The newest version of FxFactory restores plug-in compatibility in Adobe After Effects on Snow Leopard, and introduces LiveToon, a new cartoon-look plug-in by DVShade:
New for FxFactory Pro users is Slideshow 2.0, a generator that lets you quickly animate any folder of images. Slideshow ships with four built-in transition effects that can be added automatically between each slide.
Re: FxFactory 2.1 by Mikey Bouchereau on Sep 25, 2009 at 2:19:37 am
Gabe is there anything we should know about the AE preference in FxFactory Pro, I noticed a check box for multiprocessor rendering as well as native or compatibility. Can you shed some light on these options.
Our official recommendation is to leave all those options to their default values. Much like the options under the "Rendering" and "FxPlug" sections, they are meant to make our life a little easier when we are diagnosing problems for our customers.
The Multiprocessing option is rather experimental. After Effects has the ability to launch many replicas of its rendering engine (background applications) to render any given scene. Among the many advantages of this approach is that After Effects - a 32bit application that can only use up to 4GB of memory - can fully utilize all the memory in your system, past the ~4GB limit. That's because each replica can use an additional 4GB.
That said, it doesn't make sense to render GPU-accelerated effects in such a manner: most users only have one graphics accelerator, and the end result is that the rendering would be slower. Imagine multiple separate copies of After Effects all competing for the single graphics card.
The picture has changed slightly in recent times. More and more people have multiple graphics cards in their Mac Pros. Some MacBook Pros have dual graphics processors on board. It's possible that in the near future there will be some advantage in enabling Multiprocessing for FxFactory plug-ins, when multiple graphics processors are available on the system. For the time being, our recommendation is to leave the experimenting to us :-)
