Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 Posted by Jim Thacker

Red Giant launches VFX Suite


Red Giant has launched VFX Suite, a new bundle of nine After Effects plugins it describes as “a cohesive toolkit aimed at solving some of the biggest challenges faced by visual effects artists today”.

The collection includes updated versions of popular keying tool Primatte Keyer and lens flare system Knoll Light Factory, plus completely new plugins for compositing, motion tracking and object removal.

All of the tools are GPU-accelerated and support 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit colour depth.

The new collection replaces Red Giant’s old Effects Suite and Keying Suite product bundles, and provides a VFX-focused counterpart to Universe, its online library of tools for motion graphics work.

New versions of Primatte Keyer and Knoll Light Factory
VFX Suite comprises nine individual plugins, including some well-known tools, like bluescreen and greenscreen keying software Primatte Keyer.

The version included in VFX Suite, Primatte Keyer 6, has been “rebuilt from the ground up”, making it “3x faster than previous versions”, although it isn’t backwards-compatible.

Another popular tool included in the bundle is Knoll Light Factory, the 3D lens flare tool originally created by Industrial Light & Magic chief creative officer John Knoll.

Again, it has been updated to support GPU acceleration – it also gets new presets – with the version included in VFX Suite, Knoll Light Factory 3.1, available as a free update to users of the standalone edition.

The suite also features two tools from Red Giant’s older Effects Warp product, originally included in the Effects Suite bundle: Shadow and Reflection.

Both are fairly self-explanatory, adding perspective shadows or reflections to image layers.



Five entirely new tools, including an intriguing new ‘compositing environment’
Of the new products in VFX Suite, the most interesting is Supercomp, a complete “compositing environment” designed to minimise the number of precomps needed when working on complex shots.

In particular, light wraps and atmospheric lighting automatically interact with all of the layers in a project, rather than requiring multiple separate layers and mattes.

The plugin has been getting good reviews from early testers, with ProVideo Coalition describing it as an “eyebrow-raising, unexpected and exciting new toy”.

The suite also includes new tracking and object-removal tools King Pin Tracker and Spot Clone Tracker, glow generator Optical Glow and height-map-based displacement effect system Chromatic Displacement.

Pricing and system requirements
VFX Suite is available for After Effects CC 2018+, running on Windows and macOS. A full perpetual licence costs $999, and there is separate academic and bulk rental pricing.

All of the plugins are also available individually, and cost between $99 and $399. On Red Giant’s website, the product names are prefixed with the word ‘VFX’ – ‘VFX Knoll Light Factory’, and so on.

Primatte Keyer, Knoll Light Factory, Optical Glow and Chromatic Displacement are also available for Premiere Pro; the other plugins are After Effects only.

Updated: Of the other tools from the old Effects and Keying Suites, some have now been superseded entirely, but Holomatrix and Text Anarchy have been updated and have been moved over to Universe.


Read a full run-down of the tools in VFX Suite on Red Giant’s blog

Visit the VFX Suite product page on Red Giant’s website