Digital Anarchy Releases Text Anarchy for Discreet flame, inferno

Four sparks produce a variety of text based effects using a particle system

San Francisco, CA – March 11, 2002 —

Digital Anarchy today announced the availability of the Text Anarchy spark package for Discreet’s Advanced Systems. The sparks produce a variety of text based effects using a particle system. They’re very powerful for easily producing typed on text, text along paths, random text, controlling and animating large amounts of text, and distorting text.

The sparks in Text Anarchy can either generate text or other characters randomly, or they can accept user specified text. In addition, almost any Truetype or Postscript Type 1 font can be used, which opens up a world of possibility with different typefaces, ‘dingbat’ or symbol fonts, and foreign language fonts.

By letting a particle system handle most of the creation and animation of the text, designers can spend more time designing and less time setting keyframes. Many of the effects that Text Anarchy creates would normally involve many layers of text and a lot of keyframes. Not necessarily difficult, but tedious and time consuming, especially if it’s a background element.

Four Sparks in the Set.

The sparks included in the set are:

Text Matrix: A particle system specifically for text. It creates streams of characters that are easily animatable. The streams (or single letters) can follow garbage mattes, and have a wide variety of attributes that can be set and animated. This makes it easy to generate large amounts of text, or any art that’s in a font, for backgrounds or effects like waves of text.

Text Grid: Creates a grid of characters. Characters can flow across the grid or the grid itself can be animated. How often the characters change or what type of characters (numbers, characters, upper ascii characters) are easy to set. Definable sections of the grid can be zoomed in or out.

TypeOn: Allows the user to have text automatically type on the screen. Specify the text, animate the completion percentage and the text will slowly appear. There are plenty of options for controlling the look of the type and you can even add a unix style cursor to the text.

Text Screen: Scrolls text like a computer terminal. Lines of text can be set to 'type' themselves on or do a text scroll. It generates text randomly or can use a user defined text file. Some similar functionality to TypeOn, but more designed to generate random, self-animating text.

User Quotes.

Hear what users have said about our After Effects version of the software:

Broadcast designer Gary Reisman, formerly from the NBC Agency, MAGIC Room (Burbank, CA), had this to say about the plugins: “The plugins have been great in allowing me to easily create some complex backgrounds. Usually these kind of text effects can take quite awhile and be fairly tedious. It really simplifies doing these types of designs."

“This has been a lifesaver in my production environment. My clients here in the San Francisco bay area are expecting a creative look in the motion graphics I create. The type tools allow me to quickly generate random type or binary code for 2D backgrounds and 3D texture maps which would normally take hours or days to create.” — Matt Silverman, motion graphics designer, San Francisco

“It’s easily the most effective, time-saving and best value for money plugin I've ever had the pleasure of using” — Jared Cocken, Williams Digital Media, Ireland

Text Anarchy will be available for $995 until March 31st, 2002, at which time it will go to it’s regular list price of $1295. Demo sparks, manual, sample movies, and tutorials can be found at www.digitalanarchy.com. It’s available for Smoke, Fire, Flint, Flame, and Inferno. A bundle with the Knoll Spark Pack is available for $1995.

About Digital Anarchy.

Digital Anarchy is a privately owned company operating out of San Francisco, CA. Digital Anarchy is devoted to creating high end and high quality software products for broadcast designers in television and film. The products work in conjunction with a wide range of products from companies like Adobe, Discreet, and Apple.

Digital Anarchy is committed to developing new software to further the creative abilities of broadcast designers and visual effects artists. These products solve a wide range of problems that face designers, from creating text effects and background elements to the addition of lighting effects in 2D compositing applications.

For further information on Digital Anarchy and other products, please see the web site at www.digitalanarchy.com or call 415-621-0991.

Press Contact

Jim Tierney
jim@digitalanarchy.com
415-621-0991