Next week, the entire Red Giant team will be getting together for our annual company meeting. We’re a virtual company with people in NY, Utah, Ottawa, Halifax, Oregon, California, the UK and more. We regularly communicate with each other, via Skype, iChat, gotomeeting.com and through some older tech called the telephone.
But there is no substitution for meeting face to face, and talking through the issues. I’m really looking forward to it. And I’m really looking forward to bringing you with me. And by that I mean – I want to hear your ideas and thoughts about Red Giant. What we’re doing right, wrong, too much of or not enough.
If you could do me a personal favor, please post your ideas and thoughts in the comments area below. I want to take them with me to discuss at the meeting.
Thanks.
P.S.: Red Giant is always listening. We read EVERYTHING that comes in via email, blog comments, tutorial comments, twitter and facebook. And you can always use the phone or live chat for support. The reason I’m doing this is because I want to come into this meeting with your ideas and thoughts fresh in my mind. So, basically, you’re helping me do my job better.
17 Responses
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I would love to see a new denoiser. Just an idea but what about a plugin to fix dead/stuck pixels ?
The software is all good when it works, but some continues to be unstable and the installers are a nightmare. Instead of trying to come up with new ideas, get what you have working properly.
Red Giant plugins crash my apps more than any other manufacturer. (Trapcode excluded)
I really dig the Red Giant products I own, the Magic Bullet Suite is awesome, I’m gradually building out my Trapcode and Effects suites and next up for me is the compositing suite. I haven’t experienced the crash issue raised above but I will echo that installation is a bit of a fuss to deal with. My experience with Red Giant has been almost entirely positive, great service so far, lots of learning tools and a superb community from both within the company and in the user base.
Hi
I disagree with Rob Neal.
I am satisfied with Red Giant.
Thank you Harry.
For the novices, More Tutorials on your products or even a product manual for your products. So I’m not wasting time playing with different settings trying to figure out what they do. Some of them I still don’t know what they do.
Thank you Aharon for being open to suggestions. I am very pleased w/ Red Giant’s software, and the customer support is amazing!
LOOKS 2
–How about a keyer? Should have the 3-rings and HSL with it so it’s a tool itself.
–a few tools have the circles that are dead-center (and to my knowledge cannot be moved, I think ‘Lens Distortion’ is one of them) … possibly modify these tools so the ‘circles’ can be moved about
LOOKS 2 and COLORISTA II
A number of tools have “circles” that can be adjusted to ellipses, but if the “circles” have more adjustment points to manipulate then more forms could be created to better serve the image or part of the image.
That’s it …
Attack life Aharon!
I agree with Rob, the new installers are a nightmare if you’ve not updated for the latest and greatest. For example, I recently demoed Looks 2 and Form 2 while evaluating future upgrade decisions and had a horrible time rolling back to older versions. In the end I had to uninstall all my plugins, install the previous suite versions and then install again using the new installers to get the bug fixes released for the products I actually owned.
On a positive note your customer service is generally good. It would be nice if there was more visibility into bug fix requests. I still have bug fix requests that have been open for over a year with no ETA. The lack of visibility (or fixes) doesn’t inspire confidence when reporting other issues encountered.
I think you guys approach your customers with the right attitude and I feel like you try your best to deliver quality products – there just seems to be some bumps in the road now and again.
Red Giant is definitely one of my favorite companies, you do a great job of making the community feel appreciated with all the support and tutorials you guys give.
The only thing that really sticks out to me as needing improvement would be make the installers more User Friendly. The main part being, let me choose which disc drive I want to install the plug ins on. Magic Bullet Looks was a pain trying to install due to multiple hard drives and After Effects not being on C:. Just a simple option to choose would make a world of difference.
Other then that just keep up the awesome work!
I really like the outstanding quality of your products. I’m especially happy about helpful and workflow-oriented features such as the RGB parade and vectorscope in Looks. Additionally I love to see how the service and everything around the quality software develops so well. The sales and update pricings are awesome and I’m happy that you provide a friendly and helpful customer service who helped me with problems in a solution-oriented, direct and uncomplicated way (unlike other major companies). Keep it personal, aim for the unexpected (like obj support in Form). How about timeline scrubbing in Looks? (I know it’s a host thing but maybe you can find a solution even though it is???)
Only one request: I would love to have tablet support (Wacom) in Colorista II. It’s fully supported in Looks (and the 3wayCC in there) but it doesn’t work in Colorista2… And eyedropper tools for CC in Looks (just like in Colorista2) would be helpful sometimes.
I have no problems with the software or installers whatsoever. And in fact, I think the products are of top quality, and they perform exactly as advertised.
I do hope you’ll continue to standardize the user interfaces where possible, even as most are, for the most part, intuitively designed for easy adaptation.
Last, since Red Giant products are my plug-ins of choice, I have to believe you could offer more frequent sales/discounts for small output shops like mine.
After all, your goal should be to get your products onto an increasing number of users systems.
I agree with Stan. I am just getting into the Trapcode Suite and have immersed myself in tuts on Form and to a lesser extent on Particular. I would love it if you redid Peter’s original Getting Started tuts so I can get a better understanding of what some of the other products do in a more current CS5, and also expand those a bit to help with the understanding of their capabilities. Otherwise, I’m having a good time following along with your tuts both archived and live. I always feel like I come away learning something new, so keep it up! Thanks
I agree with the other comments – Red Giant is top-of-the-line, and I feel confident using it. However, I have many of their products that I know I’m not using to their full advantage, and it’s because of the lack of a manual or thorough tutorial. Horizon is a good example.
The products at Red Giant are incredible and love the amazing things you can do with them. The only thing I would want to see is more tutorials using products from the Effects Suite such as Image Lounge, Planespace and more. The Magic Bullet and Trapcode suites get more great tutorials than any other products (i.e. Particular, Looks, Form and/or Shine). It would be great to have more diversity or real world effects using other great products that you offer so that people can justify whether to purchase the other suites. Otherwise, excellent job overall
Though kinda expensive initially, Red Giant has really proven to be customer-friendly. The all-platforms, all-apps policy is FANTASTIC, and the affordable upgrades (or even better, free updates like Looks for FCX) are truly appreciated. Emotion plays a huge role in how much I look forward to paying for version upgrades, and Red Giant has graciously and quickly taken care of some licensing snafus in the past. Coupled with periodic sales, I’ll be buying upgrades for a long time!
As mentioned before, the installers are a bit of a pain to deal with, and it seems weird that the demo downloads are the only obvious way to get the software – though the updates page would be a great one-stop solution, it’s not obvious if they are the full software packages, or simply partial updates? Maybe this has been fixed since I last tried to install on a system…
I also have some complaints about the quality of the effects, especially in Looks. When editing images, I want to be careful about retaining highlight and shadow densities and pay special attention to realistic lighting, but nearly all the adjustments modify these in a non-photoreal way. For example, applying a vignette will actually gray out areas of white! In no situation would I ever want this result, and it means the colours are messed up too. Check out the DV Rebel Tools in AFX for an excellent example of a more photo-real vignette using gamma adjustments to prevent highlight loss and shadow distortion, along with more realistic tonal changes. Same goes for a lot of the filters in Looks; even the chromatic aberrations are harsh and non-optical. I’m also not a fan of the radius + spread + falloff settings, as they seem hard to control reliably, but now it just sounds like I’m hating on the software, which isn’t at all the case.
hello Aharon,
I’m an after effect user for quite a long time now and there is a few thing that I think are missing at RedGiant.
I often work in companies which have dozens of after effects workstations to deal with and installing or upgrading your softwares
is a pain for them because there are way too many of installers to run and too many of licenses to buy and it become a real nightmare if they own a render farm.
Why won’t you sell packages with a simple and unique installer and upgrades included in the price for a certain amount of time it would be a kind of company super package. From what i see your policy seems to be to only communicate to single users but most of the professionnals even if they own their own computer with their own pieces of software spend most of the time working on companies’ computer which most of the time won’t have all of your plugins that we need to do great work and mostly do it fast because they don’t work to buy and install new stuffes every two months specially if some of those we don’t use more than once in a year but I as a user and all my collegues will be totally screwed up the day we will need that special one.
I think this situation is sad for the users and for you as the seller so if could simplify the installation and the upgrading processes specially on multimachines you would make tons of users happy.
That was the first point.
About your tutorials, I think you all are doing a super great job and I learn so much thanks to you.
But I think most of them are showing cheesy results and it’s often ok but I think it sometimes deserves your products.
I really enjoyed the interview and the breakdown of the stargate studio you did and also the whole “plot device” idea because both of those were about showing an in production usage of after effects and red giant products and I think you should show more of professionnal use of your products.
About the plugins I think there is a lack of informations and tutorials about the old sets of plugins like for exemple the image lounges and the composite wizard.
I would really like to see more effects working in the 3d world of after effects like particular form horizon etc…
First of all thanks for all you do Aharon! I have learned alot from you and Red Giant via the great tut’s.
With that said, I am having a large number of crashes in AE while using Light Factory and Colorista 2. Windows 7 64bit-i7-24 gig of ram. It usually happens when moving a camera in 3D space. Hapenbs over and over again.
Thanks again and keep the good stuff coming!
i want to break a portion or total building in a video footage.so i want know i could it possible in after effect ,i used shatter but it did not result which i want.