Best Visual Effects (VFX) Software

Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more. Now you can take your ideas to new places with Photoshop on the iPad, draw and paint with Adobe Fresco, and design for 3D and AR. Join our global creative community — and make something better together. Explore your creativity with desktop and mobile apps including Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere Rush. Access thousands of fonts for your projects right within your Creative Cloud apps. Showcase and discover creative work. Save, browse, and share assets from libraries right inside your Creative Cloud apps. Create and customize your own portfolio website. Get 100GB of cloud storage for file sharing and collaboration. Work better together with tools for sharing, reviewing, and commenting. Photography, video, design, UI and UX, 3D and AR, and social media. Creative Cloud has everything you need, wherever your imagination takes you.

HitFilm is free video editing software with professional-grade VFX tools and everything you need to make awesome content, films or gaming videos. Perfect for beginners, film students, gamers, YouTubers, or any creative without a budget. You got talent and the drive, so we give you what you need, free video editing software. Why? Because you shouldn’t have to pay to play. And that way, we get to be a part of your origin story — which is pretty awesome. Get access to the world’s most powerful free video editing and VFX software for Mac or PC. Join our growing community of 6 million filmmakers and content creators today. Wanna level up your skills? Masterclass editing and VFX tutorials are made for every brand of hero. Create your own 3D shield-wielding super-soldiers or plunge your audience into the Wild West with a sci-fi twist. We bring opportunity and equality to the creative industry. Together with our community, we develop powerful accessible tools, training, and support.

LWKS, established in 2020, LWKS is a new creative technology company developing software for content creators and distributors in the media and entertainment industry, including the popular and multiple award-winning Lightworks and QScan products. Lightworks is a non-linear editing system for editing and mastering digital video. For over 30 years, Lightworks has helped every type of video editor and creator imaginable, from Oscar-winning Hollywood legends to YouTubers. QScan, everything you need to automate your media QC. The professional automated media QC platform that takes all the effort out of ensuring video files meet international delivery standards.

3D visual effects (VFX), finishing, and color grading software. Flame® 3D VFX and finishing software provides powerful tools for 3D compositing, visual effects, and editorial finishing. An integrated, creative environment means faster compositing, advanced graphics, color correction, and more. Extract mattes of the human body, head, and face with AI-powered tools for color adjustment, relighting, and digital cosmetic and beauty work. Isolate skies and salient objects quickly for grading and VFX jobs. Edit, composite, and color correct in one environment, without toggling between software. Create and iterate quickly for more productive client sessions. Tools for fast and interactive visual effects finishing and 3D compositing. A timeline-centric, fully compatible assistant station for Flame. A fully compatible creative assistant station for Flame in collaborative VFX workflows. Real-time color grading software for creative look development.

3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control. Create massive worlds in games. Visualize high-quality architectural renderings. Model finely detailed interiors and objects. Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX. The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects. Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image. Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls. Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster. 3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity. Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production. Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs.

Chaos® V-Ray® is a 3D rendering plugin available for SketchUp, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Revit, and more. It is widely used in architectural visualization, advertising, and visual effects for film and television. With V-Ray, artists and designers can explore and share their projects with real-time ray tracing and render high-quality visualizations. V-Ray has a large community of users and is recognized for its incredible versatility. V-Ray has been honored with a Sci-Tech Academy Award® and an Engineering Emmy Award® for bringing fully ray-traced photorealistic CGI to the film and television industries. For more information, please visit chaos.com

Sapphire plug-ins let you create stunning organic looks unmatched by any host native effect tools. Key features include over 270 effects and 3000+ presets, a powerful effect and transition builder, and integrated tracking and masking with the academy award-winning mocha. Sapphire’s superior image quality, control, and render speed offers massive time-savings — allowing creatives to focus on what matters most, delivering an impact that keeps audiences coming back. Mac users with Sapphire 2021 will rejoice with the introduction of Metal GPU acceleration for over 60 Sapphire effect. Dramatic speed gains can be achieved with Metal acceleration in Sapphire; S_Rays renders over 4x faster with metal than CPU only. Performance can vary depending on GPU specs, host application, OS version, and individual Sapphire effects, but on average Sapphire 2021 with Metal acceleration renders 20% faster than CPU only.

Academy and Emmy Award-Winning VFX Tools Silhouette is a best-in-class, GPU-accelerated compositing application, delivering the industry’s most robust non-destructive paint and roto tools to feature film and visual effects teams. Since 2005, Silhouette has made its mark on Hollywood’s biggest film and TV shows including Avatar, Black Panther, Stranger Things and many more. Silhouette is officially recommended by the Netflix Post Technology Alliance in the VFX category. The artists tool for Roto, Paint & Tracking. Silhouette 2020.5 goes beyond traditional roto and cleanup as a professional stereoscopic enabled node-based compositing system with 146 nodes designed for every finishing task. Silhouette is available as a standalone application for macOS, Windows, and Linux with floating license options for enterprise. New Silhouette Paint plug-in! Our paint tools have now been streamlined into a multi-host plug-in supporting Adobe and OFX hosts, free for all Silhouette 2020 owners.

Optics is the definitive digital toolbox for photos. Created by professional feature film VFX artists, Optics is designed to simulate optical camera filters, specialized lenses, film stocks and grain, lens flares, optical lab processes, color correction as well as natural light and photographic effects. Take your images to the next level, try Optics. Available now as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as a standalone application for macOS and Windows. Apply Optics and choose from 160 filters and thousands of presets. Optics provides everything you need to creatively enhance and improve photos using a staggering amount of filters and presets. Color grade your image using film style controls or go from reality to sci-fi with incredible lighting effects. All filters can be limited to a portion of the image using sophisticated but simple to use masking controls. A layering system to apply multiple filters, a built-in paint system for touch-ups,

Meeting tight turnarounds just got easier. The post-production industry’s most complete plugin collection delivers nearly 350 creative effects in 20 categories, 4000+ presets, built-in Academy Award-winning Mocha planar tracking and masking, a beat reactor that drives VFX to music, and the FX Browser. Busy editors and artists rely on continuum to get the job done. Continuum 2021 is the biggest release in its storied history with 80+ new effects, 1000+ new professionally-designed presets, 3 new Unit categories, major additions to particle illusion, a new keying effect, improvements to Mocha’s planar tracking, and more. The Cinematographer’s Toolkit gives artists access to 80 new effects, 3 new Continuum Units, and 1000+ new presets that pay homage to the bygone era of shooting on film. The built-in FX Editor makes it simple to browse the presets and create your own custom presets directly inside the interface. Recreate classic Hollywood looks in just one click.

Ziva VFX is changing the way 3D characters are brought to life for films, games, and interactive experiences. With Ziva's intuitive toolset, artists can replicate the effects of physics and simulate any soft-tissue material, including muscles, fat, and skin to create blockbuster-quality assets with ease. Ziva VFX lets you simulate the materiality of any soft tissue, using intuitive parameters and real-world units. Everything was purpose-built for creature work. Ziva Anatomy Transfer tools let you replicate, warp, and retarget creatures rapidly, so you can adapt and multiply your existing creatures for infinite hero-quality characters. Character alterations can be applied retroactively at nearly anytime. Simply adapting the underlying anatomy of your characters will allow you to react faster to changes and last-minute decisions. Use multiple material types, producing robust motion even under large deformations, StVK, NeoHookean, co-rotational, anisotropic.

Mocha Pro is the world renowned software for planar tracking, rotoscoping and object removal. Essential to visual effects and post-production workflows, Mocha has been recognized with prestigious Academy and Emmy Awards for contribution to the film and television industry. Mocha Pro has recently been used on global hits including The Mandalorian, Stranger Things, Avengers: Endgame, and many more. The next evolution of Mocha. PowerMesh enables a powerful new sub-planar tracking engine for VFX, roto and stabilization. Warped surface tracking and roto that sticks. Track complex organic surfaces through occlusions and blur using Mocha’s intuitive layer based interface. Simple to use and faster than most optical flow based techniques. Apply to source files for realistic match moves, convert to AE Nulls to drive motion graphics, render a mesh warped stabilize/reverse stabilize plate for compositing, or export dense tracking data to host applications.

Boris RED is an integrated 3D titling and visual effects software that launches an easy to use custom interface as a host plug-in, or as standalone software application. Professional titling and animation tools with 3D extrusions, bevels, materials, lights & more.

Final Effects Complete Version 7. See how flexible the transitions are to use from within Avid editing systems and how they can be easily tweaked to give the desired effect. Features: Includes 120 filters & 800 presets, quickly generate 3D particle animations, includes the BCC Beat Reactor - Animate your effects to the sound of music, stylized filters such as Vector Blur, Glass, Kaleida, and 3D Relief, auto-animating transitions including Blur Dissolve, Glass Wipe, and Light Wipe, integrated pixel chooser for masking options. Compatibility: Adobe After Affects, Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer.

Already in a committed relationship with your editor? No problem. Ignite Pro gives you 190 professional plugins to fire up After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or any other major host. Experiment with over 565 visual effects, presets, and the industry’s best suite of 360° filters. No strings attached. No arbitrary restrictions. No time limits. Ignite Pro neatly plugs into Adobe After Effects, FCPX, or any other host for hassle-free editing on your Mac or PC. Every license gives you 3 seats so that you can use Ignite Pro at home, in the studio, or on the beach — no sweat. Ignite Pro’s choice of customizable plugins is unmatched. You get over 565 professional visual effects and presets to use on any project, from sci-fi short films to thrilling action features and beyond. Looking for some drama? Bring a flavor of Hollywood into your short films. With plugins like Blood Spray, Gunfire, and Witness Protection, the visual effects in your shootout scene are going to be the best.