Friday, October 9th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

GenArts ships Sapphire 9

GenArts has released Sapphire 9, the latest update to its industry-standard collection of preset effects, transitions and looks for editing, compositing and finishing software.

The release adds four new transitions, a couple of new utility tools, and further extends Builder, the node-based system for authoring custom effects introduced in Sapphire 8.

New effects include Bokeh lights and astronomical backgrounds
New effects introduced in the release include the self-explanatory BokehLights, which generates classic Bokeh patterns of defocused lights. The effect may be animated.

There are also two astronomical effects: NightSky, which generatates accurate star fields based on date, time and location; and Aurora, which produces Northern Lights-type effects.

In addition, there is a good-looking InfiniteZoom effect, which creates a “hypnotic, spiral effect similar to infinite regression”, and which can be seen at 00:30 in the video above.

New optical flow-based utility tools
Sapphire 9 also introduces two new utility tools, including CutToDissolve, which replaces straight cuts between clips for which no video handles exist by generating the missing frames via optical flow.

A second optical flow-based tool, RepairFrames, regenerates dropouts or damaged frames automatically.

In addition, there is a new StripSlide transition, which moves from one clip to the next by sliding the foreground offscreen in a series of parallel strips.

Support for animation curves in Builder
Finally, the Builder toolset has been extended: most notably by the addition of animation curves for all parameters, along with a set of “advanced compositing tools”. You can see them briefly in this demo video.

S_transition, the part of the toolset for authoring new transitions, now supports multiple transition nodes; and transitions are also now supported in s_effect, the part of the toolset for authoring new effects.

Pricing and availability
Sapphire 9 is available for software including After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Composer, Smoke, Flame, Nuke and DaVinci Resolve on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It also works with other OFX-compatible tools.

New licences cost $1,699 for most host software, $2,800 for Avid, and are priced on enquiry for Flame. All prices include a year of support. You can see the full pricing plan here.

Read more about the new features in Sapphire 9 on the GenArts website