High-End Plug-Ins Hit the Desktop

A Bigger Bang For Your VFX Buck

For visual effects artists, a software plug-in — a small piece of code that adds new, often spectacular, capabilities to your editing or compositing application — can be the trick that pushes a show up to a Spinal Tap 11. Not so long ago, it was only Flame and Paintbox artists who harnessed high-powered VFX plug-ins for their systems— and the cost of power plug-in effects often kept pace with the price of their host system. Yet prevailing trends have brought high-end software to the desktop, where they’re finding their way into feature films, commercials and TV series. In fact, Adobe After Effects and Discreet Combustion have both amassed a legion of software plug-ins that address everything from particle effects to high-end keying— at a fraction of the cost of the big-iron systems that held sway just a few years ago.

The downhill march of the plug-ins from the high end started decades ago, when Mac programming wunderkind and Photoshop creator John Knoll wrote a plug-in to create the photon-torpedo effects in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The plug-in was originally created for use at Industrial Light and Magic, but Knoll turned around and made his software a commercial product with the Knoll Light Factory, which brought the same effects to the masses via After Effects.

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About Red Giant

Founded in 2002, Red Giant (www.redgiantsoftware.com) creates an ever-expanding universe of effects tools ranging from plug-in suites, applications and mobile apps to Guru Presets, free products and sharing communities. We provide software for motion design, photography and color correction that is used for everything from major motion pictures to worldwide television programming to web production. Red Giant offers the industry-leading Trapcode tools for broadcast design; Magic Bullet Suite for color correction; and over 60 products that run in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Avid, Vegas, Nuke, and Studio. Our effects have enhanced dozens of feature films such as Angels & Demons and The Social Network, and added sparkle to networks like NBC Universal, ESPN, Disney, CNN, Comedy Central, MTV, and TNT. Join us on Facebook (RedGiantSoftware), follow us on Twitter (@RedGiantNews) and get free content at Redgiantpeople.com.