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Digital Anarchy, a leading provider of visual effects software for Adobe and Apple products, today announced the release of ToonIt! for Avid, their first plugin for Avid Systems. ToonIt! will reliably and easily create cartoon-like images from film and video footage, giving Avid editors the ability to produce effects usually available only to animators. The filters use advanced algorithms from Toonamation to create the cartoon shading and line drawings.

Stan Schwartz, co-founder and President of Toonamation, said about their render engine, “Cartoons, whether full color images or line drawings, are a natural way for people to express themselves. Until now there hasn't been a high-quality way to create these effects that isn't very labor intensive.”

With ToonIt!, Avid users can easily customize the ‘toon’ effect for almost any footage in a variety of ways. There are four filters in the set. The Roto Toon filter creates flat shades of color and gives you full control over details like outlines, shading styles and halftone effects. The Outlines Only filter uses edge detection to produce cartoon-style edges, removing color altogether from the footage for a black-and-white comic-book style. Goth Toon makes use of internal color rotoscoping to create a high contrast effect, while Blacklight Edges’ edge detection creates a fun, customizable set of neon-colored edges.

One of the key features of ToonIt! is its ability to minimize temporal artifacts. Other cartooning software frequently produces an undesirable ‘vibrating’ image that is the result of color regions and lines jittering from frame to frame. In comparison, ToonIt! filters reduce these graphic issues and produce very consistent, pleasing results from one frame to the next. This temporal noise reduction and visual consistency  drastically reduce the need to make adjustments via rotoscoping or other manual editing methods.

Great features in ToonIt! for Avid include:

• Beautiful Variety of Styles: Create a number of sophisticated looks including Flat Cartoon, Graphic Novel, Line Art, Stipple and Pen & Ink.
• No Resolution Limits: ToonIt! will work on footage of any resolution or size, from web to film.
• No Hand Masking or Rotoscoping: Each toon effect is generated automatically. While there are customizable controls in the plugin, no manual or frame-by-frame work is needed.
• Customizable Looks: With 40 different parameters available to adjust the plugin results, there are many possible approaches to get the best result for different types of footage.
• Temporal Noise Reduction: ToonIt! keeps the results consistent over time, frame-by-frame. There is no jittering when played back at full speed, which is a common problem for software trying to achieve the cartoon effect.

Digital Anarchy CEO Jim Tierney commented about ToonIt! for Avid, “We’re excited to make ToonIt! our first plugin available for Avid systems. We feel Avid editors who are looking to provide visual effects will be excited by how easy it is to give video a good cartoon look. It’s a commonly requested effect and there’s nothing else as powerful or flexible as ToonIt! out there.”