One of the more helpful and valuable tools to leap over to the Windows side of the desktop revolution of visual effects is certainly Puffin Designs Commotion 2.1. With multiple tracking operations, roto-spline and painting tools, this is a must for anyone wanting to either pull off some fancy effects work or create fancy animatable paint strokes.

Commotion first grabbed my attention a few years back when I saw that you could use it to paint in real time on a Macintosh. You could paint something on 30 frames of an RGB image, and then view this image (made up of millions of colors), forwards and backwards, over and over again, back and forth -- pretty incredible for the desktop in those days. Now, Commotion has crossed platforms over to Windows and has the ability to play back nearly a minute of footage with millions of colors -- if you have the RAM.

The many tool options within Commotion 2.1. Another nice feature: you can change the feathering and size of your brush in real-time

There are so many cool features included in Commotion 2.1 that I could keep writing about it for hours, but since there's a manual that covers that, I'll simply point out a few key features.

Really Real Time
When painting in Commotion, you can paint in real time, or you can record strokes for use with fx brushes, clone tools, or for just regular paint tools to be used over a different set of frames than the ones you are currently working on. The cool thing is being able to view what you have animated or painted in real-time, instantaneously, either as you go, or once you've completed painting (of course, this depends upon the amount of RAM you have). The super-cloning tools are great for performing the quick wire removal shots. For example, you can load up a clean background sequence and a foreground sequence with an actor attached to wires.

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