What is Elastic Reality 3.x?

Morphing is a special-effects technique that creates a smooth, controlled transformation of one image or movie into another. Ask Industrial Light and Magic how it put new words in JFK’s mouth in Forrest Gump, or Digital Domain how it did the past-to-present time transitions in Titanic. They used Avid’s masterwork, Elastic Reality.

In addition to morphing, Elastic Reality is equally suited to warping (essentially the same as morphing, except it uses only one image or movie), mask creation, and even color correction. ER’s ability to link the motion paths of several outlines, or shapes, in which some shapes add the motion of others to their own, also puts 2D animation programs such as Adobe After Effects to shame.

The source of Elastic Reality’s power is its shape-based morphing and warping system. You use Bezier splines to outline important areas of an mange, such as the eyes and nose of a face. You achieve morphing by linking shapes between two images — the A-roll and the B-roll — and fading between them as they deform.

You can layer and associate shapes in various combinations, providing tremendous control over the transformation. Each shape can have its own animation path. You can also stack shapes in groups, allowing some shapes to pass in front of or behind others. Stack your shapes correctly, and a morphing chin can pass in front of the neck without distortion.

New to version 3 is a snap-to-edges tool that automatically snaps a path to the edges it detects in the underlying image. It works well for simple shapes with distinct edges, but it has an annoying habit of creating control points whenever the mouse changes direction, producing strange, squiggly edges.

We were surprised at Elastic Reality’s shallow learning curve. The program’s interface is uniform, comprehensive, and easy to understand, despite a bewildering number of options in some of its floaters.

If you’re doing any kind of video, film, or print work that requires you to distort an image in an organic way, you absolutely need Elastic Reality.

Anzovin, Raf. (May 1998). Elastic Reality 3.1. MacAddict. (pg. 41).

Download Elastic Reality 3.x for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver