Friday, May 15th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Red Giant ships VFX Suite 1.5


Red Giant has released VFX Suite 1.5, a paid upgrade to its suite of After Effects plugins for common visual effects tasks like chroma keying, camera tracking, blemish removal and precomposing.

The update, which costs $199 for 1.0 users, adds Lens Distortion, a new semi-automated lens correction tool, and updates existing tools Supercomp, King Pin Tracker, Optical Glow, Shadow and Reflection.

A new suite of After Effects plugins tailored to common visual effects tasks
Launched last year to replace Red Giant’s old Effects Suite and Keying Suite, Red Giant describes VFX Suite as “a cohesive toolkit aimed at solving some of the biggest challenges faced by visual effects artists today”.

It includes updated versions of popular keying tool Primatte Keyer and lens flare system Knoll Light Factory, plus 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.



New Lens Distortion tool semi-automatically corrects footage
The main change in VFX Suite 1.5 is Lens Distortion: an entirely new lens correction tool capable of undistorting footage even if the lens used to shoot it is not known.

It has a semi-automated workflow, with users simply identifying linear features in the footage like road markings or the edges of buildings to guide the solve.

Updates to five other existing tools, including Supercomp and Optical Glow
The release also updates five of VFX Suite’s existing tools, including Supercomp, its complete “compositing environment”, designed to minimise the number of precomps needed when working on complex shots.

Supercomp 1.5 adds Color Match, an automated tool for matching the black and white points of a layer to those of the layers behind it, plus support for 28 more colour spaces.

The self-descriptive Optical Glow tool gets a new Radiate option for adding light rays to glow effects, plus the option to adjust the X and Y scale and RBG channels of the effect independently.

Camera tracking tool King Pin Tracker and the Shadow and Reflection tools also get workflow improvements. You can find more details via the link below.

Pricing and system requirements
VFX Suite is available for After Effects CC 2018+, running on Windows 10 and macOS 10.13+. Some of the individual tools also work in Premiere Pro. See full system requirements here.

A new perpetual licence costs $999. The update is not free to existing users, who pay $199 to upgrade from version 1.0. All of the plugins are also available individually, and cost between $99 and $399.


Read an overview of the new features in VFX Suite 1.5 on Red Giant’s blog