Not seeing your plugins in the host app is likely easier to fix than you think! When the installation process is completed properly, all Digital Anarchy plugins will show inside the Digital Anarchy folder located in your Video Effects folder, ready to be dragged and dropped into your timeline.  However, compatibility issues, corrupted installations, and having multiple versions installed could be preventing the plugin from connecting to the host app and appearing as an option in your effects folder. Here are the main reasons your plugin might not be showing in After Effects, Premiere Pro, FCP, Resolve or Avid – and how to quickly fix them.  PS: If you are in Premiere and saw the plugin disappear after downloading their latest update or after a crash caused by a Digital Anarchy plugin, scroll down to “4” and check if the plugin is not hidden before trying other things! The option to disable plugins in the Video Effects Manager was always a thing in After Effects, but recently added to Premiere Pro.    1. Installation did not complete properly The most common cause for plugins not showing in the host app is problems in the installation process. For the installation to complete successfully, all host apps must be closed before running the installer. So if the plugin – or the entire Digital Anarchy folder –  is not showing up please make sure all apps are closed and re-run the installer.  You can also check if the plugins were installed in the correct folder. We recommend not making any changes to the file paths set or used by the installer, but even if no changes are made, files could have been misplaced due to system permissions in both Windows and MAC systems.   Windows: For each folder in the path, right-click and select Properties > Security and make sure the designated user doesn’t have any restrictions.  Premiere – C:Program FilesAdobeCommonPlug-ins7.0MediaCoreDigital Anarchy        AVID – C:Program FilesAvidAVX2_Plug-InsDigital Anarchy        Resolve – C:Program FilesCommon FilesOFXPluginsDigital Anarchy MAC – For each folder in the path, right-click and select “Get Info” > Sharing & Permissions and make sure the designated user is set to “Read & Write”.   Premiere – Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore        FCP – /Applications/Digital Anarchy        AVID – Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Avid/AVX2_Plug-ins/Digital Anarchy        Resolve – Macintosh HD/Library/OFX/Plugins/Digital Anarchy   2. Incompatible Version Always make sure that you have the latest version installed. All of the latest versions are available under “Demos” at https://digitalanarchy.com. Most of the time you may just have a slightly older version installed and that can be the reason for it not appearing in your host application or for any other issues. Attention Mac users! Older plugin versions like Beauty Box 4.0 and Flicker Free 1.0 are not compatible with the new Apple M-series chip machines. If you have an older version of a plugin that was purchased a while back, buying an upgrade may be required. Check our store for upgrade prices: https://store.digitalanarchy.com/24-upgrades Required paid upgrades are rare, but do happen sometimes since our plugins are license-based and not a subscription. More recent purchases (2019 and later, depending on the plugin upgrade release date) are eligible to receive a free upgrade. If you are not sure your purchase qualifies, please email our sales team at sales@digitalanarchy.com. After upgrading your serial number, make sure all apps are closed, download and run the most recent installer for the plugin. All installers are available under “Demos” at https://digitalanarchy.com Incompatibility issues are also frequent in the latest version of FCP. If that’s what you are using it is likely you will need to run the latest version of our plugins. Check with our sales and tech support teams if you have questions!   3. Update didn’t uninstall the previous version If the plugin does not show after you install an update/upgrade,  please make sure that the uninstaller properly removed the previous version from your machine. Some host apps will warn you if there are two versions of the same plugin installed but that is not always the case.  The uninstallers are included in all installer downloads available on our website. For Windows, the uninstaller will first run automatically when you run the installer, if it detects that there is already an installed version. For Mac, the uninstaller can be found in the same folder as the installer and can be run manually, apart from the installer, if previous versions are not removed automatically. Make sure to close all apps before running the uninstaller and/or a new installer.    4. Plugin is disabled in Premiere or After Effects If you are using Premiere or After Effects, make sure the plugin is not set to be disabled in the effects preferences.  In After Effects: Go to “Effect”.   Click on “Manage effect” and make sure the plugin is enabled In Premiere Pro: Click on the “Sandwich” menu close to “Effect Controls”.  Click on  “Video Effects  Menu” and make sure the plugin is enabled.    5. Effect is filtered out in FCP In Final Cut Pro, the Effects Browser has a search field at the bottom with filters for 4k and HDR: If the HDR filter is checked, our effects will be hidden. So if you see the Digital Anarchy section under “VIDEO” in the Effects Browser but don’t see any effects, uncheck the HDR filter to un-hide the effects.   If you are still having problems, please send us an email at cs@digitalanarchy.com!

NAB Update: Data Storyteller wins Videomaker’s Best of NAB 2023 award! It was great going to NAB and getting validation from Videomaker and many of the folks that came by the booth that there is definitely a need for better data visualization tools for video production. Please sign up for the beta and let us know what you think! I’ve had a fascination with data visualizations for a while. When done right they can get be both beautiful and incredibly informative. And with the world awash in data, big and small, there’s a lot of stories that can be told by looking at data. Data Storyteller is a plugin for Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut (Resolve is coming!) that hopes to make this easier for video production. We’re about to go into beta with it, so if you’re interested in joining the beta, reach out to:beta@digitalanarchy.com We realize that individual video editors don’t need to do this kind of work all the time, but it does come up. And for some of you it comes up a lot! So there needs to be a better way of creating visualization, be it a simple bar chart or a Bubble chart showing years of data, than trying to shoehorn Excel charts into video. The focus will be to try to make it as easy as possible to create cool visualizations. There will be various templates to start with as well as a Wizard to guide the initial creation. Of course, often the hard part with data viz is selecting the data to visualize. So that part you’ll have to figure out. 🙂 But once you do, hopefully we can make the animation part relatively easy. 1.0 will support Bar, Line, Scatter/Bubble charts as well as maps for US and the world. All of these can be linked to simple CSV or Excel files for basic animations or you can create more complex animations using larger data sets or even multiple data sets (e.g. 25 files with 25 years of the same data). We have plans for more chart types but those are the initial charts. The backend for Data Storyteller is D3.js so there are many chart types we could do in the future. We’re still a month or two away from release, but we want to get it into the hands of those interested in doing this type of work. So if you want to get the beta when it’s available, please reach out to beta@digitalanarchy.com Our team of anarchists will be at NAB 2023, booth #N1316 (North Hall) demoing the beta of DataStoryteller – So you can check out the two new plugins and the types of animated charts and map visualizations that can be created.  Best,Jim TierneyChief Executive Anarchist Here are the Key features DataStoryteller offers: Support for Simple or Complex Data: Imported CSV or Excel files can be simple spreadsheets or more complex, with multiple sheets or large data sets. Built-in Spreadsheet: A built-in spreadsheet allows users to see and select all of the data or select specific cells, rows, and columns that they wish to visualize. Multi-file Animation: One of the strengths of Data Storyteller is the ability to upload multiple data sets. For example, multiple years of census data can be uploaded and then animated year by year, creating complex visualizations that tell a story with much more depth than a simple bar chart.  Range/Filter Animation: Editors can choose to slowly reveal or hide data by animating the spreadsheet selection or filtering values that are higher or lower than a user defined threshold.  By using keyframes that determine when and where each new data point appears, it is possible to create animations that animate specific data for more impact.  Multiple Dimensions: Another strength is support for data with many attributes. For example, in our Census data, for different cities you might want to show Age, Income, Crime level, and Cost of Housing. Any of these can be used to control X position, Y position and Size and Color of the resulting data point. All of which can be animated over time. Preset Templates: A wide variety of templates help users get started on creating beautiful data visualizations. Vector Charts: The charts are all vector based graphics, so can be rendered at any size, including HD, 4K, 8K, 12K or higher. DataStoryteller charts and maps  can be setup from scratch or by using a template. Setting up a basic chart works much like creating graphics in Excel or Apple Numbers, with the advantage of all features being tightly integrated with the video editing platform. The integration with After Effects, Final Cut and Premiere Pro makes it easy to apply changes and show the animations in the video editing application, without the need to export/import files back and forth.

I was interviewed for an article in the Telegraph about retouching in film/TV. The final article sort of missed the point, as non-industry publications often do, that it’s hard to make humans look good with bright video lights, cameras, and all the things that production involves. (they spun it as an ‘A-list vanity’ thing) But it did get me thinking about how different users deal with that production problem when using Beauty Box. (Link to the article is at the bottom of the post) I do find it interesting talking to different customers who are using Beauty Box for different purposes. It’s used on an extremely wide range of productions from low budget wedding videos to feature films. And, of course, how it’s used on those productions varies widely as well. On the lower budget end, the editor generally applies it to the entire clip, hits Analyze Frame, dials in some settings to make the subjects look a bit better and then calls it a day. The budget isn’t there for a lot of fine beauty work (just like there wasn’t a budget for a makeup artist). The above may be the case if the editor is pressed for time… turning around video shot earlier in the day at an event or for news, where it needs to go live the same day. The basic settings work very well for applying a layer of digital makeup that offsets the lack of makeup, bright video lights or any of the other factors that make a subject’s skin look bad in a video. We’ve worked hard to maintain the texture of the skin so that you have a very realistic application of the smoothing algorithms. When Beauty Box users have a bit more time/budget the workflow changes a bit. They can set up tracking masks and just retouch, say, the forehead or the cheeks. This is much more detailed beauty work and you can see some tutorials on using tracking masks here. Generally this is how Beauty Box is used for commercials, TV, etc. As you get up into feature films, where there are definitely budgets for makeup artists, we see Beauty Box being used for makeup heavy applications. For example, in LBJ, Woody Harrelson needed to prosthetics to make him look older. As such, digital retouching was used to make those more seamless and realistic. Same goes for films in the fantasy genre, if you’ve got a bunch of elves, orcs and whatnot running about, you may have some makeup problems that need fixing. That’s generally where Beauty Box is a critical tool. It’s cool to hear about the wide range of productions it’s used on. The idea for Beauty Box came from watching a talk given by a music video vfx artist at Motion Graphics LA in the mid-2000s. He discussed his process of going frame by frame, duplicating skin layers, etc. I figured there had to be a better way of doing that and a few years later Beauty Box was born as the first beauty plugin to take the problem seriously. (There were a couple other plugins out there that purported to do it, but they were just applying a blur to a masked area and it didn’t look realistic. Beauty Box not only smooths the skin but tries to keep the original skin texture giving a much more realistic look) So to see it used on feature films, episodics, reality and so much more is one of the amazing things about making these tools. lol… of course, customers will tell us about this stuff privately, but getting folks to give us permission to talk publicly about specific shows/films is tough. If you’re doing something cool with Beauty Box and are willing to let us talk it up, please shoot me an email! (jim@digitalanarchy.com) And P.S…. We’re hard at work on Beauty Box 6.0, using A.I. and some other advanced tech, so look for that coming shortly. (And we give free upgrades to folks that let us say nice things about their Beauty Box work, so…. 🙂 Here’s a link to the Telegraph article. fyi… it’s behind a paywall and if you sign up for the free trial, you’ll need to CALL them in the UK to cancel. You’ve been warned. 🙂 The article is not as skewed as the headline suggests, but it does largely miss the point that this is a video production problem as much as (or more so) a vanity thing. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/digital-de-ageing-hollywood-lying-us-secret-side-special-effects/

Interview-based productions were already one of the main use cases for AI transcriptions when we first released Transcriptive. Having all content converted into text meant the footage was searchable, and the ability to create captions allowed video editors to comply with accessibility and broadcasting requirements. What we didn’t know was how much documentary production workflows would play a role in the plugin development: we added the ability to transcribe not only sequences, but also entire clips, comments and strikethrough can now be added to transcripts, Transcriptive.com lets production teams collaborate outside of Premiere if need be. PowerSearch became such an essential tool to find content in a project that we included it with Transcriptive Rough Cutter, and the ability to use transcript text to cut video made a product that started as an AI transcription tool become a pretty complete suite of products with different workflow options – very different from everything we had done so far.  This week we received an email from a  client who has been  using Transcriptive since the beginning. He was asking if we could save him some time from learning all the new additions to the plugin – there are many indeed! –  and highlight a few essential “new features” that focus on interview-based productions. So here we are, sharing our favorite new features with you all. Read on and learn more about them! Clip Mode: we added the ability to transcribe clips a while back, but some people have been so used to transcribing sequences that they do not realize turning “Clip Mode” on can be a game changer when there’s a high volume of interview footage to sort through. By transcribing the whole clip you can have all content – not only the cuts on your timeline – searchable, and use the clip to enter soundbites into the timeline straight from the transcript. Clip mode also  lets you create or import transcripts for individual media files (as well as multicam clips). These transcripts are attached to the files and will load whenever you open that clip in the Source Monitor, which makes it easy to search for specific quotes and add them to a sequence. Offline Alignment: some productions still prefer to use human transcripts, especially if their interviews have very specific jargon or scientific terms. Using transcripts generated outside of Transcriptive also becomes a necessity if the interviews hold private information  and privacy is a concern. Transcriptive does require internet connection to create new transcripts, but offline alignment makes it possible to import existing transcripts to either a clip or sequence. It is only available for English, but the alignment is free of cost,  analyzes the text and audio, and syncs them up word for word. If you have a lot of transcripts to align you can use Batch Alignment to submit them all at once. Import all of the transcripts, select those clips and sequences in the Project panel, and select Batch Project to queue up all the alignments at once. An important note: when aligning transcripts offline you’re free to use Premiere for other things while these process. Just make sure to do not close Premier until the offline alignments are finished. PowerSearch: our “Google like” plugin is still the best way out there to find content in your Premiere project, and Transcriptive Rough Cutter users no longer need to pay extra to use it. Your Transcriptive serial number now also activates PowerSearch. The panel is more efficient than using the search box in Transcriptive because it searches the transcripts in your entire project all at once, displaying a list of results for each clip and sequence where your search term appears. Clicking on one of these results opens that clip or sequence in the Program Monitor or Source Monitor and jumps to the location of that line. This makes it easy to find specific dialogue anywhere in the project. If you’re using markers to label your clips/sequences, PowerSarch can search marker text as well. Rough Cut:  the option to use shortcuts to enter soundbites into a sequence, straight from the transcript text, is one of our newest – and most powerful – additions to Transcriptive. Set an in (Ctrl+i) and an out point (Ctrl+o) in the transcript, select the sequence and press Ctrl+Comma (Windows) or Ctrl+8 (Mac) to insert the select. That’s it! Keep adding selections from different clips to to quickly assemble a rough cut. Also, if you strikethrough (using the Strikethrough button next to a paragraph in the transcript) or delete text, you can click the Create Rough Cut button to generate a new sequence with all of the deleted areas removed. This is an easy way to cut down, for example, an hour long interview into a shorter sequence using just the transcript text. This new sequence will have a transcript synced with those edits that you can export, search, or index with PowerSearch.  Transcriptive.com is also an amazing addition to Transcriptive although not specially important to documentary productions.  Learn more about our web app here: https://digitalanarchy.com/transcribe-video/app/features.html Have a favorite feature you love, but was not mentioned here? Let us know which one! We would love to hear from you: cs@digitalanarchy.com. 

Beauty Box 5.0 can retouch skin while maintaining real-time playback on 1080p footage on most machines, and real-time playback or close to it on 4k footage on faster machines. Render speed does depend on a lot of factors, like the GPU speed of your computer, the resolution of the footage, having other effects applied, and the host application you’re using. Here are some things you can check to make sure you’re getting the best performance out of Beauty Box. Make sure the plugin is using the GPU to render The most important factor for better speed is to have Beauty Box use your machine’s GPU to render. In the plugin effect controls, there will be a “Use GPU” checkbox at the bottom – make sure this is checked, and that it isn’t grayed out. If “Use GPU” is grayed out, here’s how to re-enable it: Go to this location:          Windows: Documents\Digital Anarchy           Mac: Users\Shared\Digital Anarchy And find one of these files: DA_OpenCL_Devices.txt DA_CUDA_Devices.txt DA_Metal_Devices.txt Open the file. You should see something like the screenshot below. If Enabled = Off, change the text to say Enabled = On, then save the file. Restart your editing application and now the checkbox should be active. Open the file. You should see something like the screenshot below. If Enabled = Off, change the text to say Enabled = On, then save the file. Restart your editing application and now the checkbox should be active. Having “Use GPU” disabled by default is most common when installing Beauty Box for the first time, but also may happen after updating your computer or host application. If Beauty Box seems to be causing slow playback in your projects, check that file to make sure Beauty Box is actually using the GPU. Apply Beauty Box before other effects If you are color correcting your video or using other effects on the same footage Beauty Box will be applied, remember that the order that effects are applied can have an impact on render speed. We generally recommend applying Beauty Box first, before other effects and color correction. In some rare cases, Beauty Box will perform better as the last effect applied – if it’s working slower than usual at the top, drag it to the bottom of the effects list, below your other effects. But usually having it applied first will make rendering faster.  Know what works best for the host app you are editing on: Premiere and FCP are faster than After Effects at this point in most of our tests (as of AE and Premiere 2022, and FCP 10.6.3), although this can change over time as different applications add new features and optimizations. Here are a few applications-specific tips: Premiere Pro: Make sure the renderer is set to Use the GPU. Go to File > Project Settings > General.  In the General tab, under Video Rendering and Playback, set the Renderer dropdown to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA/OpenCL/Metal). (CUDA) is for Nvidia GPUs, (OpenCL) is for AMD GPUs, and (Metal) is for Apple GPUs. IF this is set to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only, your project won’t use the GPU to render, and Beauty Box will render  more slowly – you generally will only want to use Software Only with Beauty Box if you’re running into an error with one of the GPU Acceleration options. After Effects: The same Premiere information above applies here as well. After Effects also has an option called “Enable Multi-Frame Rendering” in Edit > Preferences > Memory & Performance. You can use Beauty Box with this setting on, but it will be slightly slower in the current version of AE (2022). We do expect Multi-Frame Rendering to improve in future versions of AE, so it’s worth testing the speed of it on vs off in your projects, especially in future versions of AE. Final Cut Pro: If FCP is performing slowly while using Beauty Box, turn off Background Rendering in the Preferences > Playback menu, and turn off Skimming either by clicking the Skimming button below the Viewer, clicking it in View > Skimming, or pressing S. Resolve: We recommend applying Beauty Box in either Edit or Color modes. It works in Fusion, but will render more slowly. In combination with the automated masking and skin tone analysis capabilities, the tips we listed above can help video editors speed up the post-production skin retouching process considerably! But if you’re looking for advanced tutorials, you can learn how to create manual masks to retouch specific skin areas, isolate and track moving subjects, and more at https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/tutes.html . 

Setting Transcriptive to  “Clip Mode” to transcribe your video and audio files in Premiere Pro is the best option when the goal is to use transcripts to find sound bites and assemble rough cuts throughout the editing process. Transcribing in “Clip Mode” means everything in your clip is converted into searchable text, the transcribed text is attached to the original clip instead of the sequence, and you can pull sound bites from the text anytime – for any sequence – without having to transcribe bits and pieces for each sequence. However, using “Clip Mode” has some limitations when your video or audio clips have multiple audio channels.   When you transcribe a clip, Transcriptive exports that clip’s audio through Media Encoder. For clips with stereo or a single mono audio channel, this is no problem. But if you have multiple audio channels, Premiere only allows Transcriptive to export the top channel (channel 1), and, unfortunately, right-clicking a clip and opening the “Modify > Audio Channels” to re-assign the channels doesn’t help. If some of your recorded audio is on a different channel, it won’t be transcribed. And if channel 1 is empty, Transcriptive will return a blank transcript. Fortunately, there is a pretty easy workaround. Transcribing a sequence gives us a lot more control over what audio we’re exporting. When you submit a sequence to be transcribed, Transcriptive mixes down all of the unmuted audio channels. This means you can mute unwanted audio and transcribe everything else. If your sequence has channels you don’t want to be transcribed – scratch audio, music, etc – you can mute them before submitting the sequence to Transcriptive. You can also set in and out points in the sequence to control what area you’re transcribing (in and out points are another thing we aren’t able to read in Clip Mode, so only use them when transcribing a sequence). To transcribe a clip with multiple audio channels: Create a new sequence with that clip Mute any unwanted audio channels in the sequence, and set your in and out point Turn off Clip Mode and transcribe the sequence. Once transcribing is done, switch “Clip Mode” back on and select your clip in the project panel. The transcript will load attached to the original clip, and now you can delete the sequence. This is what your transcript will look like with “Clip Mode” on: In Transcriptive 3.0, you can Batch Transcribe sequences as well as clips. So while creating a sequence for each clip with multiple audio channels is an extra step, you can still transcribe those sequences all at once – select them in your Project panel in Premiere, click the top left menu in Transcriptive, and select Batch Project. Once transcribing is done, repeat step 4 above to attach each transcript to the clip. Here’s a Batch Transcription tutorial to watch for more info. We’re hoping future versions of Premiere will give us more control over what we can do in Clip Mode, and allow us to handle in/out points and multiple audio channels better. For now, the sequence workaround is the best way to get around these limitations. If you have any questions about Transcriptive Rough Cutter or want a two-week trial license, send us an email at cs@digitalanarchy.com