Red Giant has a multitude of effects suites that range from graceful, high quality transitions, to industry-standard visual effects packages. What’s great about Red Giant is that you aren’t obligated to purchase the entire effects suite — you can buy them one at a time, based on your personalized needs. And they’re incredibly customizable, so it will never look like you’re using a canned effect or transition.
Here are five of the favorite plugins of our editing team at Lunacy! *
1. Magic Bullet Looks
If you don’t have a lot of experience with color timing, or even if you do but are in a hurry, Looks is indispensable. With it’s graceful visual interface, it gives you access to pre-made filmic looks so all you have to do is some minor tweaking. You can also build your own look from the bottom up, with basic tools, like skin-smoothing and anamorphic lens flare, to more advanced tools, like custom S-Curves and LUTs. We find the “Cosmo” filter to be really helpful. It identifies skin tone and lets you soften or adjust color, so you can achieve a natural (or not-so-natural) effect.
2. Pluraleyes
If you are an editor and haven’t used Pluraleyes yet, get ready to cry tears of joy. Pluraleyes lets you load in different audio and video sources from your double-system recording, and automatically syncs your audio recording to your in-camera scratch track. You can then import into your NLE, saving a lot of time and energy…and probably a few grey hairs. You even have the option to automatically replace your scratch track if you know you aren’t going to use it.
3. Universe
In our opinion, Universe is the best collection of video effects and transitions on the market. Better yet, it’s subscription-based, so it’s super affordable. If you’re having fun with a sci-fi project, the “Glitch” and “Holomatrix” effects can’t be beat. And with some pretty extensive customization options, you can achieve the exact, unique look you need. If you’re editing a corporate video, sizzle reel, or even a home video montage, you’ll be able to find the perfect transition (the “Halflight” transition is our GO-TO!). With the newest update, fun transitions such as VHS, Retrograde, and Channel Surf give you that old TV or Film look you’ve always dreamed of.
4. Primatte Keyer
We recommend the entire Keyer Suite for seamless finishing, but if you use a green or blue screen, you at least need Primatte Keyer. It’s an incredibly smart tool, and even has an “auto” function which will get rid of your green screen for you. From there, you have a multitude of options that allow you to finesse your key, including patching up holes in the matte, light wrap and color correction that intelligently matches to your background layer, and so much more. Is your green screen leaking onto your subject? You can fix that too! Just mess with the “spill” settings, and it won’t be a problem anymore.
5. Trapcode Sound Keys
If you’ve ever been mesmerized by the dance of an audio wave form while listening to music and wished you could somehow harness that visual energy…look no further! Sound Keys, part of the powerful Trapcode Suite, is an After Effects plugin that will read audio waveforms and actually create keyframes based on the beat (or other parts of the song). This way, you can easily map your audio to a dynamic After Effects animation. This can be great for music videos and background animations, and will look pretty killer on your motion graphics reel.
