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eZedia Plug-Ins
Plug-ins Reviews
eZedia's eZeMatte makes iMovie even more compelling
By John Manzione
MacNET2.com Review
May 29, 2002
It seems as though the work I do with my Mac has morphed several times over the years. These days I am as apt to be working with iMovie as much as Photoshop. Digital Video is the coolest thing to come to the Mac, and iMovie is gaining legions of users everyday.
Apple's iMovie, a free application that comes with every Mac now (because every Mac can now work as a Digital Video Editor), is in the top 5 of my favorite applications. Apple has given all of us the ability to become movie directors or storytellers with ease and simplicity. With a decent Firewire camcorder (about $500) and your Mac, equipped with iMovie (OS 9 or OS X), you can create near-broadcast quality video. My daughter made her first iMovie without reading a single manual or quick-start guide, that's how easy and cool this application truly is.
Even so, this is not a review of iMovie; it is a review of a very important plug-in for iMovie. Since Apple has given 3rd party developers access to creating plug-ins to make iMovie even better some companies have stepped up to the plate and done a marvelous job. The company, eZedia, recently sent us their entry into the iMovie plug-in market and I found it amazingly easy to use and it fills a gap missing in iMovie that gives the user more possibilities when creating their movie. 'Possibilities' is what working in digital video is all about. Taking raw video footage and shaping it into a cohesive and entertaining story is a beautiful thing.
The plug-in eZedia sent us is called eZeMatte, it's a plug-in designed to import 'stills' into your movie using iMovie for OS X. Not only is this an important new enhancement to iMovie, it's a plug-in you'll love if you work with iMovie at all. The ability to import 'stills' opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities.
A few examples
Say you wanted to add a backdrop to your 'titles', how would you do it before eZeMatte? You could not do it. Say you went to Florida for vacation and when you were working on some titles you thought it would be cool to use a picture of the beach with some Palm trees as a backdrop to the words scrolling from top to bottom... with eZeMatte is easy to do.
In a movie I was recently working on to review eZeMatte, I was putting together a story of my oldest daughters graduation from high school. Each time one of her friends entered the story I would throw in their graduation portrait as a way of putting some emphasis on the 'character', pulling the attention to that person by using a still is an effective way of telling the audience that this person is important to the overall story. I also effectively used a picture of her school as a backdrop to the titles and her graduation invitation, her cap n gown, and other things to further illustrate for the audience just how important these elements were. All these 'stills' added a lot to the impact of the movie and without eZeMatte, it would have been nearly impossible to do.
Installation
Installation is simple. Unless you have never launched iMovie before and fiddled with the transitions, titles, etc. it won't take but a couple of minutes to figure out how to use it. It's as easy as bringing up an image and applying an effect. You can choose from a collection of graphical templates supplied by eZedia or create your own. If you are handy with Photoshop, you'll sooner or later prefer making your own templates. I like saving the files as PNG's and loading them into iMovie's shelf. When I need it, I simply drag it to the timeline.
If you want to add images but need them to be transparent or semi-transparent, no problem, if you can create it in Photoshop you can import it and use it. Its ease of use and support for multiple formats makes this plug-in a great tool and something you need to seriously consider adding to your iMovie tool chest.
Apple's iMovie is a simple application and simple to use, and so is eZeMatte. That's both good news and bad. Although eZeMatte works perfectly and does exactly what it's supposed to do, I would love the next version to have a little more advanced features, like the ability to fade a still, but there are so many things I can do with version 1 that I just can't fault it. It's wonderful.
So here's the lowdown; for $29, you can add a valuable and very flexible plug-in to your iMovie application. It works beautifully, it's easy to install and easy to use. With a little imagination, you'll find this plug-in indispensable.
One last reminder, eZeMatte works with OS X's version of iMovie, not OS 9. Although people are moving to OS X in huge numbers, I found iMovie for X doesn't work as well as OS 9's iMovie, and it would have been great if eZedia made an OS 9 version of the plug-in.
So, what are you waiting for? Visit eZedia's site and download the plug-in. Their website is great and you'll find a ton of information about eZeMatte and their other products. Let them know that you read about it on MacNETv2 and then drop us an email and tell us how you like it. In addition, if you would like to send us an example of how you used eZeMatte we would love to see it.
http://www.ezedia.com/
John Manzione
Amateur Moviemaker
Editor's note* This review was first published in late April and was inadvertently dropped when we switched to the new, dynamic page format. We are reprinting the review because it wasn't made available for the length of time we like to give good products.
Posted by: Staff on May 29, 02 | 7:26 am |
Courtesy of MacNet2.com
© 2002 MacNet2.com
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