Tag Archives: Apple Silicon

Video Editing Plugins, Video Editing Tutorials

Only Beauty Box 5.x Supports Metal GPUs and Apple Silicon

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Beauty Box 5.0 and higher supports Metal and Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc.). This includes the upcoming Beauty Box 6.

However, Beauty Box 4.0 does not support Metal GPU rendering on Macintosh. It uses the older OpenCL technology for GPU processing. (on Windows, 4.0 works fine)

Premiere Pro/After Effects 2022 and later dropped support for OpenCL rendering, and only supports Metal on the M/Silicon chips and Intel Macs. This means Beauty Box 4.0 does not support GPU rendering in the current Intel builds of After Effects or Premiere. It doesn’t work at all on Silicon Macs.

If you’re experiencing slow rendering in Adobe products on a Mac with Beauty Box 4.0 or it’s not showing up at all, that’s probably why.

So if you have 4.0 and have an Intel Mac, you’ll probably want to upgrade to 5.0.

If you have a M/Silicon Mac you’ll need to upgrade. 5.0 was released before the Silicon chips and that’s the only version of Beauty Box that’s been re-written for those chips.

On Windows, Beauty Box 4.0 should still work fine. Both OpenCL and CUDA (for Nvidia) are still supported by Premiere and After Effects.

If you’re experiencing slow render times in 5.0 on Intel, double check that Hardware rendering is set to Metal. (on Apple Silicon Macs, it is always set to Metal and you can’t change it)

In both Premiere and After Effects go to File>Project Settings>General to change

If this is not why you’re having a problem with Beauty Box, try these articles or contact support:

Reasons Plugins Might Not Show in the Effects Menu

Use GPU can be turned off in the plugin or the Beauty Box ‘About’ dialog.

Video Editing Plugins

Apple Silicon Plugins for Final Cut Pro

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We have the initial beta builds of native Silicon versions of Flicker Free and Beauty Box for FCP. FCP is the only released app that is currently Universal and supports Silicon plugins. Samurai Sharpen will be released for FCP/Silicon soon.

Builds for other host apps will be released once they release their Silicon versions. The plan right now is to get the FCP versions solid and that’ll make it more likely the builds for other apps will work out of the gate. Also, I don’t love releasing beta plugins for a beta host app (e.g. Resolve).

Overall they seem in pretty good shape. One caveat is that Analyze Frame doesn’t work in Beauty Box, so you need to manually select the Light and Dark Colors with the color picker. This is not ideal, as it’s not exactly the same thing as using Analyze Frame. But it’s what we’ve got right now. It’s actually more of a problem with FCP’s new FxPlug 4 API, so it won’t be fixed until the next release of FCP.

On that note, I’ll mention that there’s a lot of new stuff going on with the Apple builds. FCP announced the new API, which is completely different from FxPlug 3, so it’s required a lot of re-working. Eventually the FxPlug 3 plugins will stop working in FCP, so you’ll need the FxPlug 4 builds sooner or later. We’re also finally porting the GPU code to Metal. So look for new builds that incorporate all that for both Silicon and Intel very soon. Apple is keeping us pretty busy.

If you have any problems please send bug reports to: cs@nulldigitalanarchy.com

Here are the Apple Silicon builds:

https://digitalanarchy.com/beta/flickerfree_21-667_FX4.dmg  (Flicker Free 2.1 Beta)
https://digitalanarchy.com/beta/beautybox_43-337_FX4.dmg  (Beauty Box 4.3 Beta)