I
f the dazzling star wipe isn’t having the same impact on your home mov-
ies it used to, maybe it’s time to add a little pizzazz to your vacation vid-
eos. We’re talking muzzle flashes, explosions, and lightsaber battles.
Welcome to the world of FXhome’s EffectsLab Pro. Spawned from the
popular AlamDV, EffectsLab Pro is the go-to app for, well, automatic weap-
ons fire and lightsaber effects. We know that sounds odd, but these effects
are exactly what most budding YouTube viral cinematographers want.
EffectsLab Pro lets you add smoke- and fire-particle effects, falling meteor-
ites, color correction, masking, and other visual effects galore, in addition to
the phasers and .44 Magnum effects that built its reputation.
The latest version of EffectsLab Pro adds multithreading support,
which was able to utilize about 70 percent of the quad-core machine we
tested it on. You’ll want as much computer as possible too, handling HDV
content made even our quad-core box feel pokey. True to the product’s
simple-to-use reputation, we shot a DV-res movie and added muzzle blasts
to create a quick zombie movie in just a couple of hours. As a bonus, the
program has a loyal community filled with folks who’ll help you add every-
thing from sniper scopes, to night vision, to X-ray vision effects—for free!
Overall, we were very pleased with the muzzle flash and lightsaber
effects (the company even makes lightsaber sound effects available for
download), but some of the eye candy, such as the built-in fire preset, fell
into cheese land. We’ve seen output from more experienced users that
looked satisfying, so it can be done, but not as quickly and easily as theother effects. You shouldn’t expect Industrial Light & Magic in a box. This is
a $150 program, not a $150 million EFX company. But for adding that little
special-effects touch to your short movies, EffectsLab Pro is far
easier and far cheaper than the alternatives, and a whole lotta
fun to boot.
—Gordon Mah UnGFXhome EffectsLab Pro
Think of it as a Glock in a box for your home movies
64 MAXIMUMPC april 2007
reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
adding shotgun muzzle flashes to you home videos has never
been so easy!9
effectslab pro
$150, http://www.fxhome.comW
e’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Hitachi’s Deskstar T7K500
hard drive, with an easy-to-remember 500GB of storage, is unremark-
able. More than that, it underperforms when compared to similarly featured,
similarly priced (if not cheaper!) products.
Although the Deskstar’s speedy random access time of 13.2ms is
faster than times posted by all of the similarly outfitted 500GB models
we’ve looked at, that’s all this drive has going for it. The Deskstar’s average
read time, which is a pretty good reflection of a drive’s performance across
the entirety of the disc, taps out at an average of 64.2MB/s.
When compared against the sea of drives that sit in our Lab, the
Deskstar’s average read speed is barely better than the Seagate 400GB
Barracuda 7200.8’s—a PATA drive, mind you. And SATA models from both
Samsung and Western Digital (which have feature sets that are nearly identi-
cal to the Deskstar’s) utterly destroy the Hitachi in our benchmarks, as both
push read speeds upward of 70MB/s.
These results were slightlycurious to us, as the
Deskstar sports three
platters of approximately
166GB apiece. That gives
it quite a boost in areal
density when compared
to the Western Digital
Caviar’s measly four-
platter 125GB setup. As we’ve seen in the past, drives with juicer areal
densities tend to run faster. But not in the Deskstar’s case!
So, what then is the good news? If Hitachi’s new terabyte drive helps
lower the price of the company’s smaller models, the cost-to-benefit ratio
of the T7K500 could, in the future, make it a nice solution. That’s
about the only silver lining
we see.
—daVId MUrPhYHitachi Deskstar T7K500
500GB of meh
The drive’s fea-
tures—a 16MB buf-
fer, a SaTa 3G inter-
face, and nCQ—do
little to push it past
the competition.7
hitachi deskstar
$200, http://www.hitachi.comHitacHi Deskstar Western Digital
t7k500 caviar se16Best scores are bolded.benchMarkS
average reaD speeD 64.2MB/s 72.6MB/s
Burst speeD 127.2MB/s 204.9MB/s
ranDoM access speeD 13.2ms 13.5ms