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The Utility effects probably get a bad wrap. In all fairness they sound like really, really
boring effects. And at first, you see things like Color Profiles, Cineon,
HDR Compander and it sounds really technical and stupid. But really,
these effects can be very awesome. I am going to give you three of the best effects out
of the five we'll be covering in this chapter. First we are going to be talking about the
Cineon effect, Cineon Converter effect to be specific.
And basically, we are going to be talking in that process about what Cineon files are.
Basically they are film scans; when you take film and you scan it and you
make it digitized, it becomes a Cineon file typically. I will talk about some exceptions
to that and some trends in that movie. But basically,
when you bring in a film scan here, you have a really washed out image;
and when you apply the Cineon Converter, it just makes it pop and brings it to life. So
I will talk about how to do that. And then also, the Grow Bounds effects. How
many times are you working on a pre-comp or another layer
and you use an effect like this Wave Warp here? Basically, this is a little bar. We
apply the Wave Warp effect and the warping brings the layer outside of its own boundary
so we can't see all of the dimensions, they get cut off.
Super irritating, right? Well I'll show you how to use the Grow Bounds
effect to have the layer go outside of its bounds. There is little bit of a trick to
it, I will explain it in that movie.
And finally, another highlight that I want to hit here, no pun intended, is the HDR Compander
effect. Now this project is set up for 32 bits per
channel, so we have this really sweet glowing neon text.
And so when you see effects like this, little 32 next to it, that means that those effects
operate the 32 bits per channel, they understand this super glowing awesome
text. But what happens if you want to use an effect
like CC Radial Fast Blur, which only operates at 8 bits per channel?
Well even though this is a 32-bits-per channel project, when you apply an 8-bit-per channel
effect, you get ickiness. What I am going to show you how to do as to
make an HDR Compander sandwich. So you will apply HDR Compander first
and then you will apply your 8-bit effect and then you will apply HDR Compander again,
and it basically restores the HDR data. So you see we have the 8-bits effect, we have
the Radial Fast Blur, there is before it and then after. So it's
there. And we also have our HDR. So we have the best of both worlds essentially.
There is a little bit of a tradeoff, but we'll talk about that in the amazing HDR
Compander movie coming up later in this chapter. So all in all, there is some great stuff here
we didn't cover too, like the Color Profile Converter effect and
the HDR Highlight Compression movie- all that stuff coming up in this chapter on the Utility
effects.