Add Beautiful Bokeh and Realistic Lens Flares with Maxon Red Giant 2024
A look at the latest cinematic updates coming to Maxon Red Giant.
Maxon, the developers of tons of professional software solutions for editors, filmmakers and all types of motion designers and visual effects artists have announced a wide-range of updates coming to Red Giant 2024.
The biggest highlights include two new fast-rendering Universe bokeh tools for crafting beautiful blurs, depth-of-field, and transitions. They’re also adding some Light Ball core projects for Real Lens Flares and reimagined color management integration for Magic Bullet Looks.
Let’s take a look at these new features and explore how these new bokeh and lens flare effects in particular can be used to give your projects an extra level of cinematic beauty.
Maxon Red Giant Update 2024.1
Now, there are a lot of different apps and features to explore with Maxon Red Giant products these days, but for those focused on editing and compositing, these are some of the essential effects that have been updated in their toolkit.
In particular these new bokeh and bokeh transition plugins are going to be quite helpful for editors and cinematographers alike looking to give their footage a more dream-like and ethereal quality. The real lens flares should also be quite useful as the flares and reflections can actually change shape and morph the light that goes behind complex shapes.
Here’s everything new coming to Maxon Red Giant 2024.1:
Universe
- New Bokeh plugin allows artists to quickly create beautiful bokeh and mimic camera focus without the need for a complex camera lens setup. A variety of shapes, and other customizations, make it possible to simulate depth of field while maintaining control over the area of focus, focus length, and adding custom blur maps and depth maps.
- Bokeh Transition, a variant of the Bokeh plugin, helps artists seamlessly transition between two clips using a dazzling de-focus effect.
- Enhancements to Universe’s underlying framework offer non-linear editors and compositors real-time experience with Maxon products. Both new plugins plus uni.Blur are built on the new performance framework, which will be expanded to other Universe products in future releases.
Magic Bullet
- New, simplified Magic Bullet Looks color management makes it possible for artists to achieve their goals much more quickly.
- Enhanced support for Unreal Engine (UE) integration allows users to make the most of Looks with the latest version of UE.
VFX Real Lens Flares
- Obscuration is as groundbreaking as Real Lens Flares itself. Watch as the flare and reflections change shape and beautifully morph as the light goes behind complex shapes — just like in a real lens!
- Art direct the sun and bring streetlights to life with the new Light Ball core projection option, which gives flares a physical presence in a scene.
VFX Spot Clone Tracker
- Particularly helpful to After Effects users, the Tracker Only feature allows artists to hide all non-tracking-related parameters, exposing only the necessary controls. Handle multiple tracks on one clip while also kicking out nulls with the new Create Null and Clear Track buttons.
- Shape Roundness is a new single slider that determines the roundness of tracking, cloning shapes. Get more versatility from Spot Clone Tracker, and quickly clone shapes that fit into hard-to-reach places.
Trapcode
- Particular is now optimized for multithreaded, multi-frame rendering.
- A new asset browser refresh enables Maxon to provide assets through the cloud to all Trapcode asset browsers except Form. Artists can now find the perfect sprite, model, curve, or gradient in the ever-expanding Maxon Cloud Capsule Service.
- Highlighting Trapcode’s new cloud service support, Maxon has added two new sprite categories for emojis and pixel art.
Fore more info about how to purchase and download these apps and features, check out Maxon’s website here.
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