Red Giant Universe 2.0 - no more free lunch

You probably already heard, but...

Red Giant Universe had been a consistently-updated mix of free and subscription effects for Adobe After Effect, Premiere Pro, and related apps like Hitfilm Pro, Final Cut Pro X, and DaVinci Resolve. With the new Universe 2.0, Red Giant removed the less popular plug-ins -- and will no longer offer free tools! 

There more at PVC in Red Giant Universe 2.0: Hud, Mograph, Stylized Damage & Looks, Transitions

Video Copilot releases Element 3D v2

Video Copilot released Element 3D v2 today. E3D v2 is $199 or a $99 upgrade, with more bundle upgrade discounts. The plug-in is compatible with After Effects CS5 + above.

There's more on PVC, but here's the 2nd intro movie:

Plug-ins: AE, Premiere, locations +VST

Toolfarm noted that in Vista AE filters can be installed in the folder Program Files \Adobe \Common \Plug-ins \CS3 \MediaCore.

The is same as Windows XP, and in either case there are a few gotchas. If you want to avoid annoying error messages, you won't want to duplicate filters from Program Files \Adobe \Adobe After Effects CS3 \Support Files \Plug-ins.

More importantly, filters in the Common folder will load into AE, Encore, and Premiere Pro CS3. This is nice when they work, but Premiere doesn't support the AE filter spec completely. Trapcode Shine, Starglow, and 3D Stroke work fine in both apps because they were made with the editor in mind. Other filters may not work, even the ones that ship with After Effects. For example, it would be really nice to have AE's Remove Grain inside of Premiere -- but it just crashes Premiere (on my XP setup). Other filters may work fine, or yield animation rendering artifacts, or not even load.

Adobe Encore also attempts to load from the Common\\\MediaCore folder, and this too can cause Encore crashing when the native AE Effects folder is relocated there.

So, you can use the Common folder to install plug-ins, but be aware that those filters will be shared by Premiere and Encore, which can be problematic at times.

Update: In Premiere starting the app with Shift key down clears the cache of plug-ins, but does not clear Preferences (since Premiere Pro 1.0).

Also, VST audio plug-ins can be a problem in Premiere, which supports VST 2 plug-ins not VST 3 plug-ins in CS4. There are also problems with loading VST filters in Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, especially if have many (like hundreds). Premiere will ignore custom shared folders and by default look in the public/shared VST plug-ins folder: C:/Program Files/Steinberg/VSTPlugins.

A temporary fix is to prevent plug-ins you don’t want to load is to add a plain text file called "Blacklist.txt" to the VST plug-ins folder. Blacklist.txt should have the names of the plug-ins (the .dll file) you don’t want to load, each on its own line.

In Windows XP, Premiere uses the registry to store VST locations at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ VST\ VSTPluginsPath. In Vista64 the registry key is at HKLM\ SOFTWARE\ Wow6432Node\ VST and uses a string value called VSTPluginsPath to point to the directory where VST plugins are installed.

Hydra: Adobe's answer to Core Image

Is Hydra Adobe's answer to Apple's Core Image? The official name for 'Hydra' is Pixel Bender (nee Adobe Image Foundation), and it's in beta now on Adobe Labs.

John Nack has the news from Abobe MAX 2007: "the Flash Player is being equipped to run Hydra, a new graphics programming [and shader] language from Adobe. Instead of running just the built-in drop shadows, blurs, etc. that were added in version 8, Flash (and by extension Adobe AIR) will now be able to run an essentially unlimited number of imaging effects."

"Hydra is tuned to run ridiculously fast on modern graphics cards (GPUs), and it'll be tuned for multi-core CPUs as well...Here's a key point, though: the same Hydra technology is being used to power the fast filters in After Effects CS3. Therefore an AE plug-in developer could effectively also develop runtime effects for Flash, while a Flash developer could leverage her work inside AE." I hope that Adobe-native effects export as runtime effect in exporting to Flash formats from AE.

Nack continues, "AIF/Hydra engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith has posted a bit more info on his blog." For more good details, see The obligatory post on Hydra by Tinic Uro San.

Update: Darin Cardani of Apple gave a presentation at Cocoaheads/LA on writing an FxPlug, Apple's image processing plug-in architecture (SDK Overview) that lets you create new effects for Final Cut Pro and Motion. For a while you can download a video of the presentation.