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Use Coupon Code: NLCS5UP10

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UPDATE 2/28: Whoops! We sent this offer on Thursday, February 24 and had an unexpected problem with the discount coupon code. This newsletter extends our 10% Upgrade Sale until Friday, March 4. The coupon code will now allow you to buy multiple upgrades. We apologize for any frustration you may have encountered. Please contact our Support team with questions OR go shopping now.

After a whirlwind year, Red Giant has finished a big task. We updated 29 products for Adobe CS5 Creative Suite and 64-bit compatibility. We also put together four CS5-compatible Suites that will really knock your socks off (but keep your wallet intact).

That’s 29 products which contain 170 plug-ins. Each has a Mac and Windows side, which doubles to a total of 240 plug-ins, and then we have multiple Adobe host apps… Wow! This great accomplishment took the hard work of every team at Red Giant and — just as important — a lot of terrific support and advice from you, our customers. We always strive to release the best products, and sometimes we had to delay a much anticipated update to make sure it was in tiptop shape.

It’s been a wild ride to the finish line and we appreciate your patience. As a thank you, we are offering 10% off all upgrades for the next 5 days. That’s a 10% discount on individual and Suite upgrades, most of which are $29 and $99 regularly. Go Shopping Now.

5 Day Sale: This 10% OFF sale runs through Tuesday, March 4, 2011 at 11:59 PM PST (California). To find out when the sale ends in your time zone, visit the World Clock Site.

How To Buy: Add the selected product to your Shopping Cart. Enter Coupon Code NLCS5UP10 during checkout to redeem your discount on the page titled Review and Submit Your Order. (Note: The coupon code field appears after you have entered your credit card information and hit Continue.)

NOTE: This coupon works with upgrades only, not crossgrade offers. In order to purchase an upgrade, you must own the original product. The upgrade will ask for your original serial number. Have questions about which products you own? Please contact our Support Team.

Great news to light up your summer! We have just released Knoll Light Factory 2.7. This important update includes support for Adobe CS5/64 bit processing along with new tools that make this industry standard plug-in even more amazing.

Even better, if you already own Knoll 2.5-2.6, you are elligble for a FREE update! (SEE BELOW)

Buy Knoll Light Factory 2.7 now for $399 or upgrade for $99.

What’s New?

• New Lens Designer for Adobe CS5
• 10 new custom lenses
• Knoll 3D Flare to easily create Lens Flares in After Effects 3D space (tutorial here.)
• Knoll Unmult for removing black backgrounds and generating mattes
• Support for Adobe CS5 and native 64-bit operation

The new Knoll Lens Designer for Adobe CS5

Free Update for Knoll Light Factory Pro 2.5 and 2.6 Users

If you own a license of Knoll Light Factory Pro version 2.5 or later, you qualify for a FREE update to Knoll Light Factory 2.7! This is our way of showing you how much we value your business and to thank you for being a loyal and devoted customer.

• Download the FREE Update (IMPORTANT: This will  only update Knoll Light Factory 2.5-2.6 to 2.7)

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:

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.