Friday, September 17th, 2021 Posted by Jim Thacker

Maxon ends perpetual licences of Red Giant products


Maxon has discontinued perpetual licences of Trapcode Suite, VFX Suite and Magic Bullet Suite, the collections of effects and colour grading plugins that it acquired in its recent merger with Red Giant.

The decision became clear with this week’s release of the latest versions of the plugin collections, which are available only via the firm’s Red Giant Complete and Maxon One subscriptions.

The latest Maxon products to go subscription-only
The change makes Trapcode Suite, VFX Suite and Magic Bullet Suite the latest Maxon products to go subscrption-only, following the firm’s recent decision to drop perpetual licences of the Redshift renderer.

Unlike with Redshift, Maxon doesn’t seem to have announced the change in advance.

We only spotted it had happened when we realised that Maxon’s online store isn’t listing perpetual licences of the latest versions of the three plugin collections: only of the previous releases.

When we contacted Maxon to ask whether perpetual licences had been discontinued, the firm replied: “Yes, it was decided to not offer a perpetual version of the individual suites.”

Of the other products acquired by Maxon following last year’s merger with Red Giant, plugin library Universe has been subscription-only since 2016.

Audio sync tool PluralEyes got its most recent major update the same year, so the perpetual licence available in Maxon’s e-store is still for the current version.

New subscriber-only features of Trapcode Suite 17, VFX Suite 2, Magic Bullet Suite 15 and Universe 5
The change means that the latest features in the plugin suites are only available to Maxon subscribers.

In the case of Trapcode Suite 17, that means a more unified workflow between particle effects plugins Particular and Form, and new particle flocking options in Particular.

VFX Suite 2 introduced Bang, a new procedural gun muzzle flare generator.

The other updates were smaller, with Magic Bullet Suite 15 adding support for After Effects’ experimental multi-frame rendering system, native support for new M1-based Macs, and GPU acceleration for several of its key plugins via Apple’s Metal API.

Universe 5 only added support for multi-frame rendering in After Effects.

No plans to drop perpetual licences of Cinema 4D ‘while there is enough demand’
The remaining Maxon product where perpetual licences are still available for the current release is 3D modeling and animation software Cinema 4D, version R25 of which also shipped this week.

When we asked Maxon whether there were any plans to discontinue perpetual licences of Cinema 4D, the firm told us: “There aren’t any plans to eliminate perpetual licenses yet.”

“While there is enough demand [they] will still be offered.”

Pricing and licence conditions
Perpetual licences of Trapcode Suite 16, Magic Bullet Suite 14 and VFX Suite 1.5, the previous versions of the plugin collections, are still available, and all cost $999.

The latest versions of the plugin collections are available via Maxon’s Red Giant Complete subscriptions, which cost $79/month or $599/year, or via Maxon One subscriptions, which cost $149/month or $1,199/year.

Read more about the new features in the Red Giant plugin collections on Maxon’s website