Effects Suite 10.0.1 Goes Live!

Over the last year, we’ve been working on streamlining the entire “purchase to publishing” process at Red Giant – one of the largest behind the scenes activities has been re-releasing all of our suites so you only need to deal with a single installer and a single serial number. It makes installing all of your Red Giant products and getting to use them in your actual day to day work a much easier experience. We’ve finally done it – the remaining product suite now has it’s own single suite installer – say hello to Effects Suite 10.0.1.

While getting this together, we also put together maintenance releases to take care of a number of issues in the products included in the suite. Take a look at all the major updates (there were numerous tweaks made under the hood to clean up all the plugins; I’ll just list the highlights here):

Effects Suite 10.0.1:

• Single installer for the suite, supports a single serial for Suite customers.
• Proper support for Adobe After Effects CS5.5 installations.
• Numerous installer fixes incorporated from all of the Effects Suite products.
• Several issues fixed with the registration of serial numbers.

Knoll Light Factory 2.7.2:

• Windows only: Fixed a crash when “region of interest” tool is used in conjunction with KLF in After Effects (previously fixed for OSX in KLF 2.7.1).
• Windows only: Fixed an issue when using our volume licensing.
• Fixed a problem with Knoll Spectacular that causes After Effects to crash is the scale is set to zero.
• Hitting return or enter in the Lens Designer was not submitting changes; this is now fixed.
• The option to duplicate a light element was missing in After Effects CS5/5.5; this option is now available.

You can get all of our latest installers on our Product Downloads page here.

A “PS” from the Maintenance Release blog post guy:

As this is probably about my 10th blog post, I thought it might be time to say a brief hello and not hide behind the somewhat-weird looking “acheyne” moniker that my posts show up here as. In the real world, I’m Andrew Cheyne, Red Giant’s Engineering Manager. I oversee everything at Red Giant that has to do with getting our products built and released to the customer – design, implementation, builds, installers, bug fixes, and Quality Assurance. I have a great team that gets the real work done in making these products come together, but it’s generally my responsibility to ensure we’re getting you the products you need and want and making sure they work.

Oh, and sorry for the accent; I know Canada-ese can be tough to understand some days.

Note from the Editor: I fixed it so that Andrew Cheyne’s blog identity now shows up as his name instead of acheyene. You know, Andrew,  you could’ve just asked. You didn’t need to release a single suite installer to get me to do that…

Formed in 1976 Accept is one of Germany’s most renowned heavy metal bands with over 27 million albums sold worldwide. When Mark Tornillo (former T.T. Quick front man) joined in 2009 they attacked the industry with fresh ideas and a matured outlook on music and as they say on their web site “A new era begins!” With this new direction in mind they called on Dave Blass to give creative input for their new videos and the story of how ToonIt came to be used is interesting. We asked Dave to tell us his side of the story.

“I had been hired by the band ACCEPT to Produce/Direct a video for their upcoming Album “Blood of the Nations”, they were going back and forth between songs and ended up setting on “Teutonic Terror”. For that video, the first for the band in nearly 15 years, we wanted something that felt like it was right out of the 80′s Heavy Metal world.

The Teutonic Terror video was a the heart of a unique Social Network scandal when a fan of the band typed “Accept Rules” into Twitter after watching the video, and thus exposed a back-door bug in the system that resulted in Twitter having to shut down its whole network for several hours… creating a worldwide social media event. As opposed to normal shoots, rather than get behind, we finished early and had half a day to shoot some green screen footage for another song “Pandemic”. There was no “concept” at the time of shooting, just “capture some footage, and figure it out later”

The idea for the Pandemic video started with the idea of telling that story in a cool way. We had looked at Trapcode Form as something to use possibly for Teutonic Terror, but ultimately felt it made our 80′s style video look too modern. From there we looked at ToonIt as a possibility to make a graphic novel style telling of the story. Elements of the “Twitter” story were dropped as the world has a short memory for such things, but the concept of a watching a video as if you were reading a graphic novel was kept.

We initially tried compositing all of the footage and then running it through ToonIt, but we found that the faster motion and switching dynamic of the flames caused havoc with the settings depending on the pattern of the flames. Too much detail on the flames, and you got too much detail on the faces etc. Too little detail on the flames, and you lose the toon effect on the faces. We ended up running each element through the software individually and then compositing them together. Some of the sequences ended up being 4-5 passes.”

Dave Blass is well known for his television and film work, and has been responsible for the award winning and incredibly popular western styled drama Justified as well as Cold Case and ER. He also has a number of films to his credit including Asylum and Overdrive.

Related Links

• More about Dave Blass
• More about Accept
• Making of Tutonic

Red Giant QuickTip #36: ToonIt Presets in Final Cut Pro

In this tutorial, Apple Certified Master Trainer Simon Walker shows you quick ways of applying cartoon effects to footage using ToonIt!, as well as FCP tips for working more quickly in the interface.

Related Links:

• Get Red Giant ToonIt HERE.
• Get Simon Walker’s Weddings & Events for Looks HERE.
• Check out Simon Walkers website HERE.

Thanks to Nick Campbell for pointing us to this hillarious video making several references to our Trapcode products. Well, we think it’s funny, anyway. If you’re reading this, you probably will too. However, chances are your non-motion graphics significant other won’t even crack a smile:

Money Money Money – “Gettin Money With a Mouse and a Wacom Pen”
Production Company: Daily Planet Productions ltd.

Also Stan Scwartz, creator of the technology behind Red Giant ToonIt, sent us this really great cartoonized music video that he found:

Video by PAT G & ORPHAN DREAM Living Without You by SalCentoducatiVideo

Hi folks – new episode of RGTV is ripe and ready to go.

In this episode, I’ll show you how to turn your video into an animated watercolor painting, and shares some techniques in varying the look and color. You can watch it here.

The tutorial uses ToonIt – a great plug-in for creating a cartoon look – which if you watch the tutorial, you’ll find out how I am wholly responsible for it’s creation as a video plug-in (OK, that is a gross exageration, but I did have SOMETHING to do with it).

Don’t forget, you can get 35% off ToonIt just for watching.