Creating ghostly figures or people (or other creatures) in a hologram may look like magic when seen on the big screen, but as with most awe inspiring effects, they are the result of much hard work by computer generated graphics artists. If you want to take the “hard” out of the “hard work”, Red Giant's Holomatrix plug-in for Adobe After Effects might be an essential tool. Holomatrix is a set of plug-ins and scripts with which you can rapidly and effortlessly generate stunning hologram and ghost images.Contrary to how most After Effects plug-ins work, Holomatrix isn’t a drag and drop affair. Because of its complexity—Holomatrix in essence is a compositing subsystem—it requires an organised workflow. You start the effect by selecting the Holomatrix.jsxbin item from the Window menu, after which a new panel with controls appears. Furthermore, you can’t rename the affected layer without running into trouble. And finally, when Holomatrix is applied, a new folder is created in the Project window for pre-comps—and you guessed it, that folder is to be left alone unless you are an experienced After Effects expressions coder.
Except for these workflow assumptions, Holomatrix works like any other After Effects plug-in. There are no controls that appear without first selecting a Preset from the Holomatrix panel. It’s only when you apply a preset that controls appear and they look like any other plug-in’s controls: sliders and check boxes—but a lot of them.
Most of the controls are self-explanatory, so you can literally experiment until you drop. My guess is that you can spend a day or two trying out different combinations and still not repeat yourself. One thing is important when applying Holomatrix to get the desired effect: setting the scale setting correctly. If you have HD footage and set the effect to SD, the results will be underwhelming. If you have HD footage, the scale should be HD as well.
The resulting effects can be quite stunning, in my opinion, and with an absolute minimal effort. In fact, Holomatrix dramatically lowers the skill, energy and time it takes to create effects that look eerie, futuristically ‘natural’, or downright scary. As all controls can be animated, it’s a breeze to start with a “bad TV” look (noise) and then gradually show through what looks like a person. It’s easy to produce what nineteenth century so-called mediums would have thought to be ‘plasma’ appearances of dead people…
In a sense that’s also what disappoints about Holomatrix: almost anyone can now produce these effects without them looking as if they’d been painted on top of the footage. Of course, much still depends on the creative capabilities of the person applying the effect, but nevertheless the hard work has been reduced to virtually nothing.
And at 99.00 USD, Holomatrix is not even expensive. So, to spruce up your next YouTube presentation, why not appear and do your thing as a hologram from the future?
I recorded an intro to Holomatrix—from the top of my head, so please excuse my “euhs” and “hahs” as you go along. The whole project I did for the screencast intro took less than 15 minutes yet I think you can see what Holomatrix is capable of, and that was my intention. The screencasting thing is new to me, and I will be improving upon it, so that in future you’ll get to see more polished affairs than this—however I did not want to postpone this until I’m ready.
