Liquid uses a combination of software and hardware for its realtime effects. Hardware based effects are mainly motion based – suing the graphic chip in your computer to do what it is good at essentially. Software based effects are for things like colour correction, chroma and lumakeying and blurs.
All the effects play back on your computer screen only unless you have Pinnacle’s special Liquid Pro AGP card, when all effects play to the TV or monitor attached to the breakout box. For this reason we recommend using Liquid with the Pro board. If you do not have the pro board you will not see your effects on TV until they are rendered – not even a still image as parameters are adjusted. This is ok for motion paths but not so goof for judging colour correction for example. The on screen display of the video image is exceptionally good in Liquid, the best of the any editing program we have used, but is not a proper substitute for a TV.
The effects render in the background so you can carry on editing and get the final video at the end of the edit ready to record to tape anyway. Background rendering almost makes up for this lack of RTDV output; RTDV would have been nice but nothing is perfect!
If you tick this option, render yellow slices then the RT effects render while you work. Of course this will mean that you can play less effects in realtime because your computer is busy rendering as well but does not completely kill RT effects.
If Liquid cannot play the effects in realtime then it will drop frames and play what it can. This is called “graceful degradation” and is better than the machine grinding to a halt if it can’t play the effects or playing the video slower than it should be. Editing is all about timing and you should always see your video are the right speed even if some frames are dropped.
At the bottom of the screen we have two readouts – one showing you the current frames per second, and the second showing you the lowest rate Liquid has dropped to. Very useful.
The Effects
The hardware based effects are mostly 3D based. The obvious 2D and 3D editors allow you to move scale and spin clips around. Pinnacle have very sensibly kept the excellent effects configuration screens used in version 4 – although one button missing is the ability to expand the effects set up screen and zoom in to the image for very precise positioning. These still exist in the rendering editors but not in the realtime.
You can see all the layers you are working on on screen whilst you edit without put to TV through the Pro board. As with the renderable effects you can easily copy and paste individual keyframe settings between keyframes or over the entire clip and have control over the speed at which you fly through keyframes using the graph in the centre of the window.
You can also switch between clips without leaving the editor . In this example of 5 clips I can set up the effect on the top clip whilst in the editor and then set up another effect on the second clip just by clicking on the clip. With a Premiere based system I would have to come out of the effects setup screen, drag the effect on to the clip then open the dialogue box – all annoyingly time consuming. Again nothing new in this as you could do this with all the editors in version 4.
3D effects
The standard 3D editor - I like the rounded edges on the picture in picture effect - great for a DVD menu.
The full list of effects editors. A similar list is available for transitions. This does not include Hollywood FX, much of which is also realtime.
There are lots of wacky 3D effects as well… This explosion effect is interesting. Perhaps more so when used on titles...
Page peels an curls are fairly obvious…
Water drop and water wave…
Lens flares in realtime with a significant amount of flare options similar to those offered by Matrox and Pinnacle’s ProOne.
This multishape picture in picture is taken straight from the ProOne and is just as useful here...
Reflection is a really nice effect, although I am not too sure when I would use it!
Replciate can be used in conjunction with other effects to produce a good result.
And magnify magnifies a bit of the image...
Also in realtime are many of Pinnacle’s Hollywood FX. These are a huge range of wild and wacky transitions which would be very difficult to do in any other way.
The whole interface has been revamped from version 4 and many new options added.
If you turn on more advanced features such as anti aliasing or trails then the effects have to be rendered.
And some of the really complex effects have to be rendered anyway. This that do have a little red blob in the icon.
CPU based effects
The most useful effect is colour correction. You can adjust overall brightness level of a clip, the gamma and stretch the black to make more of the dark areas black whilst not darkening the entire image. Individual controls are also available for red green and blue as well as hue and saturation. We would like to see a one click white balance and decent colour matching added – and since these exist in Pinnacle’s own Purple software the may be added sometime in the future, but you do get pretty comprehensive control using this filter. It can be applied to the clip before being put on the timeline, or after. Like all effects you can save a preset as an icon in your library and then apply it to as many clips as you like.
Chromakey is now in realtime – this is a totally different keyer to rendered version that came with Version 4, which still exists if you prefer to use it. The keyer has several advanced options including a “helper” which allows you to show the just the matte on screen, either on the entire screen or split as part of it. This is very useful in trying to get a good key. 2D and 3D editors also exist in software as well as hardware. These achieve the same results as the hardware based editors although they do have other options.
A realtime blur, a CPU based effect so dependent on your computer's PC rather than the graphic card.
Titles in realtime
Liquid’s titles will all be displayed in realtime, complete with transparency. How many layers you can achieve does depend on the speed of your computer and is not limited. Any of the realtime effects can be used on titles meaning you can blow them up, blur them in, curl them on and off screen or fly them wherever you feel like.
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Liquid non-RT effects
Liquid’s standard FX editors still exist – all still renderable, although the major advance from version 4 is that any part that is rendered is instantly viewable, where as in version 4 you would have to wait for the entire effect to be rendered before you could see it on screen.
These effect editors still have their uses – for example really complex composites are easier because of the way it is possible to zoom into the preview screen for accurate positioning of an effect. They are also extremely useful for image pans as they will maintain the full quality of the panned image rather than down sampling it like the RT effects.
The Effect Editors in Liquid all work along the same lines. Therefore, once you pretty much know how to use one you know how to use them all. The colour effect editor here is used for decent colour correction effect. On the left we have the control panel with sliders for each type of adjustment. On the right the preview screen, with buttons next to it to enable you to choose the effect you want. Instead of using the slider to adjust the parameters you can choose one of the tools and then dragging up and down on preview image changes the parameter. For example, if you choose colour levels dragging in the left of the image changes the red, middle changes the green and right changes the blue. All the results are instantly displayed both on the Liquid preview screen and on the DV device attached to the computer. The final result cannot be viewed until Liquid has rendered them, although as it does this in the background you can carry on working.
Adding a 3D effect is easy - just use the 3D editor. The 3D Liquid works in the same was as the other effect editors. It takes over the top of the screen and each parameter can be adjusted by using the controls on the left and dragging the cursor around the screen.
The program automatically creates keyframes so that you can create a decent moving path and has professional acceleration/deceleration adjustments to create smooth, realistic motion.
Attributes can very easily be copied between keyframes or applied to the entire clip.
As with all the "classic" editors on click and it expands to full screen. This makes fine adjustment possible and gives much more accuracy
You can zoom in and output of the effect window easily. Here we see a very large paste board, and in the centre the highlight section is the area that is actually on screen. Of course the on screen section is all the time being relayed to your DV device and hence to the TV.
You can also zoom in your preview area - right down to individual pixels if needs be. This makes choosing a particular pixel colour when chromakeying or accurately positioning a frame around a picture in picture very easy.
And zooming out to show the entire image in an image pan, and choosing the part you want to display is simple too..
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If you tick this option, render yellow slices then the RT effects render while you work. Of course this will mean that you can play less effects in realtime because your computer is busy rendering as well but does not completely kill RT effects.
At the bottom of the screen we have two readouts – one showing you the current frames per second, and the second showing you the lowest rate Liquid has dropped to. Very useful.
You can see all the layers you are working on on screen whilst you edit without put to TV through the Pro board. As with the renderable effects you can easily copy and paste individual keyframe settings between keyframes or over the entire clip and have control over the speed at which you fly through keyframes using the graph in the centre of the window. 
You can also switch between clips without leaving the editor . In this example of 5 clips I can set up the effect on the top clip whilst in the editor and then set up another effect on the second clip just by clicking on the clip. With a Premiere based system I would have to come out of the effects setup screen, drag the effect on to the clip then open the dialogue box – all annoyingly time consuming. Again nothing new in this as you could do this with all the editors in version 4.
The standard 3D editor - I like the rounded edges on the picture in picture effect - great for a DVD menu. 
The full list of effects editors. A similar list is available for transitions. This does not include Hollywood FX, much of which is also realtime.
There are lots of wacky 3D effects as well… This explosion effect is interesting. Perhaps more so when used on titles...
Page peels an curls are fairly obvious…
Water drop and water wave…
Lens flares in realtime with a significant amount of flare options similar to those offered by Matrox and Pinnacle’s ProOne.
This multishape picture in picture is taken straight from the ProOne and is just as useful here...
Reflection is a really nice effect, although I am not too sure when I would use it!
Replciate can be used in conjunction with other effects to produce a good result.
And magnify magnifies a bit of the image...
Also in realtime are many of Pinnacle’s Hollywood FX. These are a huge range of wild and wacky transitions which would be very difficult to do in any other way.
The whole interface has been revamped from version 4 and many new options added.
If you turn on more advanced features such as anti aliasing or trails then the effects have to be rendered.
The most useful effect is colour correction. You can adjust overall brightness level of a clip, the gamma and stretch the black to make more of the dark areas black whilst not darkening the entire image. Individual controls are also available for red green and blue as well as hue and saturation. We would like to see a one click white balance and decent colour matching added – and since these exist in Pinnacle’s own Purple software the may be added sometime in the future, but you do get pretty comprehensive control using this filter. It can be applied to the clip before being put on the timeline, or after. Like all effects you can save a preset as an icon in your library and then apply it to as many clips as you like.
Chromakey is now in realtime – this is a totally different keyer to rendered version that came with Version 4, which still exists if you prefer to use it. The keyer has several advanced options including a “helper” which allows you to show the just the matte on screen, either on the entire screen or split as part of it. This is very useful in trying to get a good key.
A realtime blur, a CPU based effect so dependent on your computer's PC rather than the graphic card.
