Need for Speed

There’s a revolution in the After Effects world – a revolution of speed. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you caught that VideoCopilot and Red Giant released some ridiculously fast OpenGL powered Plug-ins that promise to change the future for AE users. Moving from the CPU to the GPU is clearly the wave of the future, and that future starts now. Just in case you missed it, I’m talking about VideoCopilot’s Element3D and Red Giant’s Trapcode Mir.

I should also point out that Mettle beat most everyone to the punch with ShapeshifterAE.

I have not heard a lot of chatter about ShapeShifter, but it’s definitely worth looking at, no question.

So while VideoCopilot and Red Giant aren’t the first to release OpenGL Plug-ins, these two products are the first to show a promising future for fast rendering of 3D in AE for wide use in motion graphics and visual effects. I say this because they fulfill the following criteria – both:

• Are useful
• Are super fast
• Have a High adoption rate
• Are fairly stable (so far – time will really tell on this one) read more...