Apple has made a massive move today, announcing that by year’s end it will be offering computers running on “Apple Silicon.” These new chips replace the Intel processors that have powered MacOS for the last 15 years. Let’s explain what that means, and see how it affects filmmakers. Image Credit: Apple What Is Apple Silicon? Strange as it may sound, Apple has long been a leading processor manufacturer. Their powerful, custom chips have set them apart from other manufacturers in the mobile and tablet arenas. iPhones have consistently out-performed top offerings from Samsung and Google. And, amazingly, they sometimes outperform themselves. The latest generation of iPad Pros get better GeekBench scores than a brand-new 13” Macbook Pro. Apple has been pushing the performance envelope on these custom ARM chips, and it has paid dividends for them. Today’s announcement, then, can be seen as almost inevitable. Apple has decided to begin placing these powerful custom processors in their Mac lineup as well, starting this fall. They have rolled out a suite of software products and updates to support this transition.Within a few years, I expect that all Apple computers will be running on Apple Silicon. Why does Apple Silicon Matter? And What Is ARM? These processors are not just Intel look-alikes. Apple Silicon processors are ARM chips, which are distinctly different from the x86 processors made by Intel and AMD. The details are less important than the impact: programs written for x86 processors will not run on ARM processors. You cannot run Photoshop natively on your iPad, and for many years could not run iPad apps on your Mac. In 2019, Apple announced Project Catalyst, a project that allowed iOS and iPadOS apps to run on MacOS. In other words, it translated apps from ARM systems to x86 systems. At the time, it was received as a welcome boost to the Mac App store, but it turns out to be the foundation for what was to come. Apple proved it could successfully and smoothly translate ARM to x86. Now they are preparing to translate the other direction. Will My Apps Still Work? When Apple first made the move to Intel chips, they added a piece of software called “Rosetta.” This program smoothed the transition by emulating the old systems on the new x86 hardware. Fittingly, Apple has announced Rosetta 2, this time translating x86 into ARM. According to 9to5 Mac, this change will cause fewer problems than it might seem. To quote their developers, “Very few apps work at such a low level that they care about the difference in CPU architecture.” With some small tweaks, your favorite apps should be fine. Image Credit: 9to5 Mac Some Apps are Already Native That said, all Apple Pro apps will run natively on the new systems, making this whole conversation irrelevant. Final Cut Pro editors should have no issues making the upgrade. Adobe has been working closely with Apple to get up and running on these new chips. Apple demonstrated Adobe Photoshop running natively on stage, which bodes well for Premiere and After Effects. No word yet from Avid or Blackmagic Design (DaVinci Resolve). Adobe Photoshop running natively on an Apple Silicon computer. Image Credit: Apple The Upshot for Filmmakers This major move from Apple means a lot for the filmmaking community. To start, Macbook Pros have had issues with cooling their overpowered Intel chips for years. ARM chips are designed to draw less power and therefore create less heat. This will likely extend battery life and help keep their laptops away from thermal throttling without sacrificing performance. Second, the iPad pro demonstrates that performance is not about to be sacrificed. If a small and nimble iPad can perform so well on an ARM chip, imagine what a MacBook or Mac Pro will be able to do with more room for additional hardware and heat dissipation. Tim Cook demonstrated 4K editing in FCPX, and bragged that it could play back 3 streams of 4K footage simultaneously. Make no mistake, this is a boost to raw computational performance. Third, the inter-operability of the entire Apple ecosystem going forward should not be ignored. iOS control apps, such as those for lights, motion control rigs, and more, will be available on Mac. And even more than that, desktop editing apps like Final Cut Pro may finally be available on iPad. That’s a major win for filmmakers and editors on the go, especially for documentaries and small crews trying to pack light. A custom Hackintosh computer. Image credit: Hackintosher Fourthly, unfortunately, this will likely lead to the end of Hackintosh computers, at least as we know them. A Hackintosh is an unapproved, non-Apple computer that still runs MacOS. This has proved to be a popular middle ground between Apple die-hards and custom-PC builders. Unfortunately, that only works if everyone has access to the same basic components that Apple already uses. Namely, Intel processors and AMD graphics cards. If MacOS in the future is built around Apple-exclusive processors, it will be very difficult to build your own. This will further lock people in to the Apple ecosystem.   When Will This Arrive? If you are a developer, the answer is now. Apple is offering developer beta kits immediately. For the rest of us, the first computers with Apple Silicon processors will be available by the end of the year. From there, you can expect it to take over the entire lineup of Mac computers as they are refreshed one by one on their regular release schedule. So what do you think? Will you make the switch? Or do you plan to hang back and see how it goes? Let us know in the comments!

Red Giant, long-time developers of innovative post-production tools, have unveiled Red Giant Complete, a yearly subscription plan for all of their tools. Is it worth the price of admission? Image Credit: Red Giant The Details on Red Giant Complete The details matter here, especially when the asking price is $599/year for professionals, $299/year for academic settings. That’s the same price as Adobe Creative Cloud, and potentially twice what you’d pay to license Final Cut Pro X. That might seem like a lot to ask for a set of plugins, but to look at it another way, buying that same software outright would run you $3,500. Every tool works with After Effects, and some tools work other apps as well: Adobe Premiere is well supported, and Final Cut Pro X isn’t too far behind. Outside of that, support starts to get a little more limited, although not entirely absent. Sorry, Avid and Davinci editors. However, if you only need one piece of software, or dislike subscriptions, the good news is that buying outright is still absolutely an option for you. Individual software packages are still available on their website. But when the cost of one package can already run up to $999, I personally find it hard to justify purchasing unless you have a very specific need. If you know you need these tools, then the cost is reasonable for what you get. What’s Included Everything. Seriously. Every tool and plugin Red Giant has ever made. By my count, that’s 5 software “Suites”, for a total of 113 tools. Trapcode Suite is a particulate and 3d vfx suite that lets you easily generate fluids, particles, objects, light, and more. Magic Bullet Suite has top-notch color and grading tools that far outpace what you find in Lumetri. Universe Suite contains all of the supplemental tools for finishing your video, from unique text generation and animation to transitions to little stylistic flourishes like camera shake and glitch FX. VFX Suite is there for seamless compositing and tracking, and Shooter Suite will help you dump, process, and back up your footage so you’re ready to rock when you hit the edit suite. Should you Subscribe to Red Giant Complete? Red Giant makes excellent tools for workflows of all sizes and shapes. But the final question is whether to subscribe or purchase. This package is obviously targeted at the power user, the super fan, the person or organization that can use the full suite from top to bottom, and to end. If that sounds like you, then take advantage of this deal by simply going to their website. Existing Red Giant users can even get 50% off their first year through February 1 with code RGC50 at checkout (or RGC50A for academic purchases). If you are looking for one specific set of tools, however, you might want to consider the numbers a little bit more carefully. What do you think? Would Red Giant Complete complement your workflow, or do you do just fine with your native plugins and effects? Let us know in the comments!

Today, Red Giant Software released the latest addition to their already impressive collection of effects and grading suites. The Red Giant VFX Suite offers 9 freshly coded effects for immediate use in Adobe After Effects. Four of the nine also work in Premiere Pro. And all these effects can be tweaked and tailored to your specific needs, of course. The (very) impressive ‘Supercomp’ FX in action. Most of Red Giant’s software bundles aim for specific user needs. The ‘Trapcode Suite’ is for 3D motion graphics and most of its tools require Adobe After Effects as a host application. The ‘Shooters Suite‘ offers practical tools for working on set (Shooter Offload) and when entering post-production (Shooter PluralEyes for syncing audio or Shooter Instant 4K for example). The popular ‘Magic Bullet Suite‘ bundles cool, yet easy to build effects and color treatments for your post-pro pleasure. All of these tools can be purchased as individual tools of course. So what’s next you might ask. Well, the Red Giant VFX suite offers 9 brand new tools for serious After Effects pros while some of the new FX, namely the impressive ‘Supercomp’, still maintains Red Giant’s own and easy to follow workflow GUI, even for not-so-pros. Like me. In order to get you started right away, watch the intro video below: Red Giant VFX Suite First off, let’s get the probably most asked question out of the way here and the answer is: yes. All 9 plugins of the VFX suite come with a GPU-accelerated engine, so working with them smoothly and –even more importantly– getting results fast is key here. The Red Giant VFX Suite comes with nine tools in total: Supercomp Primatte Keyer 6 King Pin Tracker Spot Clone Tracker Optical Glow Chromatic Displacement Knoll light Factory 3.1 Shadow Reflection For me, the most impressive (and most innovative) plugin of the whole suite is called ‘Supercomp’. It’s a complete compositing environment that makes it easy to create complex, seamless composites. 1/ Supercomp If you’re familiar with Magic Bullet you’ll feel right at home here. You don’t need to pre-comp everything over and over.. a pretty common task in After Effects after all. With Supercomp you get everything you need within a nice effects UI but still within After Effects, no need to leave the app or roundtrip to a standalone FX app. It’a seamlessly integrated within After Effects, just like the other 8 plugins. You can drag’n’drop single effects to certain layers, rearrange everything, try different values, reorder layers, you name it. But the cool thing is that the resulting composition will update in real time, so you see exactly what you get. Effects like a 3-way color correction are built right in, same goes for chromatic and optical glows, fire effects, light wraps, volumetric fog, edge blends for merging foreground layers into background plates and many more. In order to conveniently control the vast amount of possible effects and tools within Supercomp, Red Giant build a context-aware rotary picker tool which is really handy to use instead of drop-down menus. 2/ Primatte Keyer 6 Primatte Keyer is already part of the Keying Suite but included in the Red Giant VFX Suite is the new version 6 of the plugin. Primatte Keyer is a tool for fast and pretty much automatic chroma-keying and both, green and blue screens can be used for it to work. Red Giant have updated the UI for cleaner looks and improved usability. On first click, Primatte tries to pull an automatic key in order to separate your subject from the background. While this first pass might be ok already you can tweak and refine the matte to your liking of course. Several tools assist you on the way, a brand new one is called Core Matte: It keeps the inside of your key solid while preserving fine semi-transparent details on the edges. in the above image you can see Core Matte in action controlling the fine details hair while preserving the inside of the key. Since the whole Red Giant VFX Suite is GPU optimized, users can expect a speedy Primatte 6, with previews and renders up to 3x faster than in previous versions, according to Red Giant. Primatte Keyer can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 3/ King Pin Tracker King Pin Tracker gives you fast, accurate planar tracking, right inside Adobe After Effects. It’s a bit like Red Giant’s Warp plugin (part of the ‘Effects Suite’) but much more sophisticated. With King Pin you can integrate 2D objects into your shot and it’s pretty simple, indeed. The object you want to integrate doesn’t even have to be rectangular and with the supplied “to” and “from” pins and the ability to rotate and/or offset your object in planar space it’s easy to pin whatever you want. King Pin won’t stop tracking at the edge of frame but will continue beyond the frame and it also will track surfaces in changing lighting accurately. Even a white wall will give King Pin something to hold on to, I’ve seen it in a demo Red Giant hosted prior to the release. Pretty impressive, indeed. 4/ Spot Clone Tracker This tool of the Red Giant VFX Suite does exactly what you think it does: It tracks moving objects within your footage and replaces them with a defined target. Think clone stamp tool in Adobe Photoshop. Easily fix blemishes or remove small, unwanted items. Spot Clone Tracker tries to match your lighting automatically, with options for how it clones light, color and texture. You also can add transparency to blend your target in smoothly. 5/ Optical Glow Optical Glow adds realistic (and therefore beautiful) glows to your composition. With built-in gamma management, glows look realistic in all kinds of footage: log or linear. Optical Glow offers lots of control for making lightsabers, starship engines, police lights, neon signs and more with beautiful, photo-realistic results. Again, if you ever have used a Red Giant tool before, you will find yourself right at home. Adding a glow to things make them blend more naturally with their environment. That’s actually the main core feature of the whole Red Giant VFX Suite: Blend things into other things with tons of options and realistic results (even if ‘realistic’ means a giant Transformers-style robot standing in a lake next to some mountains and holding a ridiculously large glowing saber-like weapon, shown in the aforementioned demo hosted by Red Giant). Optical Glow can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 6/ Chromatic Displacement Chromatic Displacement uses one layer to displace the pixels of another, while smoothly separating out the colors. The displacement image is being used as a height map here, which gives you nice looking, organic results. Chromatic Displacement was designed for creating professional visual effects, such as force fields, heat ripples, light refractions, cloaking effects, and much more – but it’s also good for motion graphics. The above effect looks really cool and I think without this plugin is pretty hard to build from scratch. The tools of the Red Giant VFX Suite makes things a bit easier as they try to achieve realistic results with a few clicks while still maintaining a vast list of options for variation. Furthermore, since the whole suite is fully integrated with Adobe After Effects you can deploy any tool/command/effect you want on top of the Red Giant VFX, of course. Chromatic Displacement can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 7/ Knoll Light Factory 3.1 Knoll Light Factory is a tool for creating photo-realistic lens flares. Thanks to the aforementioned GPU acceleration you get these flares and light effects in less time and since these effects try to mimic real-life lens designs  it all blends together nicely. With the build-in lens editor, you can create your very own flares from scratch, or customize one of the (many) included presets which are clearly inspired by quite a few blockbusters of past years. Knoll Light Factory 3.1 can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 8/ Shadow Shadow is a plugin for After Effects that makes it easy to add a perspective shadow in front of or behind a layer, based on its alpha channel, brightness, and more. With options for softness, bend, length, color and many other properties, the Shadow effect extends the various shadow tools available inside After Effects. 9/ Reflection Last but not least, Reflection is a plugin for After Effects that makes it easy to add a reflection to your layers. Bundled with it, controls for softness, distance fade, length and more are available. Again, this tool might not be the do-it-all super-tool but it solves a common task for motion graphic artists and the vast but dedicated options make it easy to work with this plugin. Pricing and Availability The Red Giant VFX Suite is available now and you can download it over at redgiant.com. The full version is $999 but there’s also an academic version available which will set you back $449. All tools are available for purchase individually, too: Supercomp $399 Primatte Keyer &199 King Pin Tracker $199 Spot Clone Tracker $99 Optical Glow $99 Chromatic Displacement $99 Knoll Light Factory $199 Shadow $99 Reflection $99 All nine tools of the Red Giant VFX Suite run on both Windows and MacOS machines and require Adobe After Effects CC 2018 and later as a host application. Knoll Light Factory, Primatte Keyer, Optical Glow and Chromatic Displacement also work in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 and later. If you want to take a deep dive into these new tools, I highly recommend a visit to Stu Maschwitz’ Prolost.com. Stu is a veteran in the VFX industry and currently serves as the Chief Creative Officer of Red Giant. Basically, he’s one of the creative minds behind the new Red Giant VFX Suite. A 52-min tutorial on Supercomp can be found on his site. Link: redgiant.com | Prolost.com What do you think? Do you use any of Red Giant’s products already? Would you use any of these new tools for your workflow? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The Trapcode Suite is synonymous with 3D motion graphics and VFX. Trapcode Suite 15 now brings you realistic 3D particle systems within After Effects. Ahead of their annual 40% off sale for 24 hours on December 5th, Red Giant have recently announced the latest update to the Trapcode suite, which extends and enhances the existing toolset of 11 plugins with new 3D particle physics and fluid dynamics, plus ability to import and work with 3D objects using Trapcode Mir. The addition of the Dynamic Fluids physics engine is a significant step forward in providing new creative possibilities within After Effects according to Chad Bechert, CEO of Red Giant. “The introduction of our Dynamic Fluids physics engine makes it possible to create particle systems that behave as if moving through a fluid environment and that interact with each other, producing stunning, organic results. This release will completely change the range of what artists will be able to create inside of After Effects, opening the door to new and more robust particle system animation, motion graphics and VFX.” Trapcode Suite 15 Dynamic Fluids in After Effects Long time Red Giant user Territory Studio, wh0 have worked on Blade Runner 2049 and Ready Player One have created a video to show off their experimentation with the new plugin. Trapcode Suite 15 Highlights Trapcode Particular 4 Trapcode Particular 4 lets users create realistic fire, water, smoke, snow and other organic effects. Multiple particle systems can be combined into a single 3D space along with 3D objects for complex and sophisticated effects. Trapcode Form 4 Multiple Trapcode Form particle grids and objects can be combined together in a unified 3D space. Trapcode Form particles live forever, and give you precise control over behavior. Trapcode Mir 3 Trapcode Mir creates flowing surfaces, endless tunnels, terrains and 3D objects for use in your motion graphics work. Buy Red Giant Trapcode Suite Trapcode Suite 15 is available now via the Red Giant website. Trapcode Suite 15 pricing. Full: $999 Upgrade: (from previous versions of Trapcode Suite) $199 Academic: $499 Are you already a Trapcode user? We’d love to hear what you think of the new features. Let us know in the comments.

Picture Instruments, the company behind Color Cone and Image 2 LUT, just released a new plugin called LUT Mixer for Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Final Cut Pro X to help you with LUT stacking. Working with LUTs is pretty common nowadays. You can use a LUT directly on set, with more and more monitors and cameras supporting them, or in post-production while you’re color grading your project. The new plugin from Picture Instruments called LUT Mixer was created to help you during post-production. From Log to the Final Grade When shooting a project in any flavor of Log color space, you have to apply a LUT in post-production to convert the Log footage to some kind of Rec.709 or HDR color space. Then, your footage is in a Linear color space and you can start making basic color corrections like exposition, white balance, etc. Depending on the look that you’re after, it’s not unusual to add one (or more) “artistic LUT” on top of that previous “technical LUT” and your adjustments. The thing is that “artistic LUTs” are mostly too extreme, and you’ll need to dial them down. Adding as many LUTs as you want and playing with their opacity is a fairly easy task to do in DaVinci Resolve. Otherwise, it takes a lot of time in Premiere Pro, After Effects or Final Cut Pro X. Adding LUTs the Easy Way To solve that problem, the team at Picture Instruments has developed the LUT Mixer. With that simple plugin – compatible with Premiere Pro, After Effects and Final Cut Pro X – you’ll be able to combine up to 5 LUTs and apply them to an image simultaneously. The cool thing about the LUT Mixer is that it enables you to dial the opacity of each LUT individually. You’ll be able to see the effect of each LUT on your image directly inside one plugin only. Of course, in Premiere Pro and After Effects you could use multiple instances of Lumetri Color to apply as many LUTs as you’d like. You’ll probably lose quite a lot of time because of going back and forth in every instance of Lumetri to adjust the opacity of each LUT. It goes the same way within Final Cut Pro X. In the end, the LUT Mixer is a plugin that makes working with LUTs a more time-effective, easy and fun task, but it’s not something you can’t do without the included tools in each NLE. The LUT Mixer is already available at Picture Instruments’ store and costs $47 (plus VAT, if applicable) for an Adobe or Final Cut Pro X license, or $66 plus VAT as a bundle. Do you usually use more than one LUT for your projects? Do you think this plugin will help you save time in post-production? Let us know in the comments down below!