Conduit is Suite, Magic Bullet was Framed
Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 11:50PM 
More w00ting later, but for now just a quick note that the Conduit Suite was released today. Like Magic Bullet Looks, you get a standalone app and plug-ins for all your favorite hosts together in one package.
Speaking of Magic Bullet and me being behind on things, Magic Bullet Frames was released recently as well, providing wicked fast and smooth deinterlacing and 24p conversion right in your NLE.
Conduit has always allowed you to do nodal compositing in Final Cut and Motion, which to me was like allowing you to do brain surgery in a bumper car. But now it works in Photoshop and After Effects as well, which makes a ton more sense. I've been waiting for years on After Effects's front lawn holding a nodal boom box over my head, and while this doesn't quite answer all my hopes and dreams, it's a damn fine start.
By the way, Conduit is not just a complete GPU-accelerated real-time compositing system that now runs inside all your favorite apps. It's also the most innovative visualization of the venerable nodal compositing model ever implemented. In other words, these aren't just nodes, these are phat nodez with very clever ways of showing you what's going where. Nice job DV Garage.
EDIT: To help cut through the confusion about what platforms Conduit runs on, here's a critical bit from the DV Garage site:
What do you get?Conduit Live - A GPU-powered, stand-alone nodal capture tool designed for live, real-time video compositing (Mac only).
Conduit fxPlug - GPU-powered nodal ccompositing for Final Cut Pro and Motion (Mac only).
Conduit After Effects - Nodal compositing for After Effects. (Mac and Windows).
Conduit Photoshop - Nodal compositing for Photoshop (Mac and Windows)
Reader Comments (14)
Darn. Mac only. Time to save my pennies and buy the new Octocore I've been promising myself.
So Stu, do you think Adobe will ever implement a native nodal system into After Effects? If you and Mark Christiansen have the ear of the AE dev team I guess there's a better chance than ever. I know exactly how it could work too, integrating perfectly with the layer paradigm!
Magic Bullet Frames sounds like the slightly richer man's deinterlace to 24fps over the technique you described using for The Green Project. You can work with 60i material in AE but have it be converted to 24p during all your effects and mastering work, since it's just another effect applied (the first effect applied I would reckon). Would this be a correct statement?
Conduit is very sweet there is more info here
http://www.lacquer.fi/blog/?cat=3
how i would point out if you scroll down that page they have the most disturbing demo footage i seen for a while "what is he doing to that girl"
any i agree conduit is great
w00t!
I've heard of it before but never really looked at it.
Cool.
Doubly cool, actually, because it allows nodal compositing in Photoshop, of all things. For those of us who do a lot of work in non-destructive environments (even non-nodal ones like AE), working in Photoshop -- even if it's where you started, all those years ago -- is like fishing with dynamite.
Blindfolded.
The Suite is Mac only but you get AE and PS filters for Windows included.
As a Windows user, I'm pretty excited to finally get to play with Conduit. But, the Win version is not quite as well implemented as the Mac (yet...?). The "shake loose" method of removing nodes doesn't work, and sometimes it takes a couple of extra clicks in the nodes pane to wake it up. There's no Undo/Redo, and it doesn't tell you how many GPU instructions it's using. However, the standalone Preview window is pretty cool. All in all I'm very impressed, but I hope the rough edges will get smoothed before long, and we may get more parity between the Mac and Win versions.
Anyone know for sure if this works with Final Cut Express? It says it does on the website, but I downloaded the demo and it doesn't show up as a plugin in FCE.
Is there a demo of the Windows version available yet? This looks very promising and I would like to try it out before I whip out my credit card.
Bought Magic Bullet Looks yesterday (did the Beta... the final version is AWESOME!) Bought Conduit today. The Conduit Live video won me over. Alas, the scopes are not yet in the After Effects plug in.
Some folks are requiring full reinstall of Final Cut Studio to get it to work, due to fx plug in conflicts. Also no HDV live input through firewire yet. I haven't yet begun to mess with final cut.
I'm having issues in AE7. Conduit works at 8bpc, but not 16 or 32bpc. (the preview window bugs out, as does the comp window) We'll see what the response is.
The upside is that you can work in the standalone Conduit Live -which has scopes- save the settings, and then open them in AE. The complete node layout transfers. I figured I could do slop composites in FCP and fine tune in AE, and this allows you to NOT lose work or take time with renders. (lack of roto in conduit makes AE very necessary... or Motion, if you work with that.)
"Phat Nodez" - LOL!
Man, I am so hooked on Conduit. Totally a game-changer, and the price is great. I can't imagine getting better, more flexible keys. I've used it for some color correction situations, and having it in Motion is nice.
I'm trying to figure out what to do with the Live app. It's mind-blowing to think I can do all those calculations in real time.
Pauli Ojala is great, and has been responsive to comments before (freaky images notwithstanding).
+1 for the "Say Anything" reference. =)
Hey! Yes, Conduit is amazing and addictive. The cool things you could do with Shake can be done with Conduit by adjusting the terminology a little bit.
Conduit Live will work as a standalone compositor, giving you scopes you can't get to in AE. Load in your footage and get at it. Rather than rendering out a matte, you click the upper right save button. In AE or FCP, you'd launch Conduit and then Open and find that .conduit file. Pretty awesome!
FWIW: The issue may be with my 128mb of Vram. Pauli is responsive, and I appreciate that. The button issue is solved in AE7 by stretching out that panel wider.
Is Conduit worth the money? Absolutely. HOWEVER, it's not working 100% for me yet. I'd rather set realistic expectations than have users quit with Conduit if the demo glitches out. Share problems and solutions as they arrive. To Pauli's credit, he's handling it and I have no regrets in buying Conduit. No one could ever say that for DVD Studio Pro 1.0... That was never fun.
A little spoken of app that the DVgarage makes in addition to Conduit is DVMattePro3. This new version should be in every DV rebels toolkit. Right now, I think it the best keyer out there. Especially, for the DV Rebel. I can get some amazing keys with my 24p footage recorded on my DVX100A. It offers green screen correction, light wrapping and more.I'm getting ready to put it to the test here very soon on a project.