Viscosity by Sonic Foundry is an amazing product with a moderately steep learning curve. Over the past few years we've seen hard drive space shoot through the roof and hardware and software power increase dramatically. When affordable scanners came out, people thought we had found the golden goose because now we could archive all our pictures and create web pages to share those special moments like Aunt Matilda winning the pie eating contest at age 80. But with the dramatic improvements and cost reduction of CD storage, and affordable incredibly large hard drives, people will soon be moving from still shots of the family to video storage and home movies. Viscosity is a program that allows you to create and edit those movies and more.
October 03, 2000
For the beginner, opening up Viscosity may be a little intimidating. Punching up a new file, you have the option of creating a bitmap or animation. That's right, an animation. This program allows you to work frame by frame creating scenes and then slice and dice them and insert all types of transitions to create whatever type of animation you'd like. You can also use the program like an advanced paint studio where you can draw very advanced artwork for use in multimedia and web development, or import pictures and use Viscosity to edit them with a variety of filters and effects.
Viscosity is a downloadable program and comes with little documentation. This weakness is nicely compensated by an excellent tutorial section on Sonic Foundry's website. With over 50 tutorials showing you how to work with animations and apply a wide variety of effects, you'll be up to speed in no time. The variety of the tutorials is excellent, though at times imperfect. For example, one tutorial said, "use the Rectangle tool to draw over the image. A spotlight should appear." When the spotlight didn't appear, I became confused and wound up skipping the step with no apparent consequence of doing so. Another problem was lack of control on slider bars. One tutorial instructed me to set the gaussian blur to 2.0. I could only get 1.5 or 2.9 because I had to drag a small slider with the mouse. An edit box for exact control on all settings would be a welcome addition in future versions. Another welcome addition to the tutorial section would be on what different compressions to use in storing video and some explanations of the various codecs. In an age where video is replacing stills, people need some education on video storage and compression techniques.
One thing I was fascinated by was the ability to create textures in Viscosity. I was able to create some wild textures and then using the layers functions, create other effects by overlaying a filter and performing a variety of blend operations on the texture. This was a lot of fun and useful for applications where you may be doing multimedia work or game development and want to create natural looking textures easily.
One major weakness in the program for me is the lack of object-oriented drawing. Many programs allow you to draw an object and then change the size and other characteristics after you've drawn it. Viscosity instead uses a layer-based approach and once you've drawn something to the canvas, the only way to modify the shape, is to delete it and redraw...thank goodness for undo. This became very frustrating at times and I found myself using another program to draw my pictures, and then paste the image into Viscosity to do post-production type work.
For those of you that do extensive video work, a complimentary product to Viscosity is Vegas Video, a multitrack video editing package (also a Sonic Foundry product), which features a menu item to open up your video right into Viscosity to do touch-up work.
Viscosity really shines in its ability to work with video and create smooth transitions between scenes. With over 20 different effects that can be performed over time, you can create cool transitions that incorporate fading in text, color changes, deformations, as well as standard transition functions like fades and wipes. If you're not sure Viscosity is for you, download a demo and check it out. It's a solid product that could be what you're looking for. It works for me.
Oak Norton is webmaster for an international marketing company.
