Pro Editing @ Home

Interview - Zax Dow, President, Zaxwerks

by Kevin P McAuliffe

As people who read my articles know, I am a huge fan of 3D animation, and 3D programs in general. The problem is they can be very hard to learn, and by the time you've figured everything out, a newer version has come along. People have been hoping for "true" 3D in Adobe's After Effects for a long time, but until now, we are still working in a 3D world, with 2D objects. That's were Zaxwerks 3D Invigerator and the new Pro Animator FX for Final Cut Pro's FXPlug architecture come in. You can now work in a true 3D world, with some awesome looking results. I thought I would talk to Zax Dow, President of Zaxwerks to get a bit of history on the company, and a look at the new Pro Animator FX plug-in for Final Cut Pro.

 

PE@H: Can you give our readers a bit of history on Zaxwerks?

ZD: Zaxwerks began in typical "There's-got-to-be-a-better-way" fashion. I'd been doing production work for 15+ years and then worked on the software side for a few more. None of the companies writing 3-D software were paying attention to the bread-and-butter work. They were shooting for the holy grail of character animation while completely missing the point that all of us guys in the trenches were killing ourselves just trying to get basic motion graphics done.

From my production experience I'd developed a sense for workflow: how to look over a task and change it to get better results in less time. I'd also been a big fan of plug-ins ever since SuperPaint. Plug-ins seemed like a great way for a little guy to get started developing software. So by the time Zaxwerks began (1996) I had a list of plug-ins and was ready to test the waters.

It began with a small modeling plug-in called EPS Invigorator that worked inside of a 3-D program called ElectricImage. The whole idea was that you could simply open an Adobe Illustrator file and have the plug-in turn it into a complete 3-D model, and do it in such a way that you could change anything about the model at any time during the production process, without having to rebuild it. Creating beveled 3-D models of lettering turns out to be mathematically challenging. We had to invent lots of new technology in order to get perfect results. What this one plug-in did though was take a time consuming job and reduce it to a single click. It was a big hit but the ElectricImage user base was pretty small. Still it gave us enough money to keep at it, and eventually was used to create the famous "Long ago - Far away" screen crawl at the beginning of the StarWars movies. (episodes I - II - III not IV - V - VI)

After that we continued expanding the software, concentrating on workflow, making the entire 3-D process faster and easier for editors and motion graphics folks.

 

PE@H: It seems as though Zaxwerks has focused mainly on plug-ins for After Effects and Photoshop for a long time. Why did you decide to develop Pro Animator for FX Plug?

ZD: Plug-in development is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that your development can be focused, the curse is that each time the host changes version numbers the plug-in has to be fixed so it'll still work. If you write for several hosts you end up spending much of your time on compatibility updates rather than on creating cool new plug-ins.

ProAnimator is our top of the line titling software that makes the whole 3-D process fast and easy. ProAnimator was done first as a standalone so it would be compatible with every editing system on the market. If your editor will import QuickTime or AVI files then it's compatible. Once word of ProAnimator started to spread we began getting requests to make it work as a plug-in. We felt that Final Cut had a user base large enough to support a version of ProAnimator written as an FxPlug. But every decision which seems so simple has hidden dragons lying under the surface.

PE@H: How long has PAFX been in development?

ZD: Longer than you could possibly imagine. The first tests were with our Invigorator plug-in probably 6 years ago. Final Cut supported After Effects plug-ins, but not all of them. Invigorator was the most complicated plug-in ever written and parts of it just didn't want to work in any other host. Over the years many folks have tried to get Invigorator to work in other hosts. In fact the team at Apple who writes Motion at one time tried to get Invigorator working in a program now called Combustion.

Once we had ProAnimator working as a plug-in we thought it would be easy to make it a Final Cut plug-in, but once again we just couldn't do it. What we needed was a new interface that could support our growing feature set as well as make it even simpler for the plug-in to talk to the host. We started working on this new user interface and at the same time developed a real-time renderer using Apple's FxPlug architecture.

We finally got the details worked out and were able to release the FxPlug version just this August.

PE@H: Is there a particular reason Zaxwerks decided to move Pro Animator to Final Cut Pro & Motion, instead of 3D Invigorator?

ZD: Final Cut doesn't have any 3-D in it. ProAnimator does the impossible and adds 3-D to a program that can't think in 3-D. It's only able to do this due to having its own self-contained 3-D world. You can think of it like having your own iPhone or Blackberry. You have this incredibly powerful device which sits in your pocket, which you can use to pull information from anywhere in the world. You personally don't need to have any special powers, just a pocket to carry it around in. ProAnimator is like this device. We finally got ProAnimator small enough to fit into Final Cut's and Motion's pocket. The 3D Invigorator required a special kind of pocket that those programs didn't have.

PE@H: How has the customer response been to the plug-in so far?

ZD: Very good. We've had people jumping right into the spirit of things and adding really cool 3D titles to everything from holiday videos to professional productions. The only hitch we've had so far has been folks wanting tutorials. So we've posted video quick start guides and have many other tutorials planned and in the works.

PE@H: Did you work with Apple when developing the plug-in? What has been their response to it?

ZD: Apple has been great to work with. You know you say "Apple" but it's really just a group of guys and gals all working together. They have faces they like to tell jokes and I've known many of these folks for quite a while. The day I sent the email saying that we had made a breakthrough and had ProAnimator working inside of Motion, one of the product managers wrote me an email saying OMG! OMG! OMG! Over and over. They were very excited.

PE@H: Does Zaxwerks offer any other 3D plug-ins for Final Cut Pro?

ZD: 3D Flag is now available for FxPlug! Actually we did it first. We used it as the test bed for developing the real-time rendering which we then used in ProAnimator.

PE@H: For editors and graphic designers who aren't familiar with Zaxwerks current product lineup, why should they get excited about this product?

ZD: If you are trying to expand your services or attract more clients 3-D graphics can make you stand out. The problem is that most 3-D software is extremely hard to learn. Our software is by far the fastest and easiest way to add professional level 3-D title and logo animations to your videos. The ProAnimator is made to get you up and running very quickly. The first tutorial shows you how to make a complete 3-D animation in five clicks. Speed and ease is what people notice first about the program, then once they get further into the program it just keeps getting better and better.

I want to thank Zax for taking the time to talk to us about Zaxwerks and Pro Animator FX. For more information on Zaxwerks and their plug-ins, or to download a free demo, you can head over to www.zaxwerks.com .