We’ve been working on Transcriptive for like 3 years now. In that time, the A.I. has heard my voice saying ‘Digital Anarchy’ umpteen million times. So, you would think it would easily get that right by now. As the below transcript from our SRT Importing tutorial shows… not so much. (Dugal Accusatorial? Seriously?) ALSO, you would think that by now I would have a list of terms that I would copy/paste into Transcriptive’s Glossary field every time I get a transcript for a tutorial. The glossary helps the A.I. determine what ‘vocal sounds’ should be when it translates those sounds into words. Uh, yeah… not so much. So… don’t be like AnarchyJim. If you have words you know the A.I. probably won’t get: company names, industry jargon, difficult proper names (cool blog post on applying player names to an MLB video here), etc., then use Transcriptive’s glossary (in the Transcribe dialog). It does work. (and somebody should mention that to the guy that designed the product. Oy.) Overall the A.I. is really accurate and does usually get ‘Digital Anarchy’ correct. So I get lazy about using the glossary. It is a really useful thing…
Using Transcriptive with multiple serial numbers and one account
If you work with a team to deliver high quality videos then you know how important it is to keep everything organized between editors, assistant editors, producers, and everyone else involved in a project. With basically everyone working remotely, the need to keep all data under one account seemed like a big priority for our clients. So Transcriptive for Premiere Pro now allows users to log in to one account in order to share prepaid minutes balances, have access to the same projects on Transcriptive.com, track transcribed jobs to avoid duplicates, and access every invoice in one place. The licensing for Transcriptive for Premiere Pro has not changed: each license purchased equals one serial number that can be installed on two computers. However, multiple editors can now share the same account and pre-paid minutes if no serial number is attached to the Transcriptive account. It sounds confusing, but it’s a simple process. After the Transcriptive licenses are purchased and the team account is created, you can share the login info with whoever is going to be using Transcriptive. All you need to do is to make sure your team members follow the steps below. Download Transcriptive for Premiere Pro: Mac: https://digitalanarchy.com/demos/psd_mac.html#d11 PC: https://digitalanarchy.com/demos/psd_win.html#d11 Open Premiere Pro>Extensions>Transcriptive Choose the option to “Click here to register using just your serial number” in the Serial number setup window and enter the unrestricted trial serial number. Go to Profile the menu on the upper right corner of the panel and use the Transcriptive account credentials to connect the panel to the account created on https://app.transcriptive.com Following steps 3 and 4 each time Transcriptive is setup will authorize the full version of our Premiere Pro plugin without requiring users to create multiple accounts. This means all editors will be able to use one set of pre-paid minutes packages, assistant editors can quickly access the transcripts in Premiere and Transcriptive.com without having to request editors share them between accounts and producers have fewer invoices to track each month. It’s important to keep in mind that having everyone logged into the same account also means they all have access to the account information, including the credit card information and transcripts. If this is a big concern for you, please keep in mind it is not the only way to use Transcriptive, as transcripts can still be shared between accounts. See this video to learn more! However, using the same account within a team is still the best way to centralize all the info related to Transcriptive. If you are ready to give this setup a try but have not yet purchased a Transcriptive for Premiere Pro license, please send an email to cs@digitalanarchy.com.
Apple Silicon Plugins for Final Cut Pro
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@digitalanarchy.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)
Transcriptive and the new Adobe Captions
As you’ve probably heard, Adobe announced a new caption system a few weeks ago. We’ve been fielding a bunch of questions about it and how it affects Transcriptive, so I figured I’d let y’all know what our take on it is, given what we know. Overall it seems like a great improvement to how Premiere handles captions. Adobe is pretty focused on captions. So that’s mainly what the new system is designed to deal with and it looks impressive. While there is some overlap with Transcriptive in regards to editing the transcript/captions, as far as we can tell there isn’t really anything to help you edit video. And there’s a lot of functionality in Transcriptive that’s designed to help you do that. As such, we’re focused on enhancing those features and adding to that part of the product. Also, it also looks like it’s only going to work with sequences. It _seems_ that when they add the speech-to-text (it’s not available in the beta yet), it’s mostly designed for generating captions for the final edit. However, being able to transcribe clips and use the transcript to search the clip in the Source panel is one powerful feature that Transcriptive will allow you to do. You can even set in/out points in Transcriptive and then drop that cut into your main sequence. The ability to send the transcript to a client/AE that doesn’t have Premiere and let them edit it in a web browser is another. With Transcriptive’s Conform feature, you can take the edited transcript and use it as a Paper Cut. Conform will build a sequence with all the edits. Along with a bunch of other smaller features, like the ability to add Comments to the transcript. So… we feel there will still be a lot of value even once the caption system is released. If we didn’t… we would’ve stopped development on it. But we’re still adding features to it… v2.5.1, which lets you add Comments to the transcript, is coming out this week sometime (Dec. 10th, give or take). One thing we do know, is that the caption system will only import/export caption files (i.e. SRT, SCC, etc). From our perspective, this is not a smart design. It’s one of my annoyances with the current caption system. Transcriptive users have to export a caption file and re-import that into Premiere. It’s not a good workflow, especially when we should just be able to save captions directly to your timeline. Adobe is telling us it’s going to be the same klugy workflow. So if that doesn’t sound great to you, you can go to the Adobe site and leave a comment asking for JSON import/export. (URL: https://tinyurl.com/y4hofqoa) Perhaps if they hear from enough people, they’ll add that. Why would that help us (and you)? When we get a transcript back from the A.I., it’s a rich-data text file (JSON format). It has a lot of information about the words in it. Caption formats are data poor. It’s kind of like comparing a JPEG to a RAW file. You usually lose a lot of information when you save as a caption format (as you do with a JPEG). It’ll make it much easier for us and other developers to move data back and forth between the caption system and other tools. For example: If you want someone to make corrections to the Adobe transcript outside of Premiere (on Transcriptive.com for example :-), it’s easier to keep the per-word timecode and metadata with a JSON file. Historically Adobe has had products that were very open. It’s why they have such a robust plugin/third-party ecosystem. So we’re hopeful they continue that by making it easy to access high resolution data from within the caption system or anywhere else data/metadata is being generated. It’s great Adobe is adding a better caption workflow or speech-to-text. The main reason Transcriptive isn’t more caption-centric is we knew Adobe was going to upgrade that sooner or later. But the lack of easy import/export is a bummer. It really doesn’t help us (or any developer) extend the caption system or help Premiere users that want to use another product in conjunction with the system. As mentioned, it’s still beta, so we’ll see what happens. Hopefully they make it a bit more flexible and open. Cheers, Jim Tierney Chief Executive Anarchist
Why we charge upgrade fees
Most of the updates we release are free for users that have purchased the most recent version of the plugin. However, because we are not subscription based (we still do that old fashioned perpetual license thing), if you don’t own the latest version of the plugin… you have to upgrade to it. It requires a TON of work to keep software working with all the changes Apple, Adobe, Nvidia and everyone else keeps making. Most of this work we do for free because they’re small incremental changes. Every time you see Beauty Box v4.0.1 or 4.0.7 or 4.2.4 (the current one)… you can assume a lot of work went into that and you don’t have to pay anything. However, eventually the changes add up or Apple (most of the time it’s Apple) does some crazy thing that means we need to rewrite large portions of the plug-in. In either case, we rev the version number (i.e. 4.x to 5.0) and an upgrade is required. We do not go back and ‘fix’ older versions of the software. We only update the most recent one. Such is the downside of Perpetual licenses. You can use that license forever, but if your host app or OS changes and that change breaks the version of the plugin you have… you need to upgrade to get a fix. If one of your clients comes to you with a video you did for them in HD, and says ‘hey, I need this in 4K’. Would you redo the video for free? Probably not. They have a perpetual license for the HD version. It doesn’t entitle them to new versions of the video forever. We want to support our customers. The reason we develop this stuff is because it’s awesome to see the cool things you all do with what we throw out there. If we didn’t have to do any work to maintain the software, we wouldn’t charge upgrade fees. Unfortunately, it is a lot of work. We want to support you, but if we go out of business, that’s probably not going to benefit either of us. Apple may say it only takes two hours to recompile for Silicon and that may be true. But to go from that to a stable plugin that can be used in a professional environment and support different host apps and graphics cards and all that… it’s more like two months or more. So, that’s why we charge upgrade fees. You’re paying for all the coding, design, and testing that goes into creating a professional product that you can rely on. Not too mention the San Francisco based support team to help you out with all of it. We’re here to help you be successful. The flipside is we need to do what’s necessary to make sure we’re successful ourselves.
Flicker Free 2.0: Up to 1500% faster!
We’re extremely excited about the speed improvements we’ve enhanced Flicker Free 2.0 with! Yes, we have actually seen 1500% performance increase with 4K footage, but on average across all resolutions and computers it’s usually 300-400% increase. Still pretty good and 4K is more like 700-800% on average. You can see our performance benchmarks in this Google Doc. And download the benchmark projects for Premiere Pro (700mb) and for Final Cut Pro to run your own tests! (However, you need to run the FF1 sequences with FF1 and the FF2 (FF1 settings) with FF2. If you just turn off the GPU in FF2 you won’t get the same results (they’ll be slower than they would be in FF1) However, it’s pretty dependent on your computer and what video editing app you’re using. We’ve been disappointed by MacBook Pros across the board. They’re just really under powered for the price. If you’re running a MacBook, we highly recommend getting an external GPU enclosure and putting in a high end AMD card. We’d recommend Nvidia as we do on Windows, but… Apple. Oh well. It’s possible once we implement Metal (Apple’s technology to replace OpenCL) we’ll see some additional improvements. That’s coming in a free update shortly. In fact, because After Effects/Mac only supports Metal, Flicker Free isn’t accelerated at all in AE. It does great in Premiere which does support OpenCL. (Adobe’s GPU support is really lacking, and frustrating, across their video apps, but that’s a topic for another blog post) Some notes about the Benchmark Google Doc: It’s only Premiere and FCP Not every computer ran every test. We changed the benchmark and didn’t have access to every machine to render the additional sequences. Windows generally saw more improvement than Mac. FCP saw some really significant gains. It’s much faster/efficient to get multiple frames in FCP using the GPU than the CPU. 1.0 was really slow in FCP. The important bit is at the right edge of the spreadsheet where you see the percentages. We’d love to see you run the benchmarks on your computer and please send us the results. If you do, please send results to cs@digitalanarchy.com. However, you need to run the FF1 sequences with FF1 and the FF2 (FF1 settings) with FF2. If you just turn off the GPU in FF2 you won’t get the same results (they’ll be slower than they would be in FF1). After Effects isn’t in the benchmark because AE/Mac doesn’t support OpenCL for GPU acceleration. Davinci Resolve and Avid are coming soon!
Fixing Flicker in Videos with Lots of Motion – Fast Moving Cameras or Subjects
One of the things Flicker Free 1.0 doesn’t do well is deal with moving cameras or fast moving subjects. This tends to result in a lot of ghosting… echos from other frames Flicker Free is analyzing as it tries to remove the flicker (no people aren’t going to stop talking to you on dating apps because you’re using FF). You can see this in the below video as sort of a motion blur or trails. Flicker Free 2.0 does a MUCH better job of handling this situation. We’re using optical flow algorithms (what’s used for retiming footage) as well as a better motion detection algorithm to isolate areas of motion while we deflicker the rest of the frame. You can see the results side-by-side below: Better handling of fast motion, called Motion Compensation, is one of the big new features of 2.0. While the whole plugin is GPU accelerated, Motion Compensation will slow things down significantly. So if you don’t need it, it’s best to leave it off. But when you need it… you really need it and the extra render time is worth the wait. Especially if it’s critical footage and it’s either wait for the render or re-shoot (which might not be so easy if it’s a wedding or sports event!). We’re getting ready to release 2.0 in the next week or so, so just a bit of tease of some of the amazing new tech we’ve rolled into it!
Multicam Sequences and Merged Clips support is coming to Transcriptive
Using Transcriptive with multicam sources is something we’ve wanted to implement for a while now. If you are a multicam fan and have been using Transcriptive for Premiere Pro, you know there isn’t a straightforward solution to transcribe Multicam source sequences. But Adobe is adding a way for panels to access multicam sequences correctly. So Transcriptive finally has multicam support! When we launched Transcriptive 2.0, which gave users the ability to transcribe Clips as well as Sequences, we started thinking that maybe if Transcriptive could treat multicam sources as clips instead of sequences it would be possible to transcribe them using Clip Mode. Multicam is an odd duck. Technically they’re sequences, but Premiere treats them as clips. Sometimes. It’s a strange implementation which made it impossible for Transcriptive to know what they were. Adobe has made some changes with the newest Premiere Pro build. It’s currently the public beta but should be released soon (14.3.2 when it comes out). The upcoming release of Transcriptive 2.5, which is in BETA, already supports these changes. Multicam sources can now be transcribed in Clip Mode, allowing users to click on a multicam source in the project window and use the transcript and find the sections they want to add to a sequence. Merged clips seem to work the same way, and can also be transcribed in Clip Mode. The transcript will be saved to that merged clip in that project, and the transcript will load when you open that merged clip with Clip Mode on. Here’s a step-by-step of what we are testing: Create a multicam or merged clip Use Transcriptive to transcribe it in Clip Mode Use the transcript to add in and out points and insert those sections into a sequence. It’s a very simple and standard workflow with some caveats. One thing to keep in mind is that, with a multicam clip, you will want to use the Insert command in the source Monitor (,) and not in Transcriptive (Ctrl+,). This is because we don’t currently have the ability to detect the active camera when inserting from Transcriptive. If a multicam clip is inserted from Transcriptive, you won’t be able to change the camera in the sequence with Multicam View. So you can add in and out points in either Transcriptive or the Source Monitor, but make sure you insert any sound bites from the Source Monitor and not from the Transcriptive panel. Another thing to keep in mind is that, if you are using the Transcriptive web app to share transcripts with team members, the multicam functionalities you find in Premiere Pro won’t be available on the web. You can share a Multicam Clip to the web app the same way you share any other clips. However, sharing the clip will use a default camera, and not the active camera. If you want to choose a specific camera to show on the Transcriptive web app, drop the multicam clip into a sequence and share the sequence, so that you can set what camera is uploaded. More on sharing Multicam Sequences to Transcriptive.com to come! Multicam and Merged clips support are likely to be included in our next Transcriptive 2.5 release. Stay tuned! Questions? Email cs@digitalaanarchy.com.
Improving Accuracy of A.I. Transcripts with Custom Vocabulary
The Glossary feature in Transcriptive is one way of increasing the accuracy of the transcripts generated by artificial intelligence services. The A.I. services can struggle with names of people or companies and it’s a big of mixed bag with technical terms or industry jargon. If you have a video with names/words you think the A.I. will have a tough time with, you can enter them into the Glossary field to help the A.I. along. For example, I grabbed this video of MLB’s top 30 draft picks in 2018: Obviously a lot names that need to be accurate and since we know what they are, we can enter them into the Glossary. As the A.I. creates the transcript, words that sound similar to the names will usually be replaced with the Glossary terms. As always, the A.I. analyzes the sentence structure and makes a call on whether the word it initially came up with fits better in the sentence. So if the Glossary term is ‘Bohm’ and the sentence is ‘I was using a boom microphone’, it probably won’t replace the word. However if the sentence is ‘The pick is Alex boom’, it will replace it. As the word ‘boom’ makes no sense in that sentence. Here are the resulting transcripts as text files: Using the Glossary and Normal without Glossary Here’s a short sample to give you an idea of the difference. Again, all we did was add in the last names to the Glossary (Mize, Bart, Bohm): With the Glossary: The Detroit Tigers select Casey Mize, a right handed pitcher. From Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. With the second selection of the 2018 MLB draft, the San Francisco Giants select Joey Bart a catcher. A catcher from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, with the third selection of a 2018 MLB draft. The Philadelphia Phillies select Alec Bohm, third baseman Without the Glossary: The Detroit Tigers select Casey Mys, a right handed pitcher. From Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. With the second selection of the 2018 MLB draft, the San Francisco Giants select Joey Bahrke, a catcher. A catcher from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, with the third selection of a 2018 MLB draft. The Philadelphia Phillies select Alec Bomb. A third baseman As you can see it corrected the names it should have. If you have names or words that are repeated often in your video, the Glossary can really save you a lot of time fixing the transcript after you get it back. It can really improve the accuracy, so I recommend testing it out for yourself! It’s also worth trying both Speechmatics and Transcriptive-A.I. Both are improved by the glossary, however Speechmatics seems to be a bit better with glossary words. Since Transcriptive-A.I. has a bit better accuracy normally, you’ll have to run a test or two to see which will work best for your video footage. If you have any questions, feel free to hit us up at cs@digitalanarchy.com!
PowerSearch is now bundled with Transcriptive 2.0! Here’s why you should try them together.
Since we announced the bundle between Transcriptive and PowerSearch a few months back, our team has been working even harder to improve the plugin so users can make the most of having transcripts and search engine capabilities inside Premiere Pro. This means we are releasing Transcriptive 2.0.5, which fixes some critical bugs reported, and PowerSearch 2.0: a much faster and efficient version of our metadata search tool. Having accurate transcripts available in Premiere is already a big help on speeding up video production workflows, especially while working remotely. (See this previous post about Transcriptive’s sharing capabilities for remote collaboration!) But we truly believe, and have been hearing this from clients as well, that having all the content in your video editing project – especially transcripts! – converted into searchable metadata makes it much easier to find content if you have large amounts of footage, markers, sequences, and media files. And this is why the PowerSearch and Transcriptive combo makes it much easier to find soundbites, different takes of a script, or pinpoint any time a name or place is mentioned. PowerSearch 1.0 was decently fast but could be slow on larger projects. Our next release makes use of a powerful SQL database to make PowerSearch an order of magnitude faster. The key to PowerSearch is that it indexes an entire Premiere Pro project, much like Google indexes websites, to optimize search performance. An index of hundreds of videos that used to take 10-12 hours to create is now indexed in less than an hour and the same database makes searching all that data significantly faster. Another advantage is the ability to use common search symbols, such as minus signs and quotes, for more precise, accurate searching. For editors with hundreds of hours of video, this can help narrow down searches from hundreds of results to a few dozen. PowerSearch still returns search results like any search engine. Showing you the search term, the words around it, what clip/sequence/marker it’s in, and the timecode. Clicking on the result will open the clip or sequence and jump straight to the correct timecode in the Source or Program panel. PowerSearch 2.0 can still be purchased separately and help your production even if you are getting transcripts from a different source or just want to search markers. However, it is now bundled with Transcriptive and you can get both for $149 while PowerSearch costs $99 on its own. So if you haven’t tried using PowerSearch and Trabscriptive together, give it a try! We are constantly working on Transcriptive to add more capabilities, reduce transcription costs, and improve the sharing options now available in the panel. Features like Clip Mode and the new Text Editor go beyond just transcribing media and sequences, and combining it with a much faster PowerSearch makes finding content much faster. Transcriptive 2.0 users can use their Transcriptive license to activate PowerSearch. Trial licenses for both Transcriptive and PowerSearch are available here and our team would be happy to help if you need support figuring out a workflow for you and your team. Send any questions, concerns, or feedback to cs@digitalanarchy.com! We would love to hear from you.
Flicker Free 2.0 Beta!
It’s been a long time coming, so we’re pretty excited to announce that Flicker Free 2.0 is in beta! The beta serial number is good until June 30th and will make the plugin fully functional with no watermark. Please contact cs@digitalanarchy.com to get added to the beta list and get the serial number. There are a lot of cool improvements, but the main one is GPU support. On Windows, on average it’s about 350% faster vs. Flicker Free 1.0 with the same settings, but often it’s 500% or more. On Mac, it’s more complicated. Older machines see a bigger increase than newer ones, primarily because they support OpenCL better. Apple is doing what it can to kill OpenCL, so newer machines, which are AMD only, suffer because of it. We are working on a Metal port and that’ll be a free upgrade for 2.0, but it won’t be in the initial release. So on Mac you’re more likely to see a 200% or so increase over FF 1.0. Once the Metal port is finished we expect performance similar to what we’re seeing on Windows. Although, on both platforms it varies a bit depending on your CPU, graphic card, and what you’re trying to render. The other big improvement is better motion detection, that uses optical flow algorithms. For shots with a moving camera or a lot of movement in the video, this makes a big difference. The downside is that this is relatively slow. However, if you’re trying to salvage a shot you can’t go and reshoot (e.g. a wedding), it will fix footage that was previously unfixable. A great example of this is in the footage below. It’s a handheld shot with rolling bands. The camera is moving around Callie, our Director of IT Obsolescence, and this is something that gives 1.0 serious problems. I show the original, what FF 1.0 could do, and what the new FF 2.0 algorithms are capable of. It does a pretty impressive job. You can download the Premiere project and footage of Callie here: https://digitalanarchy.com/beta/beta-project.zip (it helps to have both FF 1.0 and FF 2.0 to see the before/after) Beta ReadMe with info about the parameters: https://digitalanarchy.com/beta/flickerfree_readme.zip A couple important things to note… 1) if you’re on Mac, make sure the Mercury Engine is set to OpenCL. We don’t support Metal yet. We’re working on it but for now the Mercury Engine HAS to be set to OpenCL. 2) Unfortunately, Better AND Faster wasn’t doable. So if you want Faster, use the settings for 1.0. This is probably what you’ll usually want. For footage with a lot of motion (e.g. handheld camera), that’s where the 2.0 improvements will really make a difference, but it’s slower. See the ReadMe for more details (I know… nobody reads the ReadMe. But it’s not much longer than this email… you should read it!). Here’s a benchmark Premiere Pro project that we’d like you to run. It helps to also have Flicker Free 1.0 installed if you have it. If not, just render the FF 2.0 sequences. Please queue everything up in Media Encoder and render everything when you’re not using the machine for something else. Please send the results (just copy the media encoder log for the renders: File>Show Log), what graphics card you have, and what processer/speed you have to beta@digitalanarchy.com. Benchmark project with footage (if you’ve already downloaded this, please re-download it as the project has changed): https://digitalanarchy.com/beta/FF2-Benchmark.zip (~650mb) Please send any bug reports or questions to cs@digitalanarchy.com It’s been a long time coming, so we’re pretty excited about this release! Thanks for any help you can give! Cheers, Jim Tierney Chief Executive Anarchist Digital Anarchy
Why we charge crossgrade fees
It’s a lot of work supporting different host apps. Every company has a different API (application programming interface) and they usually work very differently from each other. So development takes a lot of time, as does testing, as does making sure our support staff knows each host app well enough to troubleshoot and help you with any problems. Our goal with all our software is to provide a product that 1) does what it claims to do as well or better than anything else available, 2) is reasonably bug free and 3) completely supported if you call in with a problem (yes, you can still call us and, no, you won’t be routed to an Indian call center). All of that is expensive. But we pride ourselves on great products with great support at a reasonable cost. By having crossgrades we can do all of the above, since you’re not paying for things you don’t need. If you create a video for a client in HD and then they tell you they want the video in a vertical format for mobile, do you do it for free? Probably not. While clients might think you just need to re-render it, you know that because you need to make the video compelling in the new format, make sure all text is readable, and countless other small things… it requires a fair amount of work. That’s the way it is with developing for multiple APIs. So the crossgrade fee covers those costs. And since all of our plugins are perpetual licenses, you don’t have to pay a subscription fee forever to keep using our products. If we didn’t charge crossgrade fees, we’d include the costs of development for all applications in the initial price of the plugin (which is what some companies do). This way you only pay for what you need. Most customers only use one host application, so this results in a lower initial cost. Only users that require multiple hosts have to pay for them. And we don’t actually charge per applications. For example, After Effects and Premiere use the same API, so if you buy one of our plugins for Adobe, it works in both. The crossgrades come as a surprise to some customers, but there really are good reasons for them. I wanted you all to understand what they are and how much work goes into our products.
