Free Stuff: Making Movies for Nothing

Quick and Fast: Wax is a very slick little video compositing program. It has some interesting quirks that are fairly easy to figure out and work around. Kind of a combo between Sony Vegas and Adobe After Effects on the Windows Movie Maker level. Only a few formats can be imported. Windows Only!

Where to get it: http://www.debugmode.com/wax/

Wax is the only free video compositer I’ve found that isn’t also a video editor. It is a very slick program with capabilities for manipulating 3D models, particle effects such as fire, text that writes itself, texture generation, chroma keying and even more! But what really makes the program great are it’s many presets!

The basic plugins are put together in commonly used ways to make presets that come with the program. There are compositing presets (such as Washed Out Medium), 3D text presets (such as Fly In, Fly Out), interesting special effects (such as Fireworks) and more. You can even import plugins from Movie Maker, VirtualDub and other programs that may already be on your computer.

Another great thing about Wax is that you can use it as a stand-alone program or as a plugin itself, with Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.

There are few negative things about Wax. One is the formats you can use; Video – AVI. Photo – JPEG, BMP. 3D Models - 3DS (3ds Max files), MD2 and MS3d files. Audio – WAV.

One quirk is the program will always render with a default name of “video.avi” to where ever you imported your footage from. I’d like to be able to pick the name of my creation and where to render it to, but this is only a small annoyance.

EDIT: This isn’t actually true. In the project settings, you can change this. 

Another quirk is that 2D plugins and 3D plugins are kept completely seperate. Once one track is 3D, the whole project becomes 3D. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that Chroma Key, Text that writes itself and Opacity/Transparency are 2D plugins, so once the project becomes 3D, you cannot use these plugins. There are a few more quirks that I’ll let you figure out. All things considered, Wax is still a great program to find for free. The chroma key plugin for instance, works GREAT!

Other DebugMode programs: Wink makes tutorials. Many freeware tutorials use Wink. Winmorph takes one photo and morphs it into another. There is a Winmorph plugin inside Wax. There is also another program called Frameserver. Links to these programs homepages are on the Wax page.

Tutorials: The only tutorials you’ll really need (meaning these are the only ones I’ve found) are on the homepage at the link I provided above. There are four tutorials under “Flash-based tutorials” on the right side of the page. The best way to learn the program is by messing around with it.

License and Use: You can use Wax for commercial purposes/making money. For more info, click on “Help > About Wax” inside the program.