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Datamator 1.5

Thanks to ever-decreasing production costs and web streaming capabilities, video is being employed by more and more companies to market their business. Key to any marketing strategy is an eye-catching display of facts and figures. Trying to create a visually stunning static chart within a video is just the beginning. If you really want your figures to enter the audiovisual age, they need to be animated as well. However, this process usually involves hours of laborious work in various graphics apps, culminating in a long stint in a compositing tool to provide the motion.

Enter Red Giant's Datamator, bringing specialised tools for chart creation and animation to video. However, unlike Magic Bullet Quick Looks, which plugs into a wide variety of editing apps, Datamator is intended for just one: Adobe After Effects. It's also compatible with versions 6.5, 7, CS3 and CS4, and it will work on Windows or Mac.

The basic Datamator process is relatively simple. Create your After Effects composition, add a solid layer to act as the host for the chart, apply the Datamator effect for the chart type you want to create, and then load your data. There are seven different chart types available, from bar to pie, and data must be in tab-delimited text format. However, whilst you can create a basic chart this way, it won't look that great yet, and this is where Datamator starts to become a lot more complicated.

In true After Effects fashion, Datamator has a bewildering range of parameters to configure. Charts can be 2D, 2D with 3D extruded elements, or true 3D. You can change how many levels of gridlines are on show, and their colour. You can change the colours for each data series, for the grid cells, and for the background. Every category of text can be individually configured. However, not every parameter you might want is there. We couldn't find a way to make the data columns translucent, for example. Despite using a relatively powerful quad-core PC, we also found that the true 3D charts could be quite sluggish when previewing.

Getting to grips with all the settings will take a little while, although you won't be using many of them all the time, and the quick-guide PDF helps you learn the basics. Red Giant has also included presets, although these are pegged to 720 x 480 and 1,280 x 720 resolutions. You can still use these with other resolutions, but you'll have to change the offset to compensate, so they're not exactly drag-and-drop options; more like starting points for getting a different chart appearance more quickly.

Verdict

At $99, Datamator seems like even more of a bargain. It won't give you the unique graphics which could be produced by hours of work from a talented designer. But if you need to pump out charts which move, it will cut the production time down quite a bit - once you have learned how to use Datamator in the first place. It's also a shame the plug-in is only available for After Effects. This may be the industry-standard compositing software, but having the same toolset available inside more prosaic timeline editing apps would give Datamator an even greater market amongst its corporate videomaking target audience.

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