Red Giant combines video editing plugins and community interaction with “Universe”

Red Giant, makers of editing and plugin software for all manner of film makers, has just rolled out an interesting new program called Red Giant Universe. It takes a diverse array of plugins, combines them with community functionality, promises many and frequent updates, and you get the whole thing for free.

The Universe system is a series of effects and transitions, which are GPU powered for extra speed. It plugs into Adobe After Effects CS5.5, CS6, CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, CC, Apple FCPX, and Apple Motion 5. There's a base set of 31 Free Tools (22 Effects & 9 Transitions), with another 19 Premium Tools (12 Effects & 7 Transitions), which are available with a paid subscription.

If you're interested in the paid features, it'll set you back $10/month, $99/year, or $399 for a lifetime subscription. The Premium Tools include some existing Red Giant tools ported over to the new system, including Knoll Light Factory EZ, Holomatrix, Retrograde and ToonIt.

What's even more interesting is that Red Giant is promising frequent updates, and community lead development paths for future tools:

While Universe has a great set of tools, what truly makes it unique is it’s community aspects. Through Universe Labs, you folks will get to help us choose what effects and transitions we build next – while premium members will eligible for invitations to early betas of new products, allowing you to give us early feedback and actively help shape Universe’s expansion over time.

For film editors, it's an intriguing push into supplying a base level of tools for free, and then adding more functionality for paid users. And it sounds like there might even be a plugin creation tool in the works. If this sort of a reaction is anything to go by, it seems like people are potentially very interested in these features and this model.