What is Elastic Reality?

Elastic Reality was one of the very first PowerPC only app on the Macintosh market.  With Elastic Reality, you could morph, warp, crossfade images and whatnot.  Then you could export the animation to a QuickTime movie with different compression settings.  It allowed the user to do very specific/precise morphing paths and sequences from an image to another image and produce very good quality animation based on those applied timeline transformations.

This is the original version of Elastic Reality from 1994, before it was purchased by Avid in 1995 and rebranded as SoftImage Elastic Reality.

---

Morphing, of course, is the spectacular special effect in which one image (usually a person) visibly melts into another (usually a different person or, say, an animal). Fans of Michael Jackson videos. Terminator 2, or “Quantum Leap” know what I'm talking about. The first Mac program that could create QuickTime-movie morphs was Gryphon Software’s Morph; in it, you click to place dots on the screen. These dots specify which points on the first picture (say, the nostrils) correspond to which points (nostrils) on the resulting picture.

Elastic Reality’s ingenious twist: instead of placing points, you teach the program what you want morphed by drawing lines on your beginning and ending images. You draw Bézier curves, exactly as you would in Aldus FreeHand or Adobe Illustrator. Assuming that you can, in fact, master the not-very-obvious skill of drawing Bézier curves, this scheme is far faster and more precise than the point-by-point method. In effect, you’re creating an infinite number of reference points for the program instead of a handful.

The real coup, however, is a sophisticated layering feature that pennits one portion of your movie image (a growing chin, say) to actually cover up another part of the image (the chin owner’s neck and collar). Such overlaps would be impossible in rival program Morph, and double Elastic Reality’s flexibility.

The results prove the cleverness of the scheme: with the proper Mac horsepower, it is indeed possible to create astonishing, professional morphs with Elastic Reality. You can morph between moving images (a yawning cat’s head becomes your mother-in-law); melt between still images (Rush Limbaugh’s portrait becomes Bill Clinton’s); and create astounding moving warps (your nose becomes two feet long as you speak). The version of Elastic Reality that runs on Silicon Graphics workstations is already being used to create the special effects in everything from Super Bowl commercials to “Northern Exposure.”

Unfortunately, ASDG has stacked the deck against your success. Creating a morph (having to think in three dimensions, plus time, for two images) is already a mental task akin to writing with both hands simultaneously. As if this weren’t complex enough, ASDG has endowed the program with a needlessly convoluted interface. The toolbox — whose icons bear little resemblance to their functions — is modal and tough to get used to. Confusing little windows pop up, seemingly unbidden, from time to time; the FX roll — a prominent interface element — does nothing (it’s designed to accommodate future features of the program, says a spokesperson); and important pop-up menus are hidden away in places no Macintosh user would ever think to look.

The manual needs an overhaul — the author continually confuses the control key with the ⌘ key, and errors abound. And the amount left out of the manual would fill another manual; there’s no tutorial at all for creating moving morphs, which is probably what you’d buy the program to do. The instructional video is terrific, except that it merely duplicates the tutorials in the manual.

Perhaps most worrisome: the technical-help department (for this very technical-help-intensive software) is one man. This poor fellow serves as the entire support department for both the Macintosh and Silicon Graphics versions of the program. Perhaps because of this impressive work load, his tone — when you can reach him at all — makes it clear that if he had his wish, you and your phone. call would just go away.

Alas, learning the program isn’t the only problem. Elastic Reality requires serious Mac horsepower, including an absolute minimum of 12 megs of free memory. The company notes that you need more memory for bigger screen sizes and larger movies — 80MB for a short feature film, for example. (I tried using virtual memory, but it was so slow that just saving my work took half an hour.) There’s an Undo command, but it’s grayed out almost all the time. Also, since creating the finished morph movie can take hours, the absolutely critical Preview command is your only chance to see how your work is progressing. Unfortunately, when you ask to see a preview of, say, frame 50, the program instead shows you whatever frame you happened to be viewing before turning on Preview. ASDG calls it a design decision. I call it a bug.

Despite the brilliance of its concept and the stunning output, learning and using Elastic Reality is a struggle. The company president, admitting that ASDG is “somewhat unfamiliar with the Macintosh marketplace,” vows that in future versions the program (and its package) will be transformed into a polished, professional piece of work. Now that will be an exciting morph to watch.

Pogue, David. (February 1994). Elastic Reality 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 64).

 

Download Elastic Reality for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

At least 9MB of free RAM (12MB or more is recommended, depending on your project)

Mac OS 7.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

Requires QuickTime (probably v2.5 or newer)

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II