EboSuite and SenSei, live visual add-ons for Ableton Live, got some nice updates this week. SenSei, the tool that puts the power of Unreal Engine inside Ableton Live, gets a particularly major expansion, with some 27 new plug-ins, including mesh loaders, 3D video effects, visualizers, dynamic surfaces, and a video overlay.
Read moreIt’s a great week for free and open-source media tools. Hot on the heals of GIMP 3.0 final, we get Blender 4.4. It’s labeled as focusing on stability, but the Blender contributors have packed a bunch of major animation, video, and UI features in there, too. Now, we can say this is the tool used in Oscar-winning films (Flow).
Flow was the surprise of the Oscars: a true underground hit from Latvia’s writer/director Gints Zilbalodis. It’s beautiful, expressive, and intimate in a way that big-studio features are not. And it’s a triumph of making the tech operate on a human level, fully exploiting the free and open source Blender and its real-time render engine EEVEE.