Digital Anarchy's Plugins now support M1 Apple Silicon Macs

News from plugin developer Digital Anarchy today:

www.digitalanarchy.com

Digital Anarchy today announced it has refreshed its family of visual effects plugins for Final Cut Pro optimized for Apple’s newest M1 hardware, as well as for the newest Mac OS release, Big Sur. As part of this refresh, Digital Anarchy has released new versions of Beauty Box, Flicker Free and Samurai Sharpen (in beta). These releases also now fully support Apple's Metal GPU acceleration, resulting in a 25% increase in performance across its plugins.

Digital Anarchy also worked closely with the Final Cut Pro team to make sure all the plugins take advantage of the new features in FCP 10.5.2. This includes FCP’s new plugin architecture to improve performance and reliability on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Digital Anarchy’s Final Cut Pro plugins optimized for Apple M1 hardware, Metal and Big Sur include:

Flicker Free is a Digital Anarchy’s powerful tool for deflickering video and fixes common flicker issues in video footage caused by lights and cameras being out of sync, time lapses, slow motion video, and increasingly, drone footage. In addition to Final Cut Pro, Flicker Free also works with many video editing applications, including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, and Davinci Resolve.

Beauty Box is a VFX plugin that automatically identifies skin tones and creates a mask that limits the smoothing effect to just the skin areas. By simply applying the filter, Beauty Box analyzes the video, sets a few Smoothing options, and renders to make skin retouching incredibly easy. The Beauty Box Video skin retouching plugin acts as digital makeup in post-production by incorporating state-of-the-art face and skin detection and smoothing algorithms.

Samurai Sharpen for Video is an intelligent video sharpening tool for Final Cut Pro (as well as Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro). Digital Anarchy Samurai Sharpen for Video is edge-aware sharpening software that uses a number of intelligent algorithms, as well as GPU acceleration to give users working with HD and 4K footage unprecedented image quality control.

In addition to Final Cut Pro, all of Digital Anarchy’s plugins work with many video editing applications, including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, and Davinci Resolve. New versions that support M1, Metal, and Big Sur will be released later this month.

peteramwiggins wrote: ...Digital Anarchy also worked closely with the Final Cut Pro team to make sure all the plugins take advantage of the new features in FCP 10.5.2. This includes FCP’s new plugin architecture to improve performance and reliability on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs....

This is a significant technical achievement since the new FxPlug 4 framework requires a lot more work than just recompiling. The developer must handle additional items regarding thread safety and synchronization:  developer.apple.com/documentation/profes...d_safety_in_plug-ins

I wish I had an Apple Silicon Mac to evaluate it, because Flicker Free is a good test candidate. It is very compute-intensive and on the previous FxPlug 3 framework would often dominate the FCP UI for intervals. IMO this wasn't a fault of the plugin -- all plugins in that class (Imagenomic Portraiture, Neat Video, etc) -- behaved that way.

The fact that a small company like Digital Anarchy can rapidly produce an updated version is a good sign. I hope the other high-end plugin developers can do likewise.

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