With 12 apps being offered for $39.99, you can’t beat the deal and with 25% of all orders going to charity you can even rationalize your purchase as being a gift to those less fortunate. Win-Win
I’ll talk about one of the major apps in the list that caught my eye.
Kinemac, the 3D motion graphics application, tops the app list as far as retail value ($299). If you’re a Mac user with at least a marginal amount of interest in media production, I would say based on its inclusion you would be hard pressed to find a reason not to buy this bundle. While it doesn’t quite measure up to apps like Apple’s Motion or Adobe’s AfterEffects in the realm of features, it’s certainly intuitive and easy on the eyes.
Some of the more powerful features in Kinemac include being able able to drag damn-near any image type to any surface for mapping. You can map not only 2d raster images but text, 2d vector (svg), and video files as well! If you don’t fancy building your own models using the limited primitives (sphere, cube, cone, cylinder, ring, star, 3D text, etc) provided in-app, you can drag over 3D obj and 3ds files made using other 3D modeling software. All of these features are implemented in realtime so you get a machine-specific representation (I’ll touch on this in a moment) of your animation immediately without rendering. Key framing is full featured with full bezier editing via a timeline. You can add backgrounds with alpha to export Final Cut compatible exports for video overlays.
Now the hiccup:
Some things I noticed about Kinemac that concern me are the fact that your export options are limited by your graphics hardware (another reason to pony up for Pro’s verses standard macbooks), shadows as a result of lighting are seemingly unsupported (unless you’re talking about text effect shadows), and 3d modeling (as far as creating, forming, and exporting your own meshes) is not supported.
Using an Intel graphics chipset means that you don’t have support for anti-aliased exports of your projects (kinda weak), it also limits (possibly removing) your motion blur options. Even on my Dual G5 with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro motion blur export controls are disabled, though I can add anti-aliasing (yay). The lack of shadows made me pause, because it seems like such a no-brainer to include, but technically since this software does everything in real-time it is limited in what it can represent without a proper ray tracing engine. We all know that real-time shadows as seen in video games are generally of poor quality (see cheating) so perhaps this is why they didn’t bother to include this as a feature. Finally the copy of Kinemac that you purchase is tied (via hardware signature/online activation) to a single workstation. A pretty inflexible arrangement in this day and age of extreme workstation mobility to be sure, but hell, why not buy to bundles? You will still be saving tons of money.
Running at a fraction of your $39 investment you will certainly get tons of use out of Kinemac despite any technical hang-ups you may notice. If you’re a mac user, I suggest taking the plunge.
Here’s a list of the other apps being offered (and some that will be unlocked as more buyers commit).
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
You need to get a job either working as a salesman for these companies or for Apple itself. I’m telling you man, apply at the Apple Store. Get your foot in the door there then climb the ladder all the way to Cupertino.