Appletell reviews Nodes from Yanobox

Provides: Video generation for FinalCut Pro
Manufacturer: Yanobox
System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5 or 10.6, PowerPC or Intel processor, Final Cut Express 4 or Final Cut Pro 6-7 or Motion 3-4 or Adobe After Effects CS3-5
Review Computer: 2.2GHz 13″ Macbook Pro, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM, Final Cut Pro 6
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Price: $99 (free 15 day trial available)
Availability: Out now

Nodes is a piece of software that makes data points into beautiful video clips that are really dazzling. It makes boring bits of text dance around the screen. But if you try to make that dance into something more meaningful, you’ll have to get your hands dirty.

It works like this; say you have a list that you want to include in a video presentation. Nodes can take that dull bullet point list and, using one of its amazing presets, transform it by adding graphics and motion. For instance, if you want to show where your company ships to, suddenly a drab list is a mobile of digital airplanes dancing back and forth with the names of the cities. Or you can have a set of glowing orbs that float up and down, or have the data points form a constellation. Even if you don’t tweak the presets at all, right out of the box Nodes gives you some stunning ways to display data.

The problem comes if you try to control the presenation. Now, the presets in Nodes come with a lot of options—a lot of options. But the language behind them is built on the mathematics that controls the random movements of the points; and “random” is the operative word. Because while Nodes makes data points pretty, it’s hard to make them useful.

The problem I kept running into while using Nodes was taking one point of data and making it stand out of the crowd, unless it was doing it all the way through. The transitions menu has three submenus for the way the set looks at the beginning, the end, and how it transitions between the two. Basically designed around the shape (sphere, point, wall), the XYZ position, it also contains a setting to highlight one particular data point (which you can also keyframe to change over time). The problem is that while you can select a data point to highlight, it’s still being controlled by the random motion factors of the whole set, which made it incredibly difficult for me to isolate that one point from the camera’s perspective to put it front-and-center.

I was able, with quite a bit of tweaking, to get the one point I wanted to stand out within the set. Then I realized that what I could have done is create a second Node with a transparent background and only one data point (the most important one) in the FCP timeline. This made it much easier (though not simple) to control, but there was still the problem of the less-important points moving underneath it.

Also confounding was that while Nodes has a long list of configurables, only some of them can be keyframed. In addition, the randomization options haven’t been translated out of Math-speak; what’s the difference (to me) between Quadratic In-Out and Sinusoidal?

That problem aside, Nodes really does making boring data beautiful. You can dump the text in, jump between the presets to create a look, then tweak the style to your heart’s content. This isn’t a piece of business software that anyone would use (like PowerPoint or Keynote), but it’s aimed and priced at pro video users. If you’re working on an industrial or other business film where you need to clobber someone with text in a stunning manner—but not something they particularly need to be able to recite afterwards—then Nodes is a dead useful way to create a variety of visually compelling short sequences.

Appletell Rating:

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