Portland, OR -- Red Giant announced the release of Knoll Light Factory 3, the biggest update to the industry’s most advanced 3D lens flare system. Co-developed with Academy Award winning VFX Supervisor John Knoll, the new Light Factory delivers an intuitive interface, realistic flare elements, beautifully designed presets, and time-saving animated behaviors.

“This is the biggest advance to Light Factory in many years,” said John Knoll, inventor of the lens flare technology. “Version 3 delivers a great new editor to make flare creation faster, and new and updated elements for the flare engine for better accuracy at high resolution. The library includes a collection of realistic cinematic and distant flares that I've built to help with your next production.”  

To showcase the cinematic impact of Knoll Light Factory 3, Red Giant has produced Order Up, a new short film in collaboration with Seth Worley, the Webby Award-winning director of Red Giant’s film Plot Device. Watch the debut of Order Up on the Red Giant website at http://redgiant.com/orderup. 

“Building a short film around a product is easy when the product is as exciting as Light Factory 3,” said Seth Worley, filmmaker for Red Giant. “Much like Plot Device, where we used over-the-top effects and humor to show off Magic Bullet Looks 2, we made Order Up with some fairly extravagant but realistic light effects to show how awesome Knoll Light Factory continues to be.”

What’s New in Knoll Light Factory 3

Central to Knoll Light Factory 3 is its completely redesigned and intuitive interface. Designing flares is now refreshingly simple with newly organized controls, and a Lens Designer preview that has been rebuilt for a productive, creative experience.

Knoll Light Factory 3 has new realistic flare elements, offering 28 Elements and 56 Sprites that let users quickly create a light design. The product ships over 100 beautiful Lens Flare Presets — including new presets designed by John Knoll — that emulate real world lenses and lights, and are equally useful for visual effects, sci-fi scenes and motion graphics.

New automated Behaviors instantly add unique animation by simulating real world light effects like Strobe, Pulse, Flicker and Blink. The new Edge Reaction feature flares or fades light at the edge of a frame for more realistic effects and cinematic impact. Full integration with After Effects 3D camera and comp lights lets users move the Knoll flares in 3D space and sync them with animated lights.  

Knoll Light Factory 3 is also part of the newly released Effects Suite 11, the company’s popular suite of over 70 tools for visual effects and broadcast design. All products in Effects Suite 11 ship with full support for OS X Mountain Lion and Adobe After Effects CS6.