RenderGarden

Got a new product sold though Mekajiki: RenderGarden. I suppose the tagline sums it up best: it's not a farm, just a little garden. As opposed to full farm management software like Pixar's Tractor, RenderGarden is just a couple of scripts. But it's cheap and easy, letting you get a little After Effects render farm garden going in minutes.

A big benefit of using RenderGarden vs. the AE render queue is that you can run multiple render processes simultaneously, even on a single computer. If After Effects were fully multi-threaded this would not be much help, but in AE's current state RenderGarden can often double or triple rendering speeds, meanwhile leaving After Effects available for you to continue working.

Programs like Tractor have a centralized database of their various render tasks. A hack used by RenderGarden is that the filesystem itself is the database, with the priority of the various jobs controlled by their place in your drive's hierarchy, their status determined by naming conventions. This system isn't as bullet-proof as Tractor, but it's simple, cheap, and works for small-scale users and teams looking for a little render farm functionality.

OpenColorIO for Photoshop

Many moons ago I released an OpenColorIO plug-in for After Effects. Now there's a Photoshop plug-in as well. It has most of the same features and a similar interface.

One useful feature for Photoshop workflows is the ability to export ICC Profiles and LUTs right from the plug-in. You can test out a color conversion directly on your pixels by running it normally. Then undo and export an ICC Profile that can be assigned to your document (make sure you save it in the proper directory). Or export a LUT to be assigned to a Color Lookup adjustment layer in Photoshop.

As usual, it's free and open source.

Enjoy!

Update: The October 2024 Photoshop update (26.0) added OCIO support natively. Use that instead!

ProEXR is Free

About 10 years ago I released ProEXR, a set of After Effects and Photoshop plug-ins for using multi-channel OpenEXR files. From the beginning, the core AE plug-ins were free and the source code was available. A year later the AE plug-ins started shipping with After Effects CS4, and they still do to this day. Eventually ProEXR AE was added, ProEXR EZ was made free, then Premiere plug-ins were added and later included with the program, free. I guess the only thing left to do is make the whole darn thing free. And so it is. (It's open source too.)

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank everyone who bought ProEXR over the years. Your support has really meant a lot, and allowed me to keep refining ProEXR into a stable product used by artists and installed in studios all over the world. All those who will use ProEXR in the future owe you a debt.

To be candid, part of the decision to make ProEXR free was driven by the emergence of another free Photoshop plug-in with a strikingly similar feature set. It looks nice, check it out.

Thanks again, everyone. Enjoy!