Red Giant Releases Universe Plug In

Red_Giant_Universe

Red Giant has released a new set of GPU accelerated plug ins called Universe. Right now you can try out the Free plan which includes 32 free plug ins, and you will be able to get Premium plug ins, or create your own. They are also updating many of their old plug ins to work GPU enhanced in universe.

Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.

There is the free membership, a $10 a month Premium Plan or a $99 per year plan, or a $399 Lifetime plan that does not expire!

The Plugs include:

Universe Free Tools
Universe Blur (7 plugins)
Universe Distort (8 plugins)
Universe Generators (4 plugins)
Universe Glow (3 plugins)
Universe Transitions (9 plugins)
Universe Premium Tools
Universe Chromatic Glow
Universe Holomatrix
Universe Knoll Light Factory EZ
Universe Noise
Universe Premium Transitions
Universe Prism Displacement
Universe Retrograde
Universe Toonit

This sounds very cool, and I have already installed and am looking forward to trying them out. Not sure about the monthly pricing unless they do add as many effects as they say they will, but the Lifetime is probably the best deal here, especially seeing things like Knoll Light Factory being added with GPU support.

Also is an addition is called Red Giant Supernova, which allows you to program plug ins quickly using the Red Giant Universe Library. So it fairly easy to create your own plug ins.

Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.

FCP.co long term testing of FCP X and the new MacPro and my thoughts.

FCP.Co has an extensive article on long term testing of the new Mac Pro with Final Cut Pro X.

And the results do sound pretty impressive, even if there are some problems with expansion. Seems like you need to use Thunderbolt, as a NAS over GigE is just too slow, and you will quickly use up your thunderbolt ports and be daisy chaining, especially as new devices come out.

And this lack of expansion is what worries me. Do I stay with Mac which I love, or go with a huge expandable PC that can have all the internal storage and external expansion I could ever want? Not that Windows 8.1 is all that great. I have had my Bootcamp install go down multiple times in a short period, for no reason.

Phil Hodgetts on Final Cut Pro 10.1 on new Mac Pro and my thoughts.

Phil Hodgetts has an article on running Final Cut Pro 10.1 on the new Mac Pro and what he was able to play back, 5 Red R2D 4K streams at different scales positions and rotations without rendering.

Pretty amazing, though now I want to see what happens when Adobe re-writes premiere for Dual Graphics Card support and what it can do, and even better if they carry that over to PC, so we can see this on dual NVIDIA CUDA cards. I would love to see what Premiere Pro could do using 2 GTX TITANS instead of AMD FirePro cards which are slower than gaming cards (much like NVIDIAs QUADRO line). The nice thing about the MacPro is it seems Apple is charging the gaming price for it’s FirePro cards, so you are paying for the Radeon editions and getting the FirePro.

I know that Final Cut pro X has gotten much better, but I am still not sold on it. I gave my 2 weeks at the beginning and the mess that it made of the timeline really makes it seem not viable for commercial or direct response, nor for anything that needs an audio mixer, as it will take so much longer to mix something that isn’t set specifically for an audio mixer.

Maybe I am biased by Final Cut Pro X 10.1, but all the improvements have not changed the timeline.

MacRumors on new Mac Pro

Mac Rumors has a roundup of reviews on the new MacPro.

Overall it sounds like people’s complaints were right. The ports on the back are a pain. And the Dual GPU is only good if a program is written for it, and the only one for that now is Final Cut Pro X. It seems currently Premiere Pro uses mostly the CPU, so it is pretty slow as compared to say with CUDA and a GTX 680 or my GTX 670. Be interesting to see what will happen when Adobe makes it compatible with the dual graphics cards though.

Still on the fence. Really want a GTX Titan, which would mean a Windows Machine for my next computer, but there is much software that would not move over and that would not be good. And even with it’s improvements I don’t see myself moving over to FCP X anytime soon.

Phil Hodgetts on Final Cut Pro X 10.1

Phil Hodgetts has an excellent article on the new features of Final Cut Pro X 10.1. http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2013/12/final-cut-pro-x-10-1/

It is really starting to sound more professional, especially with improved SAN support, and better Library management.

Oliver Peters on how FCP 7 makes a great companion to FCP X

Oliver Peters has an interesting article on how he uses Final Cut pro 7 as a companion to Final Cut Pro X to make up for it’s missing features.

Personally I see it as indictment of FCP X. As a program is pretty broken if you have to use an older EOL version of itself to support many high end features, especially when said program could not work on the next OS X Mavericks!