Sam here…

So… if for no other reason than it’s the coolest plugin demo video ever created, go watch this one from FX Factory about the Yanobox Nodes 2 plugin:

http://fxfactory.com/info/nodes2/

To be perfectly honest, I was a bit scared of this one when I first got it. It took me awhile to open it up and really dig into it… and even longer before I figured out what I’d actually want to do with it.

Honestly, I’m literally not capable of building one of the standard templates in Nodes on my own… so it’s nice to be able to start from something you could never even begin to understand how to create and then quickly start building on top of it.

Like most things… once you make the decision you’re going to dive in with it no matter what, you start figuring things out, and once I decided I was going to take the time to figure out how Nodes worked, I actually picked it up pretty easily.

Also, the templates were surprisingly responsive on both my Macbook and Mac Pro. I was able to move sliders around and see things update extremely quickly, which I have to admit was a surprise. With the level of complexity in these plugins, I was expecting to see lots of beach balls when I messed with stuff. This has not been the case with Nodes, for the most part.

For me, Nodes is most useful as a place to begin your larger template or as a quick way to throw on a complicated design element on an existing comp you’re doing. Basically, you get a sense of something you want to do, and instead of reaching into the Motion Particle Emitters tab (another underutilized resource that is a bit hard to wrap your head around), grab a Nodes template and get going. You’ll likely end up with something cool a whole lot faster than you would building something from scratch.

They’re great also as just a ready made cool looking particles element you can easily throw a blend mode on (I typically soft light or Overlay for this) to give a texture some life. You can use them in a very similar way to how you’d use a Light Leak… and the two complement each other nicely if you need something like that.

So often, you get plugins that just replicate stuff you could probably do yourself…. or feel very “stock” or hard to customize. Not Yanobox Nodes.

Things are so ridiculously customizable, it’s hard to go into too much detail. I think Plugins like this are the future, I think, because they allow you to start from a place you’d have literally no idea how to get to on your own. Like Coremelt’s Slice-X, It allows advanced effects techniques to become a lot more approachable to the average editor… and I think that’s something all Plugin makers should aspire to doing.

I’ve never seen another plugin package like Nodes 2. It’s definitely not cheap ($299), but you get what you pay for… and then some.

For more information on how to get started with it, go here:

http://www.yanobox.com/NodesOnlineManual/

If you have a need to quickly step up your Motion Graphics game, this plugin should probably be at the top of your list.

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