Bruce Himmelblau, Producer & YouTube Strategist at Blue Sky Video Productions & co-host of BSVP On-Site sits down with Jim Tierney, creator of Beauty Box to talk about the magic of the plug-in.
Beauty Box Video 3.0 takes the best selling and most awarded skin smoothing technology available and makes it even better. We’ve improved the automatic mask which gives you more precise skin retouching capabilities and added in presets to give you a variety of styles on top of the main functionality of smoothing out wrinkles and blemishes.
Beauty Box is designed to do automatic skin re-touching on video. The way it works is, the software analyzes the skin tones of a person in the shot and builds a mask based on those skin tones. By setting the playhead on the first frame of any shot, Beauty Box then analyzes the shot configuring the skin tones from the rest of the shot. The editor then dials in how much smoothing they want applied to the face or the look of the shot. As long as the lighting is consistent, the skin tones are going to remain the same and the skin tone values will be tracked through out the video clip. In essence, it creates a moving mask that isolates just the skin areas and keep other features such as eyes and eye lashes and hair and other elements nice and sharp. Just the skin area that gets smoothed out.
Beauty Box can be applied to any scene, whether it be a sit-down interview, talking head or narrative film, Beauty Box can be used to track multiple people within a shot. However, some manual adjustment may need to be applied depending how close the skin tones are.
Tierney does point out that there is quite a bit of rending time required for Beauty Box, but it is GPU accelerated and the faster the video card that is installed and processor speed that your system has, the better.
One of the suggestions that Digital Anarchy makes is to use Beauty Box with Adobe After Effects because the way that After Effects is set up is that it uses multi-processors really really well especially for effects work. Tierney points out that Final Cut Pro and Premiere also use multi-processing well, but they do it in a different way. And because they aren’t effects based programs, rather they are primarily for editing, they are not as efficient for effects work. Beauty Box usually performs faster in After Effects because of the way it handles multi-processing. So if you apply Beauty Box in After Effects then render it out and bring the footage into your editing program it will reduce or eliminate any rendering required when you’re ready to export the final video.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/bsvptv
Facebook: www.facebook.com/BlueSkyVideoProductions
