With its India Pro special effects titler, Prismo Graphics intends to shake up the character generator landscape a bit. And special effects are the key here, as the program has more than a few tricks up its sleeve. The software makes it quite easy to create impressive animated type effects.
The program ships with a dongle and offers the choice of connection via a parallel port or USB. I really dislike dongles, but the USB flavor installs rather seamlessly.
The program ships on 24 (!) CDs packed in a zippered carry case. The application sits on the first disc and the rest contain textures, fonts, and various effects. Upon booting up the program, you realize the interface is very intuitive. I did scan the slim 50-page manual, but I was always one step ahead of it.
India Pro basically allows you to load in a font, either one of the built-in 32-bit fonts or a system font, and then apply an animated special effect to it. DVFonts, the new font format devised by Prismo Graphics, essentially makes each letter into a movie by using a technology called ActiveFile. This lets everything on the screen swirl and jump around. These 24 CDs supply a generous selection of DVFonts as well tons of animations, graphics, and textures.
Title creation comes together in the main interface. Very handy is the ability to open multiple projects at once. You type text into a text-edit field, and up pop the words on the interface screen. Then adjust the font and type style, colorize it, add texture, outline it, adjust tracking and leading, throw on a drop shadow, or add an animated effect. Backgrounds can be a solid color, an image, or transparent, as the program supports alpha channels during export. For each DVFont, texture, and effect, a little preview movie shows what it will look like, which is necessary considering the vast amount of content provided.
You can change project settings at anytime, with presets from web-animation size all the way up to HDTV. India Pro promotes itself as suited for web animation in addition to video production. But the program actually has no tools for web-format optimization, aside from rendering in web resolutions. So you'll have to export a movie into a program that optimizes content for the Web.
India Pro offers multiple tracks, or layers, so stacking effects and fonts is pretty easy. The method for hiding and swapping among layers is a little cumbersome.
Bezier handles and control points set your text on a curve. The method of creating curves takes more steps than should be necessary: Click once for the control point, once for a left handle, and then once again for a right handle. But once set up, you can do some pretty amazing font curls around paths. Each letter can be individually rotated, sized, and can even contain multiple animation effects. Support for tracking mattes means animations can flow in a title.
Most video producers will spend a good deal of time in the timing window. Here the timelines are displayed and the tweaking of various parameters takes place. Font animations can start at specific times during the display and can be sped up or slowed down with a few mouse clicks. You can also loop the effects and animations and change the duration of the effects themselves. For example, with a burning title effect, you could slow down or speed up the flames for the entire word, or even letter by letter.
India Pro ships with the tools and documentation to create your own DVFonts and animations. A FontScript language brings it all together. Most users will be content with what ships with the product. But it's good to know there's a way to create fresh content to extend the life of the program, as well as a way for third-party programmers to create some dazzling effects.
So how do the fonts and effects look? Drop-dead gorgeous. I have seen many character generator programs at all different price points, and these are some of the best I have ever seen at any cost. There are fonts that explode, spin, burst into flames, cascade into fireworks, shimmer, shake, glitter, and sparkle, all while spinning and moving with such silky-smooth movement that you'd swear they were built by a high-end animation system. Something that would take a good half-day to create in After Effects can be summoned up with one preset in India Pro. Enough variations and settings means you can create titles that look and feel different everytime you sit down with India Pro.
What really floored me was the attention to detail paid to the animated backdrops and effects. Someone obviously spent a lot of time creating high-end effects, and there is little padding in the group of included animations. That said, the fonts and effects are, let's say, theatrical. These are over-the-top effects that you won't find on CNN. But if you want some dazzle and punch, these rise to the occasion.
There are ways to tweak and alter, but really, this package is for the load-and-go crowd. Unlike a program like After Effects or Commotion, which have lots of features that dovetail into one another, this program produces titles and effects that are pre-rendered. It's as if the creators came up with a stunning group of animated fonts and moving textures, and then created a titling program to bring them all together.
Other than that, India Pro has only a few drawbacks. I discovered that reordering your tracks — bringing them to the front and to the back — changes the numbers of the tracks on the fly. It makes sense in the program, but with lots of layers it can get confusing. Undo corrects only as far as one step back, and if any program needed more, it's this one, as there's much to experiment with. Also, India Pro does not offer a lot of realtime options. There is no way to scrub; you must render everything to see the effects. Luckily you can set only a section to render, and there are ways to render smaller movies quickly. In addition, many dialog boxes are not moveable.
Most troubling, though, is the lack of support for different DV codecs (aside from RAW). Only AVI, QuickTime, and a few less-popular animation flavors are supported. So rather than rendering out to an AVI file via my DV codec, I had to either render out an uncompressed QuickTime file and convert it to AVI, or create an AVI file and export that.
My last grumble is the two fistfuls of CDs. Many of the animation effects are 50MB to 350MB each. Generally you choose an effect by viewing a little preview, and during rendering you install the often-huge file.
But am I complaining? No. For a first version, the program is as polished and stable as a granite backdrop. As a compositing program with lots of animation features, India Pro is not the best bet. However, if you work in a cable or broadcast studio and want dazzling fonts and amazing high-end titling animations very fast, India Pro will deliver. It will be interesting to see how Prismo Graphics develops the program, but they're off to an impressive start.
