Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange.
- 3D Design in Flash MX
Electric Rain’s Swift 3D Xpress is an extension for Flash MX that lets you work with any vector object and convert it to an animated 3D object. Extrusion, rotation, lighting, surface material and animation effects can all be applied before rendering a self-contained movie clip in raster or vector form ready to be used in a Flash timeline. It’s useful for creating slick 3D effects and animations without leaving the Flash interface.
- Link Illustrator Files to Motion
Ampede’s LayerLink ($120) is a plug-in for Apple’s powerful new Motion video application that lets you link to a native layered Illustrator file. Layers can be scaled, rotated, moved, filtered and animated in real time. And — get this — if the Illustrator file changes, the changes are reflected in Motion.
- Amazingly Powerful iMovie Plug-ins
For several years, GeeThree has specialized in adding new transitions to iMovie. Their latest plug-in packs ($30-$70 per collection) include 3D transitions such as Cube, Grid Flips, Accordion, and Billboard, special effects such as putting different videos on each side of a spinning cube, shatter effects, professional scoreboards, animated titles, a moving strip of film, a video wall… you get the idea. Their Whiteboard effect lets you write onto the video, Stabilize smoothes out shakes and jitter, while Ani-Mattes adds more than 100 professionally designed animated backgrounds. You can pan and zoom over a curved path, and much more. Their Web site shows some very convincing examples.
- InDesign Plug-ins for Figures, Footnotes & Indexes
Virginia Systems is a great source for InDesign plug-ins that help you automatically number and keep track of figures, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and indexes. If your projects would benefit from this kind of automation, check out Sonar Bookends InSeq, Sonar Bookends InFnote, and Sonar Bookends InDex ($195 each).
- Cross-References in InDesign
Virginia Systems’ Sonar Bookends InXref ($195) is a cross-referencing plug-in for InDesign that lets you mark anything in a document, such as a table, figure, photo, etc., and then refer to its page number elsewhere in the document. If the item moves, its page number reference updates automatically.
Virginia Systems Inc.
Photoshop
- Four Great Image Fixers
Charles Maurer recommends these four plug-ins by The Imaging Factory for correcting perspective, angle, and lens distortions such as light falloff and magnification at the edges of wide-angle lenses, and color fringing: Debarrelizer ($40), Perspective ($40), Squeeze ($20), and Vignette ($40). Source: TidBITS#748/27-Sep-04
The Imaging Factory
QuarkXPress
- Link Databases to QuarkXPress
Em Software’s Xcatalog 6.2 lets you create bi-directional links between a QuarkXPress 6 document and an external database. You can link any picture or text element, from a single character to a phrase or paragraph or entire story. It’s excellent for making sure that you’ve included the absolute latest pictures, text, and prices. $800, or $1,200 for ODBC support. They also have a version for InDesign, named InCatalog.
Em Software
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This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on December 1, 2004
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