Red Giant has announced its newest keying, tracking, cleanup and visual effects compositing tool: the VFX Suite. It does all of that inside of After Effects
The VFX Suite works right inside of Adobe After Effects and offers up to a total of nine tools. All these tools work to help create more realistic VFX composites. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The software also offers, automatic chroma-keying, planar tracking, object replacement and removal, “photorealistic glow effects,” prismatic displacement effect and lens flares.
Now that we’ve introduced all nine tools, let’s take a closer look at them:
Supercomp: “realistic” VFX composite
When using the suite’s Supercomp tool, you can have light and atmospheric effect interact with all the layers and elements in a scene. But they don’t just interact. Red Giant says they will interact in a “far more natural way, and with far less pre-composing than ever before.”
Supercomp offers more than 15 GPU-accelerated context-aware tools to integrate all the elements into the final shoot. Those tools include things like Light Wrap, Volumetric Fog and Optical Glow.
Primatte Keyer 6: “fast” automatic chroma-keying
VFX Suite’s Primatte Keyer tool is dedicated to automatic chroma-keying. The new user interface and clean up tools to make it easier to select and separate the background and foreground. Also new is Core Matte. It’s a tool that keeps the inside of the key solid. It also still preserves the semi-transparent detail on the edges.
Red Giant says the tool can preview and render up to 3x faster than previous versions as well.
King Pin Tracker: planar tracking, directly in AE
King Pin Tracker gives you “fast, accurate” planar tracking inside Adobe After Effects. The tool can place signs or objects into a shot. Its “To” and “From” pins and ability to offset and rotate in planar space allows creators to pin what they need to. The tool can even track surfaces in changing light, even if they leave the frame.
Spot Clone Tracker: object removal with a built-in tracker
Spot Clone Tracker is a tool for object removal with a built-in tracker for moving footage. It can fix blemishes and remove small items. It matches the light automatically and offers options for it clones light, color and texture.
Optical Glow
The Optical Glow tool gives a “photo-realistic” glow effect for visual effects and motion graphics. It has built-in gamma management and Red Giant promises the light will always look realistic, regardless if it is used for video, log or linear.
Chromatic Displacement
Chromatic Displacement uses one layer to displace the pixels of another, while also separating out the colors. The tool uses the displacement image as a height map. It was designed for making effects life force fields, heat ripples, light refractions, and cloaking effects.
Knoll Light Factory 3.1: 3D lens flares for motion graphics and VFX
Knoll Light Factory makes camera-like lens flares. Users can create the flares from scratch, or customize one of 200 preset flares.
Shadow
Shadow is a plugin for After Effects that should make it easier to add a perspective shadow in front of or behind a layer. That’s based on its alpha channel, brightness and other things. Additionally, there are options for softness, bend, length, and color.
Reflection
Last, but not least, is the Reflection tool. It’s a plugin that adds a reflection to your layers. There are controls for softness, distance fade, length, and more.
Pricing and availability
The Red Giant VFX Suite is priced at $999 for the full version. You can learn more at redgiant.com.
Image courtesy Red Giant
