Sunday, September 11th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Maxon ships Red Giant 2023

Maxon’s launch video for its Fall 2022 product updates. The section on Red Giant 2023 starts at 14:40.


Maxon has released Red Giant 2023, the latest version of its collection of effects plugins, along with new versions of four of its individual products: Magic Bullet 2023, Trapcode 2023, Universe 2023 and VFX 2023.

The changes are largely workflow improvements and bugfixes, with Trapcode also getting 75 new animated sprites, and Universe getting 100 new presets for Generators.

The was announced as part of Maxon’s Fall 2022 product releases, which include Cinema 4D 2023, and new versions of the firm’s mobile apps, Forger 2023 and Moves by Maxon 2023.

New product names and verion numbering
One of the most obvious changes in the release is the version numbering, Maxon having just switched to annual versioning across all of its products, with the exception of the Redshift renderer.

Some of the individual products within the Red Giant collection also have new official names, with Magic Bullet Suite becoming Magic Bullet, Trapcode Suite becoming Trapcode, and VFX Suite becoming plain VFX.

Under the previous naming convention, the releases would have been Magic Bullet Suite 17.0, Trapcode Suite 19.0, Universe 7.0 and VFX Suite 5.0.


Magic Bullet 2023
Magic Bullet, Maxon’s colour correction tools for compositing and editing software, gets workflow improvements and support for new host apps.

OCIO integration and support for the Looks plugin in Unreal Engine 5 have been improved, although the release notes don’t give more details, and Denoiser now works with Apple’s FxPlug plugin architecture.

According to Maxon’s blog post, the Halation and Diffusion tools added to Looks in Magic Bullet Suite 16.0 are also now compatible with Cinema 4D.

Read a full list of changes in Magic Bullet 2023 in the online release notes


Trapcode 2023
Trapcode, Maxon’s motion graphics and VFX plugins for After Effects, gets 75 new animated sprites for 2D shapes and bursts in Particular, and load times for Particular Designer have been reduced.

Read a full list of changes in Trapcode 2023 in the online release notes


Universe 2023
Universe, Maxon’s online library of effects and transitions for editing and compositing software, gets 100 new presets in the Generators category, and better support for alpha layers in Media Composer.

Read a full list of changes in Universe 2023 in the online release notes


VFX 2023
VFX, Maxon’s After Effects plugins for common visual effects tasks like chroma keying, camera tracking, blemish removal and precomposing gets “tons of performance, stability and bug fixes”.

Read a full list of changes in VFX 2023 in the online release notes


Pricing and availability
The Red Giant 2023 plugins are available for Windows 10+ and macOS 10.14+, and are compatible with After Effects 2019+. Individual products are compatible with other host applications, including DaVinci Resolve.

All of the products are rental-only, and are available via Maxon’s Red Giant subscriptions, which cost $79/month or $599/year, or Maxon One subscriptions, which cost $149/month or $1,199/year.

Individual Universe subscriptions cost $30/month or $199/year.


Read more about Red Giant 2023 on Maxon’s website