AAV ColorLab is a free plugin that gives you hardware accelerated effects for Vegas and Movie Studio. It uses the graphics card to offload the CPU, which can lead to massively faster rendering times and smoother previews!

27 October, 2008

AAV ColorLab v1.0 beta 6

Download from Mediafire

(Update: The broken download link has been fixed.)

Here's beta 6, fixing the issue that plagued the last release, and an additional number of other improvements.

From ColorLab b6 screen shots

Release highlights
  • Beta 4 and earlier projects should be converted properly now.
  • New B&W user interface.
  • Fixed B&W color summing algorithm and in particular, the CMY controls were wrong.
  • Improved eyedroppers for black/white in Adjust/Levels. They no longer clip.
  • Improved quality in 6-vector and B&W, protection against amplifying CCD noise in very dark areas of the image.
  • Fixes to other reported and unreported bugs (see readme).
Please let me know of your experience with this beta, either as a comment to this post, or by mailing me (see the documentation).

23 October, 2008

Beta 5 issue

There is a rather disturbing issue in beta 5, in that it fails when loading .vegs made using older versions of ColorLab.

I have therefore removed the download links to beta 5, and am working on a fix for the issue.
  • If you already downloaded beta 5, it should work fine for new projects.
  • If you have old projects created with ColorLab beta 4 or earlier, I strongly recommend going back to beta 4 for now.
Update: The issue is fixed along with a few glitches reported by users, and beta 6 will be released as soon as I've done some testing.

If you are sure you won't be affected by this, here is the download link to beta 5 again.

21 October, 2008

AAV ColorLab v1.0 beta 5

(Download link disabled)

Here's beta 5 now, with tons of improvements. I know I'm stretching the idea of a "beta" version, but that's gonna change. Further versions leading up to v1.0 will only be bug fixes. The goal now is to get a fully stable v1.0 out the door. So please send me any problems you find. Thanks to everyone who's mailed me so far, it's very encouraging even to get complaints. :)

ColorLab b5 screen shots


Release highlights
  • Massive ease-of-use improvements to the user interface.
  • Easy White Balance correction - in the Adjust effect (formerly Levels).
  • Gamma control in Adjust.
  • Blur effect. Like the gaussian blur in Vegas but faster.
  • Fixed using ColorLab from multiple Windows user accounts.
  • Fixed (hopefully) extraneous keyframes being created.
  • Dynamic allocation and release of video card memory.
  • Many fixes and tweaks.
  • Improved documentation/readme, in PDF accessed through the start menu.
Please let me know of your experience with this beta, either as a comment to this post, or by mailing me (see the documentation).

What's planned for v1.0?

Here's the outline of what is planned to go into v1.0:
  • Bug fixes and tweaks to the range of settings, based on your feedback.
  • Rectangle-selection for the eyedroppers.
  • A 64-bit build for Vegas Pro 8.1.
  • "Linear light" gamma 1.0 RGB space support (you can see the checkbox in b5 already).
The latter two items are depending on whether I succeed in building a 64-bit version (Sony has no explicit 64-bit SDK and is unwilling to talk about it), and whether I find a way to store project-wide settings. Without this, the Linear gamma setting would be keyframed and thus annoying to use.