I tried the "glow" plug-in- I don't like it as well as the Sony "glow". Certainly not worth $30...IMO

Posted about them here - http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=207123&Replies=20&Page=2
and did a little 'review'

You have to make sure there are no extra spaces in the SN field (as when you copy-and-paste from the site's Check Serial screen). I found this the hard way.

I think its great that more and more plugs are becoming available for Vegas , good ones, bad ones, dumb ones,useful ones,,,,,whatever--. sort through and enjoy!!

Oh I am not saying the plug-ins, as far as being for Vegas, are bad. And those who know me know I love the BigFX FilmFX plug-ins for Premiere and After Effects so I was excited when I first heard they were going to port them over to Vegas. However the way they have done it, and the results, I am not happy with. For example the letterbox plug - I can accept is as part of the entire package but as a $30 stand alone plug-in I am not sure why anyone would actually need it because Vegas already does this just fine. One of the great things about BigFX FilmFX was/is the great film presets to match films stocks. In a one package deal you just choose a film type and stock pre-set. Now you need to have the 5 Zenote plug's plus, I am guessing, a 'color curves' and 'tint' yet to come, and mix and match because none of them have a specific 'stock' - the grain plug has, for example, 16mm and 35mm as well as b/w versions but does not have Kodak, Fuji, Agfa and associated film stock settings. Now I am sure I will get - "Oh but you see, these are not the same plug-ins as the BigFx FilmFX plug-in is and these also are not 'film -look' plug-ins so that is why there are no film stock settings." On the other hand Vegas already has lots of ability - such as color curves and tint as well as 'flicker' - built in. So you can use a long series of plug-ins to achieve what one could do or you can spend the money to get one of the Zenote plug's and just do the rest with Vegas. (the module idea is great - I would pay $30 to Boris to just get the RedGL portion that allows After Effects plugs to be used in Vegas)

My main beef I guess is that this is not the same BigFX FIlmFX plug-in that I grew to love. Also as I said in the other thread and on DMN the slanted line watermarking is very annoying and really takes away from what these plugs may or may not really be able to do.

It sounds like Zenote should explore (i.e. ask the Minnesota gang) how to create a Vegas script which will combine a group of plug-ins for a one-mouse-click film stock look a la BigFX.

I agree, I checked out all those plugins and apart from the Random one you can easily do all those effects in Vegas. You can even do the random one but it would take some time.

Agreed with vitalforces and filmy. Until they make the plugins work as a unit, I won't buy. I also really liked being able to choose a film stock with just a click. And based on what I've read here and at other forums, Zenote hasn't set themselves apart enough to make the plugs worthwhile.
If they make my life significantly easier by putting all plugs into a single interface - like Tsunami and Excalibur do, and bring back the presets, I'll really consider buying it. But that's just me. -mjr

Boy, I see a lot of opinions about these plugins but have you actually tried them on footage and played with the infinite variations built in to each one?

I bought the Glow and Random because it so happened they spiced up a morphing project and added just the right mystique along with the chosen music. I've also tried the glow on regular footage (after color-correcting using Billy Boys new technique setting black and white points) and I'm thrilled at the subtle ways you can enhance things. (Now if you just leave it at it's default you're going to think, "Oh, I can do that with Vegas glow!" But I promise you there's a whole lot more settings, infinitely variiable that make this a real bang for the buck.

I too didn't find much use for the letterboxing, since I have many other ways of doing that, but I can see it allows you to create 16X9 anamorphic footage out of 4X3 and adjust the view up or down through keyframing in a pretty simple way.

I haven't bought the film grain but it looks like an excellant plugin if you want the film look varying from sublte to in-your-face.

I'm experimenting with the blur and finding it exremely easy to preview and change the effect on the fly. These plugins have very well-designed controls so that you can quickly experiment with different sliding settings and see how they look. Blur is next on my list since you can so easily adjust RED GREEN BLUE together or separately and come up with all kinds of great looks.

K... now that I've had a chance to play with these, particularly glow and blur because Film Look is a big part of DV Expo's presentation on Vegas...
You CAN create each and every one of these looks with Vegas, in about quadruple then length of time, more tracks, or more finite attention to detail. Just like if you know how to create bmp's and masks, you can duplicate the SpiceMaster tool to a great extent.
While I agree that the 16:9 plug isn't terribly useful once you consider pan/crop having a 16:9 preset, the rest of the plugs are highly useful. The ease and speed of the letter boxing being changeable from black to other colors, or from widescreen to epic is pretty cool.
Some of the features resemble the Red Giant Magic Bullet software. I think these guys are on to something. If nothing else, it's yet another strong support of Vegas.
The Glow and Blur are both slightly more sensitive than Vegas' is, someone was recently asking about glow, and I was able to use the same still that they'd uploaded, and create a glow without the haloing and contouring that was found in the Vegas plug, very easily. While with Vegas only, I could also do this, it took nearly an hour to achieve the same result.
So....make up your own mind, but some of these plugs are pretty dang cool, creative, and extended palettes to the Vegas user. Worth 99.00? I think so, if you are wanting to save time. If you are a hobbyist with loads of time to blow, then you probably don't need these. If you are a pro, looking for fast workflows to hit deadlines and a variety of styles, these are good to have.
Frankly, I'd say the same of Excalibur, Tsunami, Boris, or any other plug. Most everything you see in most every plug in can be created on it's own. What is your time worth?

BTW, another small point...
Drop the Zenote Blur/Gauzy preset on your footage, watch the framerate.
Drop the Sony Gaussian Blur/Light blur on your footage, watch the framerate.
This sorta surprised me. Zenote hits the proc with less juice than does the Sony blur. On my 3.06HT, I kept 29.97 all the way through while looping playback with the Zenote.
Sony blur hit me down to 23.5 for one loop, then 27.00, then 28, then 29.97. took 4 loops to get RAM rendered to full rate. Anyone else confirm this?

I have tried them. No one seems to have posted any sort of reply under the whole 'Film Look' thread where I posted it so I just sort of came back over here.

But anyhow - I have played around with the filters more than just the presets. As I said in one of my posts above I love the BigFx FilmFx plug and was really expecting the same thing here because I was under the impression this was going to be the ported version of it. It isn't really. And it (they) aren't really being called 'film look' plugs - so if you get away from that idea than you take these at 'face' value. The "Glow" plug in works, but so does the one built into VV. Yes, trying the different photoshop type blending settings you can do more, faster, however the end results I don't much care for. That is my opinon, for my use. I tried this in combination with the grain filter and even with my custom VV presets for 'kodak' looking stock, but minus the VV 'Glow' - didn't work for me. I do, however, like the 'Black Mist' look - however I can't seem to get rid of the smearing without getting rid of the effect. As for an 'effect' - yeah, you can create really extreme glow-ish effects and if that is what you want to do maybe you will love this plug-in. I just didn't like it for the more subtle stuff, and the smearing bothers me. if I want a Pro-Mist look personally I love the look that I can get with the 55mm stuff - but they aren't available for VV. (Unless you have the RedGL plug which allows for AE plugs to be used. OT but the newest release, 3.0.1, of 55mm will not work in VV via RedGL. However the DFT Digital Film Lab will - and that just rocks)

The Letterbox thing - I just don't get it. Sorry. You say you can take 4:3 and make it 16:9 anamorphic so much easier. Here is one way to do it - load up your 4:3 footage into a 16:9 project, Click on the pan/crop option, select the 16:9 crop and than render out your footage. Why is that so hard and why would you need a plug-in to make that easier? Vice versa - load up your 16:9 footage in a 4:3 project and render out, making sure you have the 'maintain aspect ratio' switch on. Now you have a 4:3 screen that is letterboxed. Again - not that hard. On the other hand if you want a quick effect to place a letterbox over a 4:3 frame and make it purple I guess you would love this.

Grain - as I said, I do seem to think this is the best filter in the package so far and, at its core, one of the great things that helped BigFx's FilmFX plug match film stock as far a grain goes. However now comes the "but he just said..." part. Ease of use with matching film stock - presets. Say I want the look of a Fuji stock, complete with the 'enhanced' greens and blues - well there isn't a preset for it. And even if there was it doesn't affect the color curves using just the grain setting. It was mentioned over at DMN that because VV is so limited in the way it works with plugs this is why the entire FilmFX package could not be ported over as it was. However RedGL seem to do a lot at once. And than again you are talking a set of plugs for under $100 vs a complex plug that costs 10 times that.

So here is the suggestion - if you can't combine all of thse than create tutorials. The help files right now are very generic. Perhaps something like "To create the Kodak 5298 film stock look use the following filters in this order with the following presets...." or "To duplicate the 'Saving Private Ryan' look use the following presets..." But this is all just taking that someone wanted to use these plugs the same way that FilmFX was used. If not - never mind. ;)

P.S - Damn that Spot!! Stalking me again. If only I could type faster I could beat him to the post!
:)

"Out out, Damn'd spot!" Even Shakespeare couldn't post faster than me. Macbeth couldn't either. ;-)
I'm using these plugs on exceptionally clean focus, low motion footage, some shot 60i with an LDK 5000, and same subject matter shot at the same time with a GL1. To get a similar look I'm having to double up tracks. I'm not seeing smearing on anything though, not at the settings I'm using.
For me, Grain, Blur, and 1/4 Mist Glow are pretty fast and useful.
The thing that makes this 16:9 different, is the selectable crop ratio and colored boxes, which of course you can do in Vegas. Just not as quickly, hence my earlier comments. You could also build an Epic pan/crop preset, and use a generated media clip. But, in testing these, all this takes a much bigger hit on the proc and is slower to render.
I still wanna know if anyone is seeing less of a hit on the proc with these though. I'm seeing it on the Glow, Blur, and Grain, but the Letterbox takes a bigger hit on the proc than does the Sony crop.
BTW, for titles, the Random has some nice tweaks. Again, you can do all these with keyframes, but it's a headstart using this. Film clutter/jitter doesn't work the same.
I guess I'm mostly interested in speed for some things. Testing these against doing exactly the same looks, or as close to duplicated as I can get with the Sony tools, I find these are obviously faster, and easier on the process/render time. So far. I've only applied it to 3 media types thus far. HD, DV, and Quicktime PJPEG stuff.

I'm curious about Spot's question as well - re: processor time.
But I'm not all that experienced in said special effects. And, while I could/will dnld the demos, I would really like to see a Gallery section where they can show off their best effects. Relly show what it can do. That might give me the inspiration I need to more seriously persue the purchase. It would also be a nice "selling point" for them (Zenote) to put the render times for each effect to show how much time one might save.
But again, I agree with Filmy that BigFX's FilmFX was a much more likely purchase for me (owned is for years on a SR setup). Being able to click on a preset and tweeking it was really a boon for me.

filmy: No, I agree that users generally expected a BigFX for Vegas and nothing other. In fact, I had recently emailed the BigFX site and suggested that they make their famed film-look plugins usable for Vegas. I got a reply with a link to the Zenote site! It's like the product was half-developed and then made available for sale. I still wonder if a Vegas script can be written (a painstaking project if you're talking about duplicating the numerous film stocks available in BigFX) which will whip together the necessary plug-ins with presets, in one or two clicks. Since that was not done in this release, it creates the impression that it can't be done.... On the other hand, Zenote, if you provide those scripts I'll pay $40 a module instead of $30.

Someone has been looking ahead.

We are a very small company and there are many more plugins in the works - some will be available this week as well. Unlike Microsoft, there isn't a team of 500 working to make sure the website, documentation and every module can street the exact same second.

When complete, there will be approximately 10 modules as well as a method for loading presets of multiple plugins in chains as FX packages to emulate film stocks. This actually will make the plugins more versatile than in Speed Razor or Premiere because in those environments, the sections are rendered in a certain order (for example, glow is always before grain) but with this methodology there is room to switch the order around, layer several different blurs, etc., all in one preset.

In the end, my message would be to be patient. There will be many new things to see before the end of the year.

Hey thats great Aaron--I just bought the Glow--like it very much--look forward to new stuff that you guys produce---

Zenote shots page has 2 preview shots of three of the Zenote plugs applied to it. Small, but significant differences. I've rendered this media out to a "film look" and will be showing it at DV Expo for those interested.
What I'm finding is that the plugs provide some nice tweaks, and since Aaron has already said that this is only part of what he's putting together, I'm pretty psyched about seeing the whole thing run when he's done.

I didn't come to these wanting the perfect film look. But I was intrigued when it was mentioned BigFX in conjunction with them. So I downloaded them and tried them.

So far I've been able to vastly improve a family movie taken with a very cheap Panasonic camcorder in both outdoor and dim indoor light. I'm actually astonished what I'm able to tweak out of a camera I myself would never buy. (This was using various settings in the glow plugin).

Also, using the Blur plugin I've been able to tweak titles endlessly to create really neat looks that I would have found very time-consuming in Vegas.

I'm now seeing these plugins as the final post-processing of my videos and photo-movies.

What gives? I have not been able to install the update to Tsunami. I have been eMailing back and forth with Zenote support about it. Although they are trying to help me, they are really frustrating me. I just sent them my 4th eMail. Yes, eMail #4 and we still have not resolved the issue. Maybe this is why we go to companies like BORIS, PIXELAN, and DeBUGMODE. I have to say, Satish... I have never had a problem with any of your products. Only wish I could say that for some of the other guys that are trying to follow in your footsteps.

Here is my last eMail to Zenote support:
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Please take note that it does not show me a serial number or a product even after hitting the refresh button in my browser. You guys sent me a link that downloaded the installation file to my computer but it asks me for a password when I’m trying to install it. I assure you that I have done all that you have asked me to do, but I still do not see a serial number or a download button or anything that will allow me to update my Tsunami to be compatible with VEGAS 4e.
Once again, I am enclosing our correspondence along with the proof that I purchased Tsunami. Maybe my case is the only one like this. Then again in reading the VEGAS forums I have to believe that I am not. Please, is there an alternate way for me to install the Tsunami update? Is there a way to retrieve my serial # from your database?
Please let’s find a resolution for this. Although I do enjoy corresponding with fellow editors, I hate repeating the same process over and over/ explaining myself over and over/ getting frustrated over and over. Please, is there an alternate way to resolve this?
Thank you for such and awesome plug-in. Thank you for your help and support. Thank you for resolving this issue. Despite all the problems I am having, I continue to recommend your products and pass along the word about you and your work.
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No doubt Zenote is tryig really hard to hook up their plugins but it seems kinda weird to me as a small company you should go for quality not quantity. But heah, what do I know? I don't have anything to sell and if I did I guess I would want 10 different things to sell as apposed to only 1 too.


Frustrated!

Lamont
planet9productions

Not to act as a defense mechanism, but keep in mind that Zenote is a distributor of the Tsunami product, not the creator. Their website says pretty clearly taht you email jetdv and not zenote....And I know Ed is really responsive to Tsunami and Excalibur users...

I've sent Lamont a couple of e-mails which I hope will resolve all of his issues.