Action

• Intuitive and interactive 3D visual effects design environment. Ideal for in-context, creative decision-making and brainstorming.
• 16x9 user interface enhances workflow. Object node bin and Object menu make it easier to add and control elements in the scene.
• Supports unlimited media layers at any image resolution or aspect ratio. Layer effects can be quickly copied from one layer to another.
• 3D particle systems for realistic effects ranging from rain and snow to smoke and explosions.
• 3D deformation, meshes, displacement mapping, and extended bicubics for full control and manipulation of 2D surfaces and 3D models.
• Instant duplication of animations by applying settings to other objects.
• Multiple cameras with true-to-life, user-definable lenses and camera properties such as depth-of-field. Animate and switch between camera views. Each layer offers independent camera placement and animation for sophisticated effects.
• Import 3D geometry, including NURBS objects, lights, and camera data from 3D animation packages using Autodesk® FBX® interchange format. Export camera data, axis positions, and 3D point clouds via FBX.
• Multiple animatable light sources.
• Integrated 2D and 3D tracking and stabilization.
• Texture mapping with material property and shading controls. Map or project textures onto objects.
• Integrated 3D character generator for advanced text creation.
• Import Adobe® Photoshop® PSD files directly into Action while maintaining layers, blend modes, and transparency.
• Fully interoperable with DVE setups from Autodesk® Smoke® editing and finishing systems.
• Multitrack clip support automatically builds an Action setup from the video tracks of the clip.

Keying and Rotoscoping

• Master Keyer—advanced keying technology. Intuitively refine the key by gesturally modifying the matte. Automatic color spill removal and edge blending. Advanced grain removal, specifically tuned to blue and green screens.
• Keyer—fast, accurate RGB, YUV, HLS, RGBCMYL, and custom keying; linear and user-definable keying capabilities with full luminance remapping, softness, shrink, and erode; advanced spill suppression and edge color replacement capabilities.
• Tracer—the accurate edge-keying tool. Based on GMasks, it is ideal for keying hair, fur, and other finely detailed object boundaries not necessarily shot on green or blue screen.

Paint

• High-quality, integrated paint system for advanced motion graphics, digital matte painting, rotoscoping, wire removal, image retouching, and more.
• Fully customizable, user-definable brushes.
• Record and animate brush strokes. Create and animate color gradients, vector shapes, and cutouts.
• Load mattes to protect areas of the clip during painting.
• Paint node integrated in Batch for easy painting or touch-up of any element in a complex scene. Paint, blur, reveal, or clone layers or mattes and feed the result to any downstream node while viewing in context. Change source clips without having to repaint strokes.

Tracking and Stabilization

• Precise motion analysis for 2D tracking of position, scale, and rotation—track up to 1,000 points in a single pass.
• Advanced tracking features include fully editable tracking data, reverse tracking, keyframe locking, field-based analysis, and curve smoothing functions.
• Tracked data can be automatically applied to image layers, GMask shapes, Warper meshes, Distort splines, and Paint brush strokes.

Color Correction

• Colour Warper™ functionality performs primary and selective color correction, enabling precise fine-tuning with multiple levels of adjustment in a single pass.
• Interactive adjustment of gamma, gain, offset, hue, saturation, and contrast. Apply animatable settings to all channels or independently to R, G, and B.
• Intuitive hue shift and tint color wheel for fast, accurate color balancing. Visual color sampling palette for precise color matching. Interactive Histogram and Curves editing modes for subtle, precision tweaking of color components.
• Independent controls for color correcting the image’s shadow, midtone, and highlight regions—features user-definable luminance ranges.
• “Match” feature for fast scene-to-scene color correction.
• “Selective” feature for sampling up to three different color regions for isolated correction.
• User interface features include three pressure-sensitive trackballs, a high-quality RGB vector scope, and a 3D histogram for precise color monitoring.

2D and 3D Text

• Create title rolls, crawls, slates, text animations, text along a path, text effects, and more.
• Support for Adobe Type 1 PostScript®, Microsoft® OpenType®, Apple® TrueType® fonts, Asian (CID) fonts, ASCII text file import, and extended Unicode font sets.
• Full formatting and layout capabilities, spell checking, custom dictionaries.
• Easy generation of matte layers.
• 3D text creation and animation in Action module.

Warping and Morphing

• Choice of mesh- or spline-based tools for intuitive, interactive warping and morphing.
• Distort workflow enhanced for improved control of desired result. Multiple splines can be animated independently.
• Warp and morph stationary or moving elements. Animate splines, mesh points, and axes with tracking data to automatically fit motion, scale, and rotation.
• Lens distortion tool applies or removes distortion artifact to a clip for integration with other footage.
• Open splines in distort transform image distortions quickly and more efficiently. NEW

Image Processing: Plug-ins, Filters, and Optics

• Filters including sharpen, soften, emboss, and glow, as well as user-customizable convolution filter matrices.
• Lanczos filtering provides high-quality resizing when down-scaling images, preserving edge detail during image resizing. NEW
• Pixel math operators and blend modes for limitless compositing effects.
• Motion analysis tool produces forward and reverse motion vectors. Motion Blur provides motion-estimated timewarps and motion blurs. Selectively set object blur based on relative motion.
• Support for hundreds of third-party ADN Sparks® plug-ins.

Batch

• Advanced flowchart representation of the compositing workflow and clip history to display all operations performed on a clip, allowing for easy editing of complex visual effects.
• Monitor downstream results with in-context viewers. Show the result at selected nodes while modifying others.
• Custom node bins save effects that you create so you can reapply them at will.
• Node grouping with user-definable group display settings. Cleanly organizes the schematic display while permitting rapid switching between node menus.
• RGB Blur to create Box, Gaussian, Radial, and Directional blurs.
• Glow node used for creating stylized animations, lighting simulations, and glows. NEW
• Integrated editing timeline with multiple video and audio tracks offers in-context editing, time warping, and synchronized audio. Unlimited vertical timeline editing with nested containers and multiple layers for complex visual effects. Render all soft effects in a clip from Autodesk Smoke. Create new Timewarp, Resize, Blend, and audio soft effects in the Batch timeline.
• Improved source and record timeline editing workflow.
• Segment FX permits uncommitted visual effects to be dropped into any edited timeline segment.
• Proxy processing allows for fast interaction even when working at the highest resolutions.
• Intelligent caching and bypassing functions allow automatic or user-defined pre-rendering of parts of the composite, increasing interactivity.
• Scripting with all the power of Unix. Scripts can be used to automate tasks ranging from email notification of render completion to generating QuickTime® previews.
• Batch Log and Queue Management handle workflow by setting up and prioritizing multiple-render jobs at once and monitoring progress on a web browser.
• Unified channel editor allows animation curves for different effects to be displayed and modified simultaneously in Batch.
• Digital notepads can be used to annotate nodes and provide reminders and instructions for further work.
• Enter Batch to apply effects to a single timeline segment before SoftFX® filters are applied (pre-segment), or to the result of a vertical compositing /soft effects (post-segment). NEW
• Batch navigation view mode provides a visual representation of the entire Batch effects tree resulting in a given Batch effects segment. NEW
• Batch paint is designed for a procedural compositing environment and includes settings to define how paint strokes are applied to the image sequence, the ability to slip the reveal frame offset, as well as the ability to adjust the scale of paint strokes. NEW

Infrastructure

• Autodesk® Stone® Direct storage solution—high-speed fiber channel storage solutions for real-time access to high-resolution media.
• Autodesk® Stone® FS software—advanced file system guarantees performance and reduces fragmentation risks.
• Autodesk® Wiretap™ technology—API provides convenient access to Stone FS file system by third-party applications.
• RAID 5 protection from data loss of audio and video media, and nonobstructive background healing.
• Supports Autodesk® Backdraft® Conform—an assistant utility for project and media management, I/O, conform, and editing.
• Autodesk® Wire® networking for visual browsing and high-speed transfer of clips. Support for InfiniBand® networking protocol delivers faster-than-real-time transfer of clips up to 2K 10-bit resolution.
• Supports standard file systems. Multiple Autodesk systems can connect to and share the same storage, such as a SAN or NAS, resulting in significantly faster media access and reduced media duplication (Linux only).

Motion Estimation Timewarp

• High-quality timewarp for speeding up or slowing down frame rate of a clip.
• Minimizes the telltale ghosting, softening, and stepping artifacts typical of traditional frame-averaging timewarps.
• Powerful optical flow algorithms track changes in image pixels from frame to frame and interpolate movement for crisp, clean rendering of extreme slow motion.
• Enables interaction with onscreen motion vectors to improve accuracy. Speed curves facilitate setup and animation of speed changes.

Animation: Channel Editor

• Easily create and manipulate animations in the ubiquitous Channel Editor.
• 16x9 user interface is standardized across all Autodesk editing/finishing and visual effects systems applications.
• Animation capabilities include auto-keyframing, motion paths, expressions, and fully editable spline curves with choice of interpolation and extrapolation modes.
• Convert expression and extrapolated curves into keyframed curves for additional manual control.
• Track Editor lets you view and slide individual keyframes on a track with multiple tracks or keyframes selected.
• Automatic and user-defined filters organize channel display for improved usability in large, complex setups.

Expressions

• Create accurate animations based on user-programmed parameters.
• Full library of functions including mathematical, logical operators, conditional operators, vectors, and constants.
• Parameters can be linked so that an object's rotation varies as a function of its distance from a light source—as you animate the object's position, its rotation is calculated automatically.

Desktop Editing

• Gestural, picture-based editing interface for easy viewing and intuitive clip manipulation. Cut, splice, trim, and play clips with fast, simple strokes.
• Prepare, preview, and compare clips in any resolution and format.
• Transition effects and timewarp tools with fully animatable speed curves, as well as adjustable interframe mixing and trailing.

Advanced Media Player

• Player maximizes image display and minimizes interface clutter for ideal viewing conditions when playing clips.
• Provides letterbox masking and safe title overlays for precise viewing of intended result.
• Real-time playback of 8- and 10-bit 4:4:4 PAL, NTSC, HDTV, and 2K (2,048x1,556) resolutions at all standard frame rates.
• Simultaneous display of SD and HDTV video to a broadcast monitor (platform specific).
• Real-time 3:2 insertion and removal, as well as the ability to mark in/out points and set cue marks for improved interactivity, faster editing, and A-frame timecode setting.

Film Tools

• Import standard color lookup tables (LUTs) or create your own using the intuitive tools provided.
• Grain management tools accurately match the grain of different film stocks and maintain homogenous grain across disparate elements used in the composite (CGI, scans from different film types, etc.).
• Tools for sampling, removing, and applying grain independently on each color channel.

Audio Tools

• Unlimited audio tracks with 32 tracks of real-time playback.
• Support for AudioDesk® workstation software in player and Batch timeline, including audio tools for mixing and mastering audio.
• Full audio editing functions, including cut, slip, timestretch with pitch correction control.
• Audio mixing capabilities with control of audio levels, pans, and EQ.
• Vari-speed audio scrubbing allows for precise work.
• Display audio waveform for syncing effects to sound.
• Dolby® E audio coding support.
• Soft effects can be applied to audio segments in the timeline.
• Import and export Broadcast Wave and MP3 files. NEW

Input/Output (I/O)

• Direct ingest of Panasonic® P2 MXF files. NEW
• Soft import workflow and background proxy generation of soft-imported streaming media files. NEW
• Codec support for DV, DV25, DV50, DVCPRO HD compressed codecs. NEW
• Create, save, and load codec encoding profiles to quickly set up and launch encoding jobs. NEW
• Send encoding tasks directly to Autodesk® Cleaner® XL software for expanded Export Media format support.
• Flint HD features serial digital interface for both ITU-R 601 standard (PAL/NTSC) and SMPTE 292M high-definition video.
• VTR control capabilities via RS-422 support for real-time frame-accurate control of video devices.
• Two tracks of ADAT digital audio I/O: 1 ADAT input, 1 ADAT output.
• Analog and AES/EBU I/O audio connectivity via included converter.
• Support for VariCam footage with automatic frame rate conversion.
• File-based I/O for most popular graphics formats including TIFF, PICT, TARGA®, JPEG, Cineon™, DPX, SGI®, Softimage®, and Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya® software formats.
• Import Adobe Photoshop PSD files with options to maintain layer structure or flatten image.
• Import/export Apple® QuickTime files on Linux platforms.
• Import 16- and 32-bit floating-point OpenEXR image files. Framestore storage, export, and editing support for 16-bit floating-point clips.
  

Conforming and Archiving

• Import/export standard EDL formats with cuts, dissolves, freeze-frames, vari-speed, reverses, split edits, and comments.
• Advanced conform tools for EDL, AAF, OMF (with audio media), and Apple® Final Cut Pro® XML files.
• Multilayer, mulitrack, or container assembly from multiple EDLs.
• Full multilayer timeline that is 100 percent compatible with the timeline in Autodesk Smoke and supports the complete set of Smoke soft effects. NEW
• EDL Editor for tweaking and revising EDLs. Sort EDLs for fast capture (A-, B-, C-, S-mode, and more).
• Convert EDL frame rates.
• Media unlinking and relinking.
• Automatic tape name assignation on file import.
• Recursively scan file directories for streamlined file import.
• Multi-Master Editing™ functionality—create multiple formats from a single master, including archiving to 720p tape.
• Full project archiving for backup of selected clips, libraries, or the entire project in a single operation. Setups can be archived together with the media.
• Archives may be stored as files (on networked drives or external USB or FireWire drives), on data tapes (LTO, DLT, DTF, and others), or (multi) videotape (SD and HDTV VTR).
• Creates HTML/XML table of contents for fast browsing and retrieval. Selective restore from archives.

Interoperability

• Interoperates with Autodesk® Flame®, Autodesk® Inferno®, Autodesk Smoke, Autodesk® Combustion®, Autodesk Toxik, and Autodesk Lustre software and effects systems, and provides extensive support for Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, and other 3D applications.
• Full clip compatibility between all Autodesk editing and effects applications. Supports multitrack, multilayer clips with containers and gaps.
• Soft-import image and audio files on shared storage without making a local copy, and then publish results back to the open file system.
• Open file system applications that support Wiretap (such as Lustre and Combustion) can read and write Stone FS clips directly from Autodesk Stone Direct storage.

Workflow and Productivity

• Support for Autodesk® Burn® background rendering solution in Batch and desktop modules, and in the Batch timeline.
• Integrated Autodesk® Backburner™ monitoring of Burn background renders.
• Project-based dual-view clip library provides media organization and sharing between separate Autodesk systems.
• Clip history automatically saves setups of rendered clips, providing a nondestructive way to access intermediate results and to make changes at any time.
• Extended search filters (search range of timecode, name, comment, and more).
• Extensive hotkeys enable instant operation of commands and menu selections. Comprehensive hotkey editor enables flexible user customization.
• Add notes to desktop clips that are also viewable in Autodesk Inferno, Autodesk Flame, and Autodesk Smoke.
• Online help and button tooltips provide quick access to documentation and button descriptions.
• Autodesk WiretapCentral software browses Autodesk systems clip libraries using a network-connected web browser for quicker reviews and approvals. NEW
• Autodesk® SystemCentral technology provides centralized diagnostic tools in a web-based application that simplifies the process of running diagnostic tests on your systems application. NEW