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Wed, 28 Jul 2004

Buena Software Releases Au Naturel for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Combustion

Buena Software, Inc. today announced the release of Au Naturel, a new plugin for Adobe After Effects, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and discreet Combustion for both Mac OS and Windows. The plugin, which sells for $79.00US through the end of SIGGRAPH (August 12th, 2004), includes tools for producing realistic lens blurs, adjusting the exposure of your footage in f-stops, performing extremely high quality transformations, and compositing with multiple alpha channels. Users can download the plugin and obtain a free time limited serial number by going to the Au Naturel web page at [url]http://www.buena.com/aunaturel.shtml[/url].

Buena Software, Inc. president Darrin Cardani explains how Au Naturel works: “When you film a scene, then convert it to a digital format and bring it into your host application, the data has gone through many different transformations. Between the electronics in the camera, the conversion to digital data, and the compression applied to it, the data your editing or compositing application receives is no longer representative of what really happened in the scene you filmed. Au Naturel strips away the transformations that were added to your footage and allows you to work in linear RGB, which more closely mimics how light works in the real world.”

Au Naturel works in a 32-bit per channel floating point linear RGB color space, giving it a realism not found in other plugins. Blurs produced with Au Naturel cause the same type of blooming in bright areas that defocusing your camera’s lens does. Motion blur produced with Au Naturel’s directional blur looks more realistic than the host application’s built-in tools, too.

In addition to reproducing real blurs, the plugin also includes an extremely high quality transformation tool that allows users to scale, rotate, skew, and translate their footage with sub-pixel accuracy. This produces much higher quality results than the transform or motion tools built into most host applications. And unlike other plugins that only improve the scaling, Au Naturel lets you perform transformations that include rotating, skewing, and translating, too, giving you the most freedom with the highest quality.

But it doesn’t stop there! You also get the ability to perform composites in linear RGB. Since linear RGB mimics how light interacts in the real world, this gives you results that are far superior to compositing with other tools. And you can even choose to have a separate alpha channel for each color channel, allowing you to create even more realistic results.

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Audio Hijack Pro 2 Now Available

From http://www.rogueamoeba.com/company/pr/audiohijackpro20040728pr.php

Rogue Amoeba has just unveiled Audio Hijack Pro 2, a major upgrade to our popular audio recording and enhancing tool. Audio Hijack Pro will drastically change the way you use audio on your computer by giving you the freedom to listen to audio when you want and how you want. Record and enhance any audio with Audio Hijack Pro - it's the cornerstone of your digital audio experience.

Audio Hijack Pro has always been a great way to record internet streams, import records and cassettes, or grab DVD audio. Now it's even better than ever. With Audio Hijack Pro 2, users can now record to AAC and Apple Lossless (ALAC), in addition to the original MP3 and AIFF formats. With the new Recording Bin, recordings can be previewed, post-processed and even burned to CD. Improved timers can be set to run once or recur, and even wake the computer and launch Audio Hijack Pro automatically.

Visit http://www.rogueamoeba.com/ for more information and to download Audio Hijack Pro 2.

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