Sharpening video can be a bit trickier than sharpening photos. The process is the same of course… increasing the contrast around edges which creates the perception of sharpness. However, because you’re dealing with 30fps instead of a single image some additional challenges are introduced: 1- Noise is more of a problem. 2- Video is frequently compressed more heavily than photos, so compression artifacts can be a serious problem. 3- Oversharpening is a problem with stills or video but can create motion artifacts when the video is played back that can be visually distracting. 4- It’s more difficult to mask out areas like skin that you don’t want sharpened. These are problems you’ll run into regardless of the sharpening method. However, probably unsurprising, in addition to discussing the solutions using regular tools, we do talk about how our Samurai Sharpen plugin can help with them. Noise in Video Footage Noise is always a problem regardless of whether you’re shooting stills or videos. However, with video the noise changes from frame to frame making it a distraction to the viewer if there’s too much or it’s too pronounced. Noise tends to be much more obvious in dark areas, as you can see below where it’s most apparent in the dark, hollow part of the guitar: Using a mask to protect the darker areas makes it possible to increase the sharpening for the rest of the video frame. Samurai Sharpen has masks built-in, so it’s easy in that plugin, but you can do this manually in any video editor or compositing program by using keying tools, building a mask and compositing effects. Compression Artifacts Many consumer video cameras, including GoPros and some drone cameras heavily compress footage. Especially when shooting 4K. It’s difficult, and sometimes impossible to sharpen footage like this. The compression artifacts become very pronounced, since they tend to have edges like normal features. Unlike noise, the artifacts are visible in most areas of the footage, although they tend to be more obvious in areas with lots of detail. In Samurai you can increase the Edge Mask Strength to lessen the impact of sharpening on the artifact (often they’re in low contrast) but depending on how compressed the footage is you may not want to sharpen it. Oversharpening Sharpening is a local contrast adjustment. It’s just looking at significant edges and sharpening those areas. Oversharpening occurs when there’s too much contrast around the edges, resulting in visible halos. Especially if you look at the guitar strings and frets, you’ll see a dark halo on the outside of the strings and the strings themselves are almost white with little detail. Way too much contrast/sharpening. The usual solution is to reduce the sharpening amount. In Samurai Sharpen you can also adjust the strength of the halos independently. So if the sharpening results in only the dark or light side being oversharpened, you can dial back just that side. Sharpening Skin The last thing you usually want to do is sharpen someone’s skin. You don’t want your talent’s skin looking like a dried-up lizard. (well, unless your talent is a lizard. Not uncommon these days with all the ridiculous 3D company mascots) Especially with 4K and HD, video is already showing more skin detail than most people want (hence the reason for our Beauty Box Video plugin for digital makeup). If you’re using UnSharp Mask you can use the Threshold parameter, or in Samurai the Edge Mask Strength parameter is a more powerful version of that. Both are good ways of protecting the skin from sharpening. The skin area tends to be fairly flat contrast-wise and the Edge Mask generally does a good job of masking the skin areas out. Either way, you want to keep an eye on the skin areas, unless you want a lizard. (and if so, you should download are free Ugly Box plugin. 😉 Wrap Up You can sharpen video and most video footage will benefit from some sharpening. However, there are numerous issues that you run into and hopefully this gives you some idea of what you’re up against whether you’re using Samurai Sharpen for Video or something else.
Tutorial: Removing Flicker from Edited Video Footage
One problem that users can run into with our Flicker Free deflicker plugin is that it will look across edits when analyzing frames for the correct luminance. The plugin looks backwards as well as forwards to gather frames and does a sophisticated blend of all those frames. So even if you create an edit, say to remove an unwanted camera shift or person walking in front of the camera, Flicker Free will still see those frames. This is particularly a problem with Detect Motion turned OFF. The way around this is to Nest (i.e. Pre-compose (AE), Compound Clip (FCP)) the edit and apply the plugin to the new sequence. The new sequence will start at the first frame of the edit and Flicker Free won’t be able to see the frames before the edit. This is NOT something you always have to do. It’s only if the frames before the edit are significantly different than the ones after it (i.e. a completely different scene or some crazy camera movement). 99% of the time it’s not a problem. This tutorial shows how to solve the problem in Premiere Pro. The technique works the same in other applications. Just replacing ‘Nesting’ with whatever your host application does (pre-composing, making a compound clip, etc).
Comparing Beauty Box To other Video Plugins for Skin Retouching/Digital Makeup
We get a lot of questions about how Beauty Box compares to other filters out there for digital makeup. There’s a few things to consider when buying any plugin and I’ll go over them here. I’m not going to compare Beauty Box with any filter specifically, but when you download the demo plugin and compare it with the results from other filters this is what you should be looking at: Quality of results Ease of use Speed Support Support I’ll start with Support because it’s one thing most people don’t consider. We offer as good of support as anyone in the industry. You can email or call us (415-287-6069). M-F 10am-5pm PST. In addition, we also check email on the weekends and frequently in the evenings on weekdays. Usually you’ll get a response from Tor, our rockstar QA guy, but not infrequently you’ll talk to myself as well. Not often you get tech support from the guy that designed the software. 🙂 Quality of Results The reason you see Beauty Box used for skin retouching on everything from major tentpole feature films to web commercials, is the incredible quality of the digital makeup. Since it’s release in 2009 as the first plugin to specifically address skin retouching beyond just blurring out skin tones, the quality of the results has been critically acclaimed. We won several awards with version 1.0 and we’ve kept improving it since then. You can see many examples here of Beauty Box’s digital makeup, but we recommend you download the demo plugin and try it yourself. Things to look for as you compare the results of different plugins: Skin Texture: Does the skin look realistic? Is some of the pore structure maintained or is everything just blurry? It should, usually, look like regular makeup unless you’re going for a stylized effect. Skin Color: Is there any change in skin tones? Temporal Consistency: Does it look the same from frame to frame over time? Are there any noticeable seams where the retouching stops. Masking: How accurate is the mask of the skin tones? Are there any noticeable seams between skin and non-skin areas? How easy is it to adjust the mask? Ease of Use One of the things we strive for with all our plugins is to make it as easy as possible to get great results with very little work on your end. Software should make your life easier. In most cases, you should be able to click on Analyze Frame, make an adjustment to the Skin Smoothing amount to dial in the look you want and be good to go. There are always going to be times when it requires a bit more work but for basic retouching of video, there’s no easier solution than Beauty Box. When comparing filters, the thing to look for here is how easy is it to setup the effect and get a good mask of the skin tones? How long does it take and how accurate is it? Speed If you’ve used Beauty Box for a while, you know that the only complaint we had with it with version 1.0 was that it was slow. No more! It’s now fully GPU optimized and with some of the latest graphics cards you’ll get real time performance, particularly in Premiere Pro. Premiere has added better GPU support and between that the Beauty Box’s use of the GPU, you can get real time playback of HD pretty easily. And of course we support many different host apps, which gives you a lot of flexibility in where you can use it. Avid, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve, Assimilate Scratch, Sony Vegas, and NUKE are all supported. Hopefully that gives you some things to think about as you’re comparing Beauty Box with other plugins that claim to be as good. All of these things factor into why Beauty Box is so highly regarded and considered to be well worth the price.
The Problem of Slow Motion Flicker during Big Sporting Events: NCAA Tournament
Shooting slow motion footage, especially very high speed shots like 240fps or 480fps, results in flicker if you don’t have high quality lights. Stadiums often have low quality industrial lighting, LEDs, or both. Resulting in flicker during slow motion shots even on nationally broadcast, high profile sporting events. I was particularly struck by this watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament this weekend. Seemed like I was seeing flicker on half of the slow motion shots. You can see a few in this video (along with Flicker Free plugin de-flickered versions of the same footage): To see how to get rid of the flicker you can check out our tutorial on removing flicker from slow motion sports. The LED lights are most often the problem. They circle the arena and depending on how bright they are, for example if it’s turned solid white, they can cast enough light on the players to cause flicker when played back in slow motion. Even if they don’t cast light on the players they’re visible in the background flickering. Here’s a photo of the lights I’m talking about in Oracle arena (white band of light going around the stadium): While Flicker Free won’t work for live production, it works great for de-flickering this type of flicker if you can render it in a video editing app, as you can see in the original example. It’s a common problem even for pro sports or high profile sporting events (once you start looking for it, you see it a lot). So if you run into with your footage, check out the Flicker Free plugin for most video editing applications!
Removing Flicker from Drone Video Footage caused by Prop Flicker
Drones are all the rage at the moment, deservedly so as some of the images and footage being shot with them are amazing. However, one problem that occurs is that if the drone is shooting with the camera at the right angle to the sun, shadows from the props cause flickering in the video footage. This can be a huge problem, making the video unusable. It turns out that our Flicker Free plugin is able to do a good job of removing or significantly reducing this problem. (of course, this forced us to go out and get one. Research, nothing but research!) Here’s an example video showing exactly what prop flicker is and why it happens: There are ways around getting the flicker in the first place: Don’t shoot into the sun, have the camera pointing down, etc. However, sometimes you’re not able to shoot with ideal conditions and you end up with flicker. Our latest tutorial goes over how to solve the prop flicker issue with our Flicker Free plugin. The technique works in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid, Resolve, etc. However the tutorial shows Flicker Free being used in Premiere Pro. The full tutorial is below. You can even download the original flickering drone video footage and AE/Premiere project files by clicking here.
Speeding Up Flicker Free: The Order You Apply Plugins in Your Video Editing App
One key way of speeding up the Flicker Free plugin is putting it first in the order of effects. What does this mean? Let’s say you’re using the Lumetri Color Corrector in Premiere. You want to apply Flicker Free first, then apply Lumetri. You’ll see about a 300+% speed increase vs. doing it with Lumetri first. So it looks like this: Why the Speed Difference? Flicker Free has to analyze multiple frames to de-flicker the footage you’re using. It looks at up to 21 frames. If you have the effect applied before Flicker Free it means Lumetri is being applied TWENTY ONE times for every frame Flicker Free renders. And especially with a slow effect like Lumetri that will definitely slow everything down. It fact, on slower machines it can bring Premiere to a grinding halt. Premiere has to render the other effect on 21 frames in order to render just one frame for Flicker Free. In this case, Flicker Free takes up a lot of memory, the other effect can take up a lot of memory and things start getting ugly fast. Renders with Happy Endings So to avoid this problem, just apply Flicker Free before any other effects. This goes for pretty much every video editing app. The render penalty will vary depending on the host app and what effect(s) you have applied. For example, using the Fast Color Corrector in Premiere Pro resulted in a slow down of only about 10% (vs. Lumetri and a slow down of 320%). In After Effects the slow down was about 20% with just the Synthetic Aperture color corrector that ships with AE. However, if you add more filters it can get a lot worse. Either way, you’ll have much happier render times if you put Flicker Free first. Hopefully this makes some sense. I’ll go into a few technical details for those that are interested. (Feel free to stop reading if it’s clear you just need to put Flicker Free first) (oh, and here are some other ways of speeding up Flicker Free) Technical Details With all host applications, Flicker Free, like all plugins, has to request frames through the host application API. With most plugins, like the Beauty Box Video plugin, the plugin only needs to request the current frame. You want to render frame X: Premiere Pro (or Avid, FCP, etc) has to load the frame, render any plugins and then display it. Plugins get rendered in the order you apply them. Fairly straightforward. The Flicker Free plugin is different. It’s not JUST looking at the current frame. In order to figure out the correct luminance for each pixel (thus removing flicker) it has to look at pixels both before and after the current frame. This means it has to ask the API for up to 21 frames, analyze them, return the result to Premiere, which then finishes rendering the current frame. So the API says, “Yes, I will do your bidding and get those 21 frames. But first, I must render them!”. And so it does. If there are no plugins applied to them, this is easy. It just hands Flicker Free the 21 original frames and goes on its merry way. If there are plugins applied, the API has to render those on each frame it gives to Flicker Free. FF has to wait around for all 21 frames to be rendered before it can render the current frame. It waits, therefore that means YOU wait. If you need a long coffee break these renders can be great. If not, they are frustrating. If you use After Effects you may be familiar with pre-comping a layer with effects so that you can use it within a plugin applied to a different layer. This goes through a different portion of the API than when a plugin requests frames programmatically from AE. In the case of a layer in the layer pop-up the plugin just gets the original image with no effects applied. If the plugin actually asks AE for the frame one frame before it, AE has to render it. One other thing that affects speed behind the scenes… some apps are better at caching frames that plugins ask for than other apps. After Effects does this pretty well, Premiere Pro less so. So this helps AE have faster render times when using Flicker Free and rendering sequentially. If you’re jumping around the timeline then this matters less. Hopefully this helps you get better render times from Flicker Free. The KEY thing to remember however, is ALWAYS APPLY FLICKER FREE FIRST! Happy Rendering!
Beauty Work for Corporate Video
We love to talk about how Beauty Box Video is used on feature films by the likes of Local Hero Post and Park Road Post Production or broadcast TV by NBC or Fox. That’s the big, sexy stuff. However, many, if not most, of our customers are like Brian Smith. Using Beauty Box for corporate clients or local commercials. They might not be winning Emmy awards for their work but they’re still producing great videos with, usually, limited budgets. “The time and budget does not usually afford us the ability to bring in a makeup artist. People that aren’t used to being on camera are often very self-conscious, and they cringe at the thought of every wrinkle or imperfection detracting from their message.”, said Brian, Founder of Ideaship Studios in Tulsa, OK. “Beauty Box has become a critical part of our Final Cut X pipeline because it solves a problem, it’s blazing fast, and it helps give my clients and on-camera talent confidence. They are thrilled with the end result, and that leads to more business for us.” An Essential Tool for Beauty Work and Retouching Beauty Box Video has become an essential tool at many small production houses or in-house video departments to retouch makeup-less/bad lighting situations and still end up with a great looking production. The ability to quickly retouch skin with an automatic mask without needing to go frame by frame is important. However, it’s usually the quality of retouching that Beauty Box provides that’s the main selling point. image courtesy of Ideaship Studios Beauty Box goes beyond just blurring skin tones. We strive to keep the skin texture and not just mush it up. You want to have the effect of the skin looking like skin, not plastic, which is important for beauty work. Taking a few years off talent and offsetting the harshness that HD/4K and video lights can add to someone. The above image of one of Brian’s clients is a good example. When viewed at full resolution, the wrinkles are softened but not obliterated. The skin is smoothed but still shows pores. The effect is really that of digital makeup, as if you actually had a makeup artist to begin with. You can see this below in the closeup of the two images. Of course, the video compression in the original already has reduced the detail in the skin, but Beauty Box does a nice job of retaining much of what is there. ” On the above image, we did not shoot her to look her best. The key light was a bit too harsh, creating shadows and bringing out the lines. I applied the Beauty Box Video plugin, and the shots were immediately better by an order of magnitude. This was just after simply applying the plugin. A few minutes of tweaking the mask color range and effects sliders really dialed in a fantastic look. I don’t like the idea of hiding flaws. They are a natural and beautiful part of every person. However, I’ve come to realize that bringing out the true essence of a person or performance is about accentuating, not hiding. Beauty Box is a great tool for doing that.” – Brian Smith Go for Natural Retouching Of course, you can go too far with it, as with anything. So some skill and restraint is often needed to get the effect of regular makeup and not making the subject look ‘plastic’ or blurred. As Brain says, you want things to look natural. However, when used appropriately you can get some amazing results, making for happy clients and easing the concerns of folks that aren’t always in front of a camera. (particularly men, since they tend to not want to wear makeup… and don’t realize how much they need it until they see themselves on a 65″ 4K screen. 😉 One last tip, you can often easily improve the look of Beauty Box even more by using tracking masks for beauty work, as you can see in the tutorials that link goes to. The ability of these masks to automatically track the points that make up the mask and move them as your subject moves is a huge deal for beauty work. It makes it much easier to isolate an area like a cheek or the forehead, just as a makeup artist would.
EL Capitan, Plugins and the Anarchist
First off, the important bit: All the current versions of our plugins are updated for El Capitan and should be working, regardless of host application (After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve, etc). So you can go to our demo page: http://digitalanarchy.com/demos/main.html And download the most recent version of your plugins. If you haven’t upgraded to El Capitan, I’ll add to the chorus of people saying… Don’t. Overall we’re disappointed by Apple as continues its march towards making the Mac work like the iPhone. Making professional uses more and more obsolete. They’re trying way too hard to make the machines idiot proof and in the process dumbing down what can be done with it. One of the latest examples is, of all things, Disk Utility. You can no longer make a RAID using it and have to use a terminal command. They’ve removed other functionality as well, but for many professional users RAIDs are essential as is Disk Utility. However, it’s now been crippled. Of course, then there’s Final Cut Pro (which has gotten better but still doesn’t feel like a professional app to many people), Photos which replaced Apple’s pro app Aperture, and the Mac Pro trashcan. (kind of sad that when we need a ‘new’ Mac, usually we buy a 2010-12 12-core Mac Pro, they outperform our D500 trashcan) Apple isn’t alone in this ‘dumbing down’ trend. Just look at latest releases of Acrobat (which I’ve heard referred to as the Fischer Price version) and Lightroom. Note to Application Developers- Just because we’re doing a lot of things with our phones does not mean we want to do everything on them or have our desktop apps work like phone apps. There’s a difference between simplicity, making the user experience clear and intuitive but retaining features that make the apps powerful, and stupidity, i.e. making the apps idiot proof. Anyways, end of rant… I spend a fair amount of time thinking about software usability, since we have to strike that balance between ease of use and power with our own video plugins, and using the host applications and OS professionally. So this ‘dumbing down’ concerns me both for my personal uses and having to help DA customers navigate new ‘features’ that affect our photo and video plugins. Cheers, Jim Tierney Chief Executive Anarchist Digital Anarchy
Easy Ways of Animating Masks for Use with Beauty Box in After Effects, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro
We have a new set of tutorials up that will show you how to easily create masks and animate them for Beauty Box. This is extremely useful if you want to limit the skin retouching to just certain areas like the cheeks or forehead. Traditionally this type of work has been the province of feature films and other big budget productions that had the money and time to hire rotoscopers to create masks frame by frame. New tools built into After Effects and Premiere Pro or available from third parties for FCP make this technique accessible to video editors and compositors on a much more modest budget or time constraints. How Does Retouching Work Traditionally? In the past someone would have to create a mask on Frame 1 and move forward frame by frame, adjusting the mask on EVERY frame as the actor moved. This was a laborious and time consuming way of retouching video/film. The idea for Beauty Box came from watching a visual effects artist explain his process for retouching a music video of a high profile band of 40-somethings. Frame by frame by tedious frame. I thought there had to be an easier way and a few years later we released Beauty Box. However, Beauty Box affects the entire image by default. The mask it creates affects all skin areas. This works very well for many uses but if you wanted more subtle retouching… you still had to go frame by frame. The New Tools! After Effects and Premiere have some amazing new tools for tracking mask points. You can apply bezier masks that only masks the effect of a plugin, like Beauty Box. The bezier points are ‘tracking’ points. Meaning that as the actor moves, the points move with him. It usually works very well, especially for talking head type footage where the talent isn’t moving around a lot. It’s a really impressive feature. It’s available in both AE and Premiere Pro. Here’s a tutorial detailing how it works in Premiere: After Effects also ships with Mocha Pro, another great tool for doing this type of work. This tutorial shows how to use Mocha and After Effects to control Beauty Box and get some, uh, ‘creative’ skin retouching effects! The power of Mocha is also available for Final Cut Pro X as well. It’s available as a plugin from CoreMelt and they were kind enough to do a tutorial explaining how Splice X works with Beauty Box within FCP. It’s another very cool plugin, here’s the tutorial:
Beauty Box Video 4.0 Released for Avid and OpenFX Apps
We’re excited to announce that Beauty Box Video 4.0 is now available for Avid and OpenFX Apps: Davinci Resolve, Assimilate Scratch, Sony Vegas, NUKE, and more. This is in addition to After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro which were announced in April. Beauty Box Video 4.0 adds real time rendering to the high quality, automatic skin retouching that Beauty Box is famous for. It’s not only the best retouching plugin available but it’s now one of the fastest, especially on newer graphics cards like the Nvidia GTX 980. We’re seeing real time or near real time performance in Premiere Pro, Resolve, and FCP. Other apps may not see quite that performance but they still get a significant speed increase over what was possible in Beauty Box 3.0. Easily being able to retouch video is becoming increasingly important. HD is everywhere and 4K is widely available allowing viewers to see more detail on closeups of talent than ever before. This makes skin or makeup problems much more visible and being able to apply digital makeup easily is critical to high quality productions. You can also incorporate masks to limit the retouching to just certain areas like cheeks or the talent’s forehead. (as can be seen in this tutorial using Premiere Pro’s tracking masks) So head over to digitalanarchy.com for more info and to download a free trial and free tutorials on how to get started and more advanced topics. You’ll be blown away by the ease of use, high quality retouching, and now… speed!
Using a Nvidia GTX 980 (or Titan or Quadro) in a Mac Pro
As many of you know, we’ve come out with a real time version of Beauty Box Video. In order for that to work, it requires a really fast GPU and we LOVE the GTX 980. (Amazing price/performance) Nvidia cards are generally fastest for video apps (Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Resolve, etc) but we are seeing real time performance on the higher end new Mac Pros (or trash cans, dilithium crystals, Job’s Urn or whatever you want to call them). BUT what if you have an older Mac Pro? With the newer versions of Mac OS (10.10), in theory, you can put any Nvidia card in them and it should work. Since we have lots of video cards lying around that we’re testing, we wondered if our GTX 980, Titan and Quadro 5200 would work in our Early 2009 Mac Pro. The answer is… YES!!! So, how does it work? For one you need to be running Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10) A GTX 980 is the easier of the two GeFroce cards, mainly because of the power needed to drive it. It only needs two six-pin connectors, so you can use the power supply built into the Mac. Usually you’ll need to buy an extra six-pin cable, as the Mac only comes standard with one, but that’s easy enough. The Quadro 5200 has only a single 6-pin connector and works well. However, for a single offline workstation, it’s tough to justify the higher price for the extra reliability the Quadros give you. (and it’s not as fast as the 980) The tricky bit about the 980 is that you need to install Nvidia’s web driver. The 980 did not boot up with the default Mac OS driver, even in Yosemite. At least, that’s what happened for us. We have heard of reports of it working with the Default Driver, but I’m not sure how common that is. So you need to install the Nvidia Driver Manager System Pref and, while still using a different video card, set the System Pref to the Web Driver. As so: You can download the Mac Nvidia Web Drivers here: For 10.10.2 For 10.10.3 For 10.10.4 Install those, set it to Web Driver, install the 980, and you should be good to go. What about the Titan or other more powerful cards? There is one small problem… the Mac Pro’s power supply isn’t powerful enough to handle the card and doesn’t have the connectors. The Mac can have two six pin power connectors, but the Titan and other top of the line cards require a 6 pin and an 8 pin or even two 8-pin connectors. REMINDER: The GTX 980 and Quadro do NOT need extra power. This is only for cards with an 8-pin connector. The solution is to buy a bigger power supply and let it sit outside the Mac with the power cables running through the expansion opening in the back. As long as the power supply is plugged into a grounded outlet, there’s no problem with it being external. I used a EVGA 850W Power Supply, but I think the 600w would do. The nice thing about these is they come with long cables (about 2 feet or so) which will reach inside the case to the Nvidia card’s power connectors. One thing you’ll need to do is plug the ‘test’ connector (comes with it) into the external power supply’s motherboard connector. The power supply won’t power on unless you do this. Otherwise, it should work great! Very powerful cards and definitely adds a punch to the Mac Pros. With this setup we had Beauty Box running at about 25fps (in Premiere Pro, AE and Final Cut are a bit slower). Not bad for a five year old computer, but not real time in this case. On newer machines with the GTX 980 you should be getting real time play back. It really is a great card for the price.
Creative Cloud 2015 and After Effects, Premiere Pro Plug-ins
All of our current plugins have been updated to work with After Effects and Premiere Pro in Creative Cloud 2015. That means Beauty Box Video 4.0.1 and Flicker Free 1.1 are up to date and should work no problem. Flicker Free 1.1 is a free update which you can download here: http://digitalanarchy.com/demos/main.html What if I have an older plugin like Beauty Box 3.0.9? Do I have to pay for the upgrade? Yes, you probably need to upgrade and it is a paid upgrade. After Effects changed the way it renders and Premiere Pro changed how they handle GPU plugins (of which Beauty Box is one). The key word here is probably. Our experience so far has been mixed. Sometimes the plugins work, sometimes not. – Premiere Pro: Beauty Box 3.0.9 seems to have trouble in Premiere if it’s using the GPU. If you turn ‘UseGPU’ off (at the bottom of the BB parameter list), it seems to work fine, albeit much slower. Premiere Pro did not implement the same re-design that After Effects did, but they did add an API specifically for GPU plugins. So if the plugin doesn’t use the GPU, it should work fine in Premiere. If it uses the GPU, maybe it works, maybe not. Beauty Box seems to not. – After Effects: Legacy plugins _should_ work but slow AE down somewhat. In the case of Beauty Box, it seems to work ok but we have seen some problems. So the bottom line is: try it out in CC 2015, if it works fine, you’re good to go. If not, you need to upgrade. We are not officially supporting 3.0.9 in Creative Cloud 2015. – The upgrade from 3.0 is $69 and can be purchased HERE. – The upgrade from 1.0/2.0 is $99 and can be purchased HERE. The bottom line is try out the older plugins in CC 2015. It’s not a given that they won’t work, even though Adobe is telling everyone they need to update. It is true that you will most likely need to update the plugins for CC 2015 so their advice isn’t bad. However, before paying for upgrades load the plugins and see how they behave. They might work fine. Of course, Beauty Box 4 is super fast in both Premiere and After Effects, so you might want to upgrade anyways. 🙂 We do our best not to force users into upgrades, but since Adobe has rejiggered everything, only the current releases of our products will be rejiggered in turn.
