The folks over at Red Giant have teamed up with alternative rock band They Might Be Giants on a new music video contest. Make their next music video and you could win cash and a ton of nifty Red Giant production software. All the contest details are below:  The contest is asking for unique music videos to highlight the track I Left My Body. Take a listen to the song below: Follow the link HERE for more contest details. Red Giant software has long been a fixture on set and in post-houses because of its user-friendly interface and useful tools for first-time filmmakers and professionals alike. There will be 3 winners: $3000 + the complete set of Red Giant Tools to the Grand Prize winner (Total Prize Value: $6,694) $1000 + the complete set of Red Giant Tools to two other winners (Total Prize Value: $4,694) The complete set of Red Giant tools includes: Trapcode Magic Bullet Universe Shooter Keying Effects So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start creating. All entries must be submitted by March 1st, 2018 for consideration. 

Red Giant is back with its annual 40% Off Sale on December 5th. For 24 hours only, you can get any of their products at a massive discount. Red Giant is a software company that specialises in creating visual effects and motion graphics plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe After Effects CC and more. Its portfolio includes products like Magic Bullet Looks, Trapcode, Universe and PluralEyes, all of which have become standards in film and broadcast post-production. The annual Red Giant 40% Off Sale will return on Tuesday December 5th 2017 and will only last 24 hours. During this period, products from its online shop will be available with a massive 40% discount. Start of the sale: Tuesday, December 5th 2017 8:00 AM PST (17:00 CET) End of the sale: Wednesday, December 6th 2017 8:00 AM PST (17:00 CET) The sale includes filmmaking and motion graphics plugins and suites available online from www.redgiant.com, including full licenses, upgrades and products from the academic store which are already 50% off. It is strongly recommended that students and faculty members who would like to make a purchase from the Red Giant Academic Store pre-qualify as an academic buyer before the sale. To redeem the 40% discount, simply apply the coupon code found on the Red Giant website, which will be available on the day of the sale. There are plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe After Effects CC, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and additional host apps available. Links to selected Red Giant Products Trapcode Suite 14: Usually $999. On sale for $599 Universe 2.2: Usually $99. On sale for $59 Magic Bullet Suite 13: Usually $899. On sale for $539 PluralEyes 4.1: Usually $299. On sale for $180 By buying through these affiliate links you support cinema5D at no extra cost. Please note that the sale does not include the Volume Program for businesses and organizations. To learn more about getting a better deal on five or more licenses of Red Giant products, see the Red Giant Volume Program page. Would you recommend Red Giant products? Share your opinion in the comments section below!

Red Giant have long offered a treasure trove of plugins for After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut Pro X, Motion and Resolve. Universe is a suite of highly-stylised modern and retro effects, titles and motion graphics tools, which was recently updated to Red Giant Universe 2.1. Here is a list of new and updated tools in Red Giant Universe 2.1: NEW TOOLS AV Club – Mimic the lo-fi, noisy text you find on ancient video tapes, old infomercials and local access cable channel shows. Luster –  Give your text a slick 1980s retro look. Luster applies a metal sheen to text, and includes a refraction-based bevel for a glassy simulated 3D look. Title Motion – Create text and shapes and then instantly add dynamic animations that bring them on and off screen. Great for titles, lower thirds, callouts and more. Ecto – Create haunting, evolving titles with this glowing fractal-based effect, inspired by Ghostbusters and Stranger Things. Long Shadow – Apply a colored, long shadow to text, logo or shape, for both classic and modern motion design. Glo Fi II – Give text an ethereal moody look by instantly adding silky smooth, self-animating, fractal-based glow effects to titles. A simple UI make it easy to apply evolving, organic glows. UPDATES Line – This update adds the ability to add text at the start and endpoint of a line. Holomatrix II – This update includes blurred, chromatic distortions, a new strobe effect and much more. Universe is an annual ($99) or monthly ($20) subscription service from Red Giant which allows users to access over 65 GPU accelerated effects. Version 2.1 is available now to all Universe subscribers, so if you fancy jumping on the 80’s retro bandwagon, Red Giant have you covered! Are you a Red Giant Universe user? Let us know about your experiences with the software in the comments section below!

The Red Giant Spring Sale is on! Enjoy 24 hours of significant discounts across their wide catalogue of filmmaking and VFX plugins. Starting today April 18th, filmmaking and motion graphics software developer Red Giant is offering a 25% discount across the board for 24 hours. You can find a link to the store HERE. Red Giant Spring Sale The Red Giant Spring Sale applies to all plugins and suites, so whatever part of post-production you specialise in, you are bound to find something useful. Let’s take a quick look at some of their products: Magic Bullet Looks Perhaps the company’s most popular plugin, Magic Bullet Looks allows you to quickly add a cinematic grade to your footage. With its easy-to-use interface, it’s a great tool for editors getting started in colour grading. The software recently got some much-needed added functionality for Premiere Pro CC, and usually retails for $399. You can also get it as part of the Magic Buller Suite for $899, which includes Magic Bullet Colorista IV, Magic Bullet Denoiser III, and Magic Bullet Film among many other colour correction and grading tools. Pluraleyes 4.1 Another popular program from Red Giant is the venerable Pluraleyes, a great tool to sync footage and audio. In just a few clicks, you can import from all your different audio and video sources, sync and export a timeline in your preferred NLE format of choice, or you can use it directly within Premiere (check out my tutorial HERE). Usually available for $299, you can also get it as part of the Shooter Suite ($399) which includes a range of utility plugins to facilitate various post-production tasks. Trapcode Suite 13.1 If your thing is VFX, then you should check out the Trapcode Suite. Usually available for $999, it is a very comprehensive plugin package for Adobe After Effects that includes Trapcode Particular 2.6 for 3D particle effects, Trapcode Mir 2.1 for 3D surfaces and wireframes, Trapcode Shine 2.0 for 3D light ray effects, and much much more. The Red Giant Spring Sale will get you significant discounts from the prices listed above on individual products, as well as for the suites and upgrades. Also, the 25% discount can be added on top of the existing 50% in their academic store. To get the discount, don’t forget to add the coupon code available from the Red Giant website for 24 hours starting April 18th. For more information, visit the Red Giant site. What do you think of Red Giant products? Let us know in the comments below!

Today only, filmmaking software provider Red Giant is holding a 40% off sale on their entire catalog of color grading, color correcting, motion graphics and Mark Cuban backed denoiser software, to name a few. The sale goes live at 8am PST (which is the time we posted this article). Find out more below:   Most of Red Giant’s software is available as plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro X and Avid. Personally, I’ve been a longtime user of many of the plugins found in Magic Bullet Suite 13, especially “Colorista”, “Looks”, “Denoiser”, “Mojo” and “Film”. The Magic Bullet suite is great for adding production value to your footage, in the form of a quick color grade or correction, without having to spend hours tinkering. Of course, if you are the tinkering type or have the time, then there is enough control available to really dive in and mess with those subtle highlights in your shot. Adobe Premiere CC “Looks” plugin, part of Magic Bullet Suite 13. You can read more about Magic Bullet Suite 13 in my previous article here. I don’t do motion graphics work myself, but if you do then there are a few programs in this sale aimed precisely at you, especially in the aptly named “Effects Suite” and “Keying Suite” — both of which are great for green screen work. In the “Shooter Suite“, a software package that is particularly useful in the field, the “Offload” program is handy for dumping footage from multiple cameras and makes the job of a DIT a little more stress-free. “Offload” helps back up your precious footage and automatically compares the copy of the file on your drive to the card to make sure no data gets left behind. “Pluraleyes“, also in the “Shooter Suite“, assists with syncing your footage with separate audio files in your editing timeline, and I find that it works better than the built-in sync capability in Adobe Premiere Pro. So, what does the Red Giant 40% Off Sale get you? Magic Bullet Suite 13: $899 $540 Effects Suite 11.1: $499 $299 Shooter Suite 13: $399 $240 PluralEyes 4: $199 $120 Universe Premium Annual: $99 $60 For an absolutely ridiculous car commercial-esque video created by Red Giant walking you through the new pricing on their products on December 6th, watch below: More details on the sale are outlined HERE, but mercifully there isn’t any fine print. 40% off really is 40% off in this case. Simply head over to www.redgiant.com and have fun shopping — crowd free. Which Red Giant program seems useful in your work and might be worth picking up? Let us know in the comments below!

Magic Bullet Suite 13 is the latest iteration of this favorite of one-man-band editing operations and larger productions alike. Red Giant has included 7 tools that help you add or remove digital noise, correct color mistakes and add fully customizable color looks to enhance your footage.  All the details, including pricing and footage, is below:  Picture: Red Giant In the last version of Magic Bullet Suite, we saw great-looking real film stock emulsion added to the suite in the form of the “Magic Bullet Film” tool, and that returns for version 13. This time, however, Open CL support for real time playback steals the show. Real time playback works with a number of the tools included in the suite if you are an Adobe Premiere Pro CC user. As an Adobe Premiere Pro CC user myself, it is impossible to overstate the joys of real time playback, and that is certainly the standout feature in version 13 in my opinion. Nobody likes rendering, unless it is a convenient excuse for a coffee trip/sunshine break from the edit bay. There is also a new tool called “Renoiser” which – you guessed it – adds cinematic grain to your shots to pull back some of that sharp digital look coming out of many DSLRs these days. Picture: Red Giant, Colorista IV Maybe it was my ill-spent youth playing PC video games, but the user interface of Red Giant‘s production software has always been very easy for me to navigate, and that’s no different in Magic Bullet Suite 13. Much of the button navigation is built around simple lists and color wheels that are intuitive and user friendly. For me, the benchmark test for software like this, and especially with the Magic Bullet Looks tool, is how many of these Looks I could see myself using on future projects. The answer for me here is: lots, and there is always the option to tone down individual Looks using sliders in a similar way to popular social photo applications like Instagram. Picture: Red Giant, Cosmo Skin Overlay Additional Standout Features of Magic Bullet Suite 13:  Magic Bullet Looks – 50 new Looks added, for a total of over 200. Most of them look great right out of the gate, or with just a little tinkering. Magic Bullet Colorista IV – Still my favorite color correction tool to use. Very quick and intuitive, with lots of UI improvements giving you flexibility to arrange your workspace however you wish. Denoiser III – Denoiser is now sporting entirely re-built code with the help of a startup backed by fellow Indiana University alumnus, Mark Cuban. Here is a little video featuring both a grainy and not-as-grainy Mark Cuban, while breaking down the improvements in Denoiser III:   Magic Bullet Cosmo – In the past, this tool could make your talent’s skin look a little too plasticky in my opinion, but if used sparingly you can get some great subtle skin improvements.  This tool is a must in a world that includes both high resolution cameras and directors looking for closeups… Renoiser – Film looks like film because of grain, 24fps & 180 degree shutter. Add grain back in with this tool. The below video dives into many of the new features Magic Bullet Suite 13 has to offer and includes footage examples: It’s expensive if you are buying the suite for the first time versus upgrading, but the sheer number of included tools significantly reduces headaches in post and are especially great for projects with a quick turnaround time. I originally purchased Colorista, Looks, and the Denoiser tool a few versions back a la carte off the Red Giant website, though I found myself very quickly wishing I had purchased the full suite right off the bat. You can see from the below pricing structure that purchasing everything as a bundle is the best bang for your buck. Red Giant offers a free trial that gives you the chance to dive in yourself and see if purchasing the full suite makes sense for your workflow. If you have a color team with a budget to sit and stare at individual highlights for two months then this product is not for you. But for the vast majority of us this software can improve the look of our footage significantly with a minimal time investment. Price: $899.00, or previous suite owners can upgrade for $299.00 Compatibility: Adobe Premiere & Adobe After Effects (PC or Mac), Final Cut Pro X Magic Bullet Suite 13 is available for purchase or trial download HERE. What do you think? Are there enough new features in version 13 to warrant upgrading, or buying the full suite the first time? Let us know below!

Today we’re trying out Red Giant’s newest version of their audio syncing plugin, PluralEyes 4.0, and testing how it stacks up against Premiere’s native sync tool.  Red Giant recently released their Shooter Suite 13, a collection of utility plugins that can help you at several stages of post-production.  Tim’s article from last month covered PluralEyes within this release extensively, so do have a read if this announcement managed to pass you by. The folks over at Red Giant were kind enough to provide us with a copy to try, and I decided to put the software to test. I was particularly interested in PluralEyes’ integration with Adobe Premiere Pro. With very little time to plan, I remembered that my good friends Maria Jose and Samuel just happened to be playing a gig near the Cinema5D office. They are a couple of very talented, Vienna-based musicians originally from Honduras, and they were happy to drop by to perform an acoustic version of their upcoming single. I had to keep the setup simple due to the space constraints in the office but I also wanted to give PluralEyes enough to chew on, so to speak. The setup consisted of 3 cameras—2 recording in 4K and the other in HD—and of course their respective audio. In addition to Maria’s dynamic microphone, I had a pair of small diaphragm condenser mics recording Samuel’s guitar and another pair of microphones recording room ambience. They were all being recorded separately to different devices. You can watch the end result here: PluralEyes 4 Hands-on Experience: Conclusion Shooting live music is one of the many applications for which a tool like this fits just perfectly, and all in all, I was very happy with PluralEyes 4.0. Previous versions of the software had performed well for me in the past as standalone apps: there was something very satisfying in seeing all those clips rearrange themselves in a matter of seconds. But having all that functionality now available within Premiere has made a fast and enjoyable process even more so. PluralEyes 4.0 is available for $299 standalone, and for $399 as part of Shooter Suite 13. If you like the music, don’t forget to follow Maria Jose and Samuel on Facebook!

Red Giant has announced PluralEyes 4.0, a sleek new update to the audio sync software. PluralEyes 4.0 simplifies its interface, alleviating confusing controls and adding faster, more streamlined workflows with Premiere Pro CC and Final Cut Pro X. For those who don’t know, PluralEyes is a very useful tool for syncing audio and video. Whether it’s a single camera and audio recorder, or MultiCam setup with several audio sources. The process is simple: it analyses similarities within audio tracks (you need reference audio for every video track) and matches them up, saving you hours of manually syncing multiple files. PluralEyes 4.0: What’s New? So what does PluralEyes 4.0 bring us? I currently use 3.0 and was excited to learn a little more about the new features this update will bring. Below you’ll find some of the key points: More simplified layout Auto analyse alleviates un-necessary user selection Auto Audio Drift Correction Improved workflow for organising files Improved support for NLE software like FCP X and Premiere Pro CC Perceived improved speed on analysis The last point maybe a little ambiguous but I will explain later. It’s clear Red Giant took a step back and reviewed PluralEyes from a user point of view. They’ve stripped the interface right back, removed the unnecessary user input for ‘how hard’ the software works & added Audio Drift Correction as standard. I completely agree that the previous PluralEyes tries a little too hard in emulating an NLE interface; I simply want to sync my clips and get out of there. Previous link up with NLE programs was pretty quick and easy; one extension click in Premiere Pro and your timeline was importing into an auto-opened PluralEyes. After syncing had completed, a click of the export button would close the program and return you to Premiere Pro with some newly made timeline in your project bin. PluralEyes 4.0 is even quicker; the audio sync software now opens in a panel within Premiere Pro, meaning you don’t even have to enter a standalone piece of software: Also for FCP X and Sony Vegas Users: There are a couple of easy access features from the PluralEyes panel in Premiere Pro (or other NLEs), you can colour code un-synced clips and send them to the end of the timeline—a nice feature for quickly organising your timelines. Expanding on my last bullet point, it seems as if the analysing process is now faster in PluralEyes 4.0. If there was one aspect I’d like to have changed from version 3.0, it was the speed of analysis; 4 video sources around an hour in length would take a while to chug through. For this reason I was happy that PluralEyes would open in a standalone program, I could leave it run in the background and get on with other editing tasks. The above tutorial on its integration with Premiere Pro shows an hours worth of footage (from 3 sources) analysed in realtime. From previous experience, I was pretty impressed with how fast it does this, but there are so many variables that I couldn’t confirm whether the overall speed has been significantly improved; I’d be very keen to try it out and see how fast it operates within Premiere Pro. PluralEyes 4.0 is available now for a stand alone purchase price of $299, or $99 as an upgrade or $149 for academic use.