Hi folks – We know there’s been some confusion regarding the CS5/64-bit transition, and product upgrade pricing, so we thought we’d try to answer your questions with this short video:

A new sister site to Red Giant Software is debuting at the end of April—Red Giant People. This is a place to browse, share, download and buy presets related to a number of Red Giant Software plug-ins. The site is at www.redgiantpeople.com.

We built this site in response to user requests that we have heard for awhile. First, Magic Bullet Looks users wanted a way to share looks (.ls3) files with others. Second, we wanted to revive a sharing site called Trapcode People that had some great content for Trapcode products. So we combined these into a bigger vision to allow you to share content for all Trapcode products, Magic Bullet Looks, Knoll Light Factory, ToonIt, and more.

When we launch there will be several dozen free presets for 3D stroke, ToonIt, Particular and more. All the presets have video previews for the site. To get any of these free presets, you must sign up and get an account. Please use your real name and a valid email address. Once you validate you account, you can get all the content on the site, and even start sharing presets and projects on your own.

In addition to the free content, you will be able to browse the hundreds of presets that our site leaders—our Gurus—have built. These collections of presets are all professionally designed by broadcast designers. You can browse the paid presets individually, or see related content in a product in the Guru Store. If you like what you see, click the buy button and you will be taken to Red Giant Software to purchase the package.

We will have a video tour, help and other assets on the site to help you get the most from Red Giant People. But to really make this site work, we need your help and hopefully your generosity to share projects and preset files with other Red Giant users so that everyone benefits from the assets that the community creates.

I hope you will join Red Giant People.

As many of you may have heard, Adobe’s next versions of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro are going 64-bit. Not only are they going 64-bit but these products will be exclusively 64-bit. Here are answers to three common questions about our plug-ins and 64-bit.

So what does this mean for my plug-ins? It means you will need all NEW plug-ins to work in the 64-bit world. We have been working in earnest with Adobe to update all of our currently shipping plug-ins to work in 64-bit mode. In fact, we have had multiple engineers and quality assurance folks rebuilding our plug-ins over the last 5 months to make them work efficiently in After Effects in 64-bit mode.

Will you need to buy an upgrade to the new version? Yes. Many of the products required extensive reworking of code because the product was originally designed when Mac OS 8 and Windows 95 ruled the world. Some of our tools go back to the mid-90s and they were never designed for 64-bit. To recoup the cost of months of engineering, we must charge something. Since this upgrade is mostly about speed (more on this below) and compatibility,  we are only charging $29 to upgrade to any single 64-bit version of our plug-ins. For Trapcode and Magic Bullet Suite customers, we will have a special discount price for the whole suite.

Are there any benefits to the new versions in 64-bit mode? Yes. 64-bit applications get to take advantage of all the memory in your system. So on a Mac Pro, the 64-bit native version of After Effects can use a big chunk of the 16 GB (or more) in a system for doing longer RAM previews, better caching, and dealing with larger file sizes like 2K, 4K or even larger images. Anyone who has ever run into memory limits with large 3D comps will find a big benefit to working natively in 64-bit.

As Michael Coleman recently wrote, After Effects will also be faster in 64-bit (you can read about it here). We have found that our own tools are also benefiting from 64-bit. We ran a quick test on Peder Norrby’s Trapcode Particular v2 – Massive benchmark project (you can find it here) which uses most of the Trapcode plug-ins including Form, Lux, Particular and Horizon and the speed improved by about 34%. The total render time dropped by 11 minutes on the same project compared to CS4. Multiply that out by many renders or RAM previews in a day, and that adds up to significant time savings when you use a 64-bit optimized app and plug-ins.

Rest assured that Red Giant is going to be ready with many of our most popular tools soon after Adobe releases the next version of After Effects. All of our plug-ins will be 64-bit ready in Summer 2010. Welcome to the future.

In this episode, I’ll show you how to create the look of a holographic interface, using Red Giant Software’s Holomatrix. I’ll also use Magic Bullet Looks for color grading, and footage from Digital Juice’s Motion Designer’s Toolkit.

Watch the tutorial here.

In the grand scheme of things, this definitely isn’t a groundbreaking tutorial – It’s more of a short demonstration of how fast and simple it is to set up a cool effect with some very basic AE animation chops and the right set of tools. I hope you enjoy.

Hi Folks – Next week, I’ll be flying out to  San Francisco to interview John Knoll, for Red Giant TV. Unless you’ve been living in a cave free of VFX news, you know that John Knoll was ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor for Avatar, Star Wars,  and many other films. He is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand collaborators for VFX, having won many awards (including an Oscar) for his contributions to some of the biggest films of all time.

We’ll be talking about his film work, co-creating Photoshop with his brother Thomas, and the evolution and use of his popular software, Knoll Light Factory,  in motion graphics and films like Avatar, Transformers,  J. J. Abram’s Star Trek, and many others.

I’m incredibly excited. I’ve worked with and met a lot of cool people, but this is a whole other thing. His influence on what we do is so profound, I just hope I don’t forget my own name** when I sit down with him, let alone remember to ask him some worthwhile questions about his work. So I need your help…

If there’s anything you ever wanted to ask this visual effects master, post it here, and I may just ask it for you.

No promises – but make it good, and I’ll do my best.

_____________________________________

** That may or may not have happened to me when I worked with Director Frank Oz (a.k.a. Yoda). I can neither confirm nor deny.

Just wanted to let you know that Knoll 3D Flare has been released. This free set of tools that allows you to easily create Knoll Lens Flares in After Effects 3D space. This add-on for Knoll Light Factory (2.5) in After Effects includes fantastic features like Edge flare-ups, color linking, Z-depth intensity, and full 3D obscuration.

You can learn more about it and its feature set here.

The short version is that Knoll 3D Flare adds 3D (and other) features into Knoll Light Factory Pro – the lens flare tools  used in Avatar, Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek (yes, the J.J. Abrams one), and many MANY other films. Download a trial, and you’ll see why Knoll Light Factory continues to be Hollywood’s go-to lens flare tool.

Let us know what you think of Knoll 3D Flare. We look forward to hearing from you.

So you may have caught on twitter that I was playing around with something called Knoll 3D Flare. It’s something being worked on and tested here at Red Giant, based on a project file sent to us in August, by David Vinson, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Outpost Pictures.

Basically K3DF is a new set of features to enhance Knoll Light Factory Pro, Hollywood’s go-to lens flare solution.

Currently, the feature set includes:

1. 3D Camera Aware: Link a lens flares to a 3D Light’s XYZ position.
2. Z-Depth: Distance of flare from camera effects flare’s intensity.
3. Color Linking: Light color effects flare color.
4. Intensity Linking: Light intensity effects flare’s intensity.
5. Multiple Lights: Apply to every light in your  comp.
6. World Scale: Control the amount of flare scaling  relative to a light’s distance from the camera
7. Edge Flareup: As flares near the edge of the comp they automatically brighten and flareup replicating natural lens phenomena.
8. Full 3D Obscuration: All 3D layers in your composition can be used to obscure the flare. As the 3D light travels behind a layer, the flare dims and goes out.

This is not a final or complete list. It’s just something that’s being worked on with the ultimate goal of making Knoll Light Factory Pro,  already an industry standard,  even better.

What’s really interesting to note is that Knoll Light Factory Pro has been able to do most of this stuff for years! 3D lens flares and light linking are not new. I’ve been using them for a long time. However it required some knowledge of expressions – which you can easily pick up at Dan Ebbert’s Motion Script.com.

Anyway we’d love to hear your thoughts on these features, and what you might want to see in Knoll. Personally, I’m really impressed with 3D obscuration. Being able to have the flare wink out of existence when it goes behind any 3D layer opens up a lot of possibilities and makes life a lot easier.

Episode 32: Feature Film Title Treatment
By Chan Bonanno

In this episode of RGTV, Chad Bonanno shows you how he created the motion graphics titles for the feature film “Dreamgirls.” These titles were also used in the broadcast ads and trailers for the award-winning film.

In this episode of Red Giant TV, Chad Perkins shows you how to create various elements for use in a Twilight Zone-esque TV show opening, using After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema 4D. Get ready to kick it old-school…

Watch the tutorial here.