Red Giant is expanding Universe with even more transitions and effects, these ones focusing primarily on giving your productions a classic 80s look. They’ve also updated some existing effects and added support for Avid Media Composer.
“The Red Giant Universe tools make it easy to quickly turn stories into something that is visually amazing,” says Red Giant CEO Chad Bechert. “We’ve heard non-stop from editors that they need faster and more interesting transitions, and we wanted to deliver to them in a big way. Drawing inspiration from Universe’s most popular tools, like VHS, Retrograde and Carousel, we’ve delivered several companion and unique transitions. We can’t wait to see what our customers do with these new tools.”
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With the update comes 11 new transitions, which includes updates to Universes’ VHS and Retrograde transition effects. You can reportedly now add VHS Transitions, which mimic the effect you’d get on VHS if you recorded over pre-existing footage, or Retrograde Transitions, which is said to use real scans of 16mm and 8mm film to create a more authentic film strip transition.
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Other transitions geared less to a bona fide 80s look include transitional wipes like shape or clock wipes.
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For updated effects, Red Giant says that there’s new VHS noise samples to Universes’ VHS that you can use to make your videos look like they were just released out of the 80s, with the option of adding nostalgic timecodes and function icons like play, fast-forward or rewind. In addition, the update is set to have a small, but important, update that will allow Retrograde to use the original aspect ratio of your footage of the effect.
Red Giant’s Universe has proven to be a popular visual effects tool, being used by productions like “Saturday Night Live,” “Portlandia,” “Documentary Now,” and “Kung Fury.” Red Giant themselves produced a short film called “Hewlogram” that relied heavily on the updated VHS and Retrograde effects in Universe.
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“Hewlogram” centers around a 80’s superhero played by David Hewlett, and it showcases what you can do with the new effects.
The release of this version of Universe also brings the complete set of Universe tools to Avid Media Composer, meaning that you can now run all 76 Red Giant Universe effects and transitions in eight host applications, like Premiere Pro CC and After Effects.
An annual subscription for Universe is $99 a year, or you can pay $20 monthly. Learn more at redgiant.com/universe.
