Lacq’ing in Depth

So, the big update on which we’ve been working for quite a while has been released. It’s called Conduit Suite, and it significantly expands Conduit’s reach: in addition to the existing plugin which works in Final Cut Pro and Motion, the Suite includes plugins for After Effects and Photoshop, as well as a brand new standalone application, Conduit Live. (To see Conduit Live in action, check out this video tutorial by dvGarage.)

The After Effects and Photoshop plugins are also available for Windows. These are not crippled ports: they offer the same Conduit Editor user interface. Conduit’s rendering backbone, the Conduit Pixel Engine, has been ported to Windows’s native graphics interface Direct3D, so you’re getting the best GPU rendering performance available on the platform just as with Conduit on the Mac.

The Conduit Suite gives you access to Conduit in 7 different applications: FCP, Motion, AE/Mac, PS/Mac, AE/Win, PS/Win, Conduit Live. Of course the same effect setups (.conduit files) work in all these applications, so it doesn’t matter where you build an effect, you can deploy it practically anywhere.

Interested yet? Our partner dvGarage is running a pretty hot sale: the entire Suite is only 149 USD until February 20, 2008. (For only $50 more, you can also get dvMatte Pro 3 for true keying nirvana!)

- -

Anyway, enough with marketing and on to the real content: to celebrate the occasion, I’d like to show something simple with Conduit inside Photoshop. Let’s start with this snapshot I took some years ago:

We’d like to place the lion in another background, so in practice we’ll just key out the sky:

I’m using the 3D Keyer because it’s easy and quick for keying out an arbitrary color. Levels is used to tweak the matte’s black/white points, and Exposure is used to tweak the layer’s color — nothing special going on there.

So what happens at the end of the conduit? Set Matte is used to apply the key matte to the image, and then it’s fed to the output. This means we’re giving back to Photoshop an image with an alpha channel. The actual compositing of the keyed lion over the background happens in Photoshop. Here’s what it looks like in Photoshop’s layers panel:

IMO this technique makes a lot of sense because it combines the strengths of Conduit and Photoshop.

Another thing: notice the label “Smart Filters” in the screenshot above? In Photoshop CS3, Conduit works as a non-destructive smart filter: you can go back and edit the effect in the Conduit Editor simply by double-clicking on the Conduit label in the layer’s properties. It’s like Adjustment Layers in Photoshops of the past… Except that Conduit has a hundredfold more capabilities than Photoshop’s simple built-in adjustments. (Thank you Adobe, I love smart filters!)

So here’s what the composite looks like, with the roughly keyed lion over a very plain gradient background:

Hmm. I think the lion and those white clouds might look nice with some glow, and maybe I could experiment with the color a bit. Well, those smart filters definitely come in useful; I’ll just open the Conduit Editor and add some nodes…

(Figuring out what’s happening here is left as an exercise to the reader.) Here’s the final image with a text layer added:

To recap, this Photoshop composite contains three layers: the background gradient, the text, and the lion. The only filter used is Conduit, which was applied to the lion layer. The node tree shown above does all the hard work: keying (sky removal), glow, color adjustments.

Are you seeing the benefits yet? We could have accomplished something similar with a combination of adjustments, filters and selection tools in Photoshop… But by building it in Conduit, everything happens within a single interface.

This way, the effect is also eminently reusable. Just save it as a .conduit file and it can be applied to another layer in another Photoshop document… Or a layer in an After Effects composition… Or a video clip in Final Cut Pro… Or even a live HD video stream in Conduit Live.