If you do a lot of video editing, you may be familiar with Red Giant, maker of many useful post-production tools and plugins. Now you can access its offerings through a new subscription service called Universe, mirroring what Adobe did with Creative Cloud.
Instead of purchasing individual licences for software packages, Universe lets you pay a monthly or yearly fee, at varying tiers, to access its archive of tools. The coolest part is that the collection is continually growing, and the subscription model allows Red Giant to speed up the process of updating and releasing new products.
A base membership for Universe is free and will give you access to a selection of basic post-production tools, and for $US10 a month or $US99 a year, you get access to some of the more heavy duty and powerful products, all of which work with the latest versions of Final Cut, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Motion. Everything Red Giant publishes under Universe will be GPU accelerated, so expect a nice and speedy workflow. Check this page for a list of which tools are free and which are premium.
Unfortunately, it looks like some of Red Giant’s best tools, like Colorista and Magic Bullet, won’t be included in a Universe subscription as of now. That may change in the future though. This selectivity could make Universe a hard sell for many who might expect a more complete package for such a cost.
The service is only in public beta right now, so there may be some kinks to work out. But it looks like it definitely has potential for many a filmmaker and motion graphics artist who have constantly shifting needs.