What happend to Serious Magic?

[iltoad]

A while back I was looking into this program, Serious Magic, for chorma-keying. It looked to me like a real good product for what it was set out to do, but it’s not around anymore.

Does anyone know where I can get the program?

[Anonymous]

iltoad,

This software product was called Ultra. It got an excellent magazine review a couple years ago. I think it could be used with any video editing software that ran on MS Windows. I believe the Adobe people bought it up, and now it’s part of the Adobe Premier editing package. So if you want to use it, you have to use Premier. (<Sigh> … I use Vegas. If only I’d bought it before Serious Magic sold the rights to Adobe!)

Oh well. I can do greenscreen with Vegas. It’s just that Ultra had some extra features that would have been nice.

BTW, only the MS Windows version of Premier can use Ultra.

Ken

[jerronsmith]

The Ultra technology is not a part of the CS4 level software and was a completely separate program (though could only be bought with the production premium suite) from Premiere. SO at the moment guess it is kind of on hiatus.

[domineaux]

You can use the Sony MovieStudio 8 Platinum Pro for chromakey. In fact, you may be able to use the other sony software as well. I have version I mentioned and chromakey is pretty easy with it.

You might use the lesser expensive Sony software as well. You have to have the Vegas Pro forMasking.

[composite1]

If you can still get a copy of Adobe Production Premium CS3, Ultra is included in that package. I do believe they took it out because After FX has some excellent chromakey tools built-in. Weird though, because they kept On-location and made it cross-platform which Ultra wasn’t in CS3.

[jerronsmith]

Adobe doesnt’ have anything like onLocation while AE can do everything that Ultra could. Just not as automatically. It also is integrated with the other programs in the suite which Ultra never was.

According to one of the developers logs over at Adobe, they just weren’t sure how to make Ultra less of a stand alone program and integrate it with the rest of the suite, which it really isn’t. So they put it on the shelf in favor of some other enhancements to the applications.

[Author]

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