Driftwood Productions has released RockDaBoat and Moving Shadows, two new OFX plugins for DaVinci Resolve. These were made by Nick Driftwood who was directing a project where he needed a shot that moved like the talent were really on the water, and shadows that sit in the picture rather than on top of it. Both are claimed to behave in the same way a real camera and real light do, and both are quick enough to use on a deadline.
RockDaBoat makes any shot move like a camera at sea or in nervous hands, and Moving Shadows casts animated shadows and patterns of light that darken footage by true photographic stops.
Both OFX plugins are built for editors, colorists and filmmakers who need motion and lighting effects that hold up on a big screen without a reshoot. They run on the GPU in Resolve, free or Studio, and are available now for Mac from the Driftwood store at driftwood-dctl.com, priced at £30 each. Windows versions are in testing.
RockDaBoat
RockDaBoat was specifically designed to make a locked-off shot move like a camera on a boat. It rolls, rises and falls with the swell, drifts side to side and surges forward. Auto Fit zooms just enough to keep the frame filled, so no black edges appear at any resolution or aspect ratio. This is certainly a pretty nioche plugin, but it could be extremely useful for a specific project or application.
A Handheld mode adds a nervous camera operator (worried about dropping their camera into the drink!) on top of the sea motion, or on its own.
There are six sea presets, from Mirror Calm to Storm and five handheld presets, from Steady Hands to Panic / Running. Additionally, there is randomizer for irregular waves that arrive in sets, with a seed fo repeatable renders.
Moving Shadows
Moving Shadows casts animated shadows and patterns of light across a shot, as if something stood between the scene and the sun. Unlike a painted-on overlay, it converts the footage to linear light, darkens it by an exact number of stops, then converts it back.
It supports Rec.709, DaVinci Intermediate, ARRI LogC3 and LogC4, Sony S-Log3, Panasonic V-Log, etc.
Version 1.0 rebuilds the original Moving Shadows DCTL as a GPU plugin, with 51 templates based on what really casts shadows on set:
- Nature: leaf dapple with round “sun coins”, palm fronds, branches, grass, clouds, water caustics, reflections off water, rain on glass, firelight, smoke
- Architecture: venetian blinds, window panes, bars, picket fence, chain-link, trellis, Moorish screen, shoji, lace and sheer curtains, perforated metal, rattan, girders
- Motion: ceiling fan, helicopter rotor, passing train windows, night-drive streetlights, day-drive roadside trees, lighthouse sweep, mirror ball
- Life: passers-by, birds overhead, spider web, plus the 18 original patterns
Every template shares the same controls: coverage, edge softness that grows with distance like a real penumbra, perspective onto floors and walls, wind, gusts and flicker, separate shadow and light colours, and a shadow-matte output for compositing.
Pricing & availability
Both plugins are on sale now for Mac at driftwood-dctl.com. Windows versions, with NVIDIA CUDA and AMD/Intel OpenCL support, are in testing and will follow.
RockDaBoat 1.2 and Moving Shadows 1.0 are £30 each. They both included the installer, PDF manual, and a licence for two computers.
