Powerful, Real-time Video Paint
Mirage's state-of-the-art, real-time 32-bit video paint system allows artists to paint and draw using a vast selection of real-world brushes, pencils, and pens. The software's powerful, sub-pixel- accurate paint engine allows artists to paint directly on video, creating amazing special effects using a wide array of animatable brushes, filters, and text tools. Powerful natural media tools such as pencil, oil brush and wet brush provide an intuitive point of entry for users, combining motion graphics-oriented tools such as Anim Brushes™ with powerful shape, fill, and texturing tools. Images or sequences can be tiled, stretched, wrapped, and animatable brush variables such as speed, fade, and pressure allow artists to add tremendous subtlety to their work. Mirage also includes a full character generation system and titling toolset, with control over Size, Scale, Italic, Spacing, Rotation, Opacity, Outline, Smooth, and border.

2D Animation

Mirage's layer-based animation interface is designed specifically for motion graphics production on an unlimited number of video layers. Artists can easily animate multiple layers of video and image layers, as well as any created or edited element- including filters, effects, and brushes. The Mirage timeline easily brings video, shapes, text, and other elements to life as motion graphics, visual effects, and 2D animations. Thanks to the system's unique architecture, projects can be instantly played back, without waiting for rendering.

Mirage's powerful keyframing system, combined with motion baths and a brush stroke recorder, make this the ideal tool for 2D animators seeking to do hand-drawn animation. Using the keyframer, artists can animate any brush or layer - changing position, rotation, or element size over time. A wide variety of animated and random variables can be added to brushes and layers - such as motion blur, perlin noise, or beveling. The keyframer also allows artists to autokeyframe elements on-the fly, and have complete function-curve control over their resultant keyframe. 2D cell animation-specific features include a light table, which allows animators to see previous and future frames, as extensive controls to work with stop motion video.

Real-Time Video manipulation
Mirage's 32-bit layers provide a real-time alpha channel for independent layer manipulation and animation. Designed to work with video elements of any resolution, Mirage's "infinite layers of glass" interface allows users to work quickly and effectively with real-time compositing of video and create elements - video and animation sequences can be loaded with no wait-time. The powerful combination of the video toolkit with Mirage's paint tools allow the creation of advanced effects such as element animation, handwriting, and picture-in-picture video.

A powerful broadcast-oriented toolkit provides a wide range of video correction and manipulation tools. High quality colour-independent chroma-, luma-, and difference keying allow video imagery to easily be worked into effects productions, and stencil layers allow quick creation of animated masks. A powerful 2-point motion and image stabilization helps remove any unwanted motion from video. Mirage's advanced (sub)pixel tracking allows users to track individual moving elements in video sequences, and use the resulting path data to apply brush animations or animated effects. Motion Tracked paths can also easily be exported to 3D software, such as Newtek Lightwave®.

Mirage also integrates comprehensive colour correction tools, including Brightness, Contrast, Gamma, Saturation, LUT tables, Black & White converter and Histogram for level adjustment. Colour region-independent colour channel control, including Temperature, Magenta, Red, Green, Blue, Alpha, Luminosity). Advanced spill and colour-suppression controls and a fully-editable Colour Lookup Tables (LUT) allow users to precisely define how film and video sequences are translated on-screen, and ensure broadcast-legal colour.

Effects
Mirage incorporates a complete special effects system, including a vast number of fully animatable visual effects, such as Particles, Lens Flare, Volumetric Lighting, Plasma Effects, and 2D Lighting. Mirage 's animatable lattice tool allows artists to deform and animate images in 3D. Mirage also includes an extensive library of blur filters, including Motion Blur, Gaussian Blur, Radial Blur, and Chroma blur. A wide library of image processing plug-ins allows users to modify existing images and video streams, with effects such as Mirror, Clone, Mosaic, Negative, Solarize, Bevel, Convolution, Waves, etc.

Workflow Integration
Mirage integrates easily with industry-standard software and hardware formats - direct output options allow advanced interoperability with all major editing systems, including Final Cut Pro 4, Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress and Media 100). Direct Wacom support allows artists access to a wide variety of paint tools.

Mirage integrates complete suite of sequence conversion tools, as well as streaming or file format I/O from all standard video formats, as well as direct integration with NTSC and PAL output hardware such as Newtek VideoToaster NT, Matrox DiGiSuite support (LE & DTV), and DPS Reality (plus PAR, PVR and HollyWood).

Mirage also supports import and export of all major image file formats, including multiple high-end image formats (Quantel VPB, Kodak CINEON, Apple QuickTime, AVI, Flic, Gif, Flyer Clip, RTV, BMP, ILBM, JPEG, PCX, PNG, PSD, SGI, Softimage, SUN Raster, TGA 32, TIFF v6), as well as TWAIN and WDM devices and digital cameras.

Completely Open architecture
Mirage includes Element, a powerful integrated scripting language that allows users to automate effects, as well as a complete Software Development Kit (API) for 3rd-Party effects and plug-ins development.

Platforms
Mirage is available for Microsoft WinXP/Win 2000 and Apple OS/X.