladin is actually a set of buttons
that pertain to charcteristics of an effect you design =- like level of shadow,
highlights, speed, direction, axis and point of rotation…. Very powerful,
very impressive.
The drawbacks come down to the CG. It is a special version of Inscriber. It
can't do roll or crawls. Fonts have to be in the inscriber format. (There is a
module to convert TT and PS to inscriber formats. No decorative font support,
though). Also, text placement and sizing is by numeric requesters rather than
mouse drag and stretch. And the requesters come up on top of the title layout
area so you have to render and look at the progam out to tell if you are
"there" yet.
Basically it is CCIR 601 instead of NTSC composite. So it looks much cripser
than the Toaster. However, the Toaster interface lends itself to making you
more productive. A sad example is that the poor girl demoing the Pinnacle was
wearing wrist brace due to all the "mousing around". Not much in terms of key
equivs, and in the CG the mouse is used to open requesters, pull menus down etc
and keyboard input is used to size/place text and graphic elements (go
figure!).
Also, I'm told (even buy Pinnacle dealers and reps) the manual sucks. It is
basically useless to the point that one person I found tossed it out! He said
it took less time to find out by experimenting then trying to follow the manual
on any given topic.
But, once you learn it, it does make some pretty video. The ideal would be to
have one Alladin and one Toaster.
wmc – via Autopilot!