What is the future for Sapphire…Sparks or OFX?
OFX!!!! At Boris FX, we are very excited about the future of our plug-ins on the OFX platform. It’s more robust and modern API, and frankly, the future of all our products. We will continue to support customers who own Sapphire Sparks and are on a current Upgrade and Support contract, but will gladly provide free cross-grades over to OFX.
Is there a price difference between Sapphire OFX and Sapphire Sparks?
No, the price is the same. A node-locked permanent seat of Sapphire “Flame Only” Sparks and a node-locked permanent seat of Sapphire OFX is $1695.00. The advantage is Sapphire OFX works on any/all OFX platforms on one machine, in addition to Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro! Sapphire Sparks are locked to Flame only unless you were to purchase a 2795.00 Spark multi-host license. So, with Sapphire OFX, that license will work in Flame, Nuke, Resolve, Baselight, Mistika, Rio, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc where as a Sapphire Spark license would only work in Flame. If you work in many different hosts, OFX is a no-brainer.
What’s the main difference between Sapphire Sparks and Sapphire OFX?
Overall, the products will look and feel very similar. Artists can expect a speed bump with OFX, and OFX presets are shareable between Flame and any other supported host, like Avid, Adobe, Resolve, etc. The main difference in two products is Sapphire OFX for Flame supports the Sapphire Effect and Transition Builder, which is a nodal based effect compositer (think Sapphire mini-batch) which can simplify your workflow by making it easy to create complex custom effects and transitions from scratch and then save these multi-layered effects as single share-able instances (AE, PrPro, Resolve, Avid, and Flame can now all share complex Builder effect and transition presets). Also, Sapphire Effect and Transition Builder ships with over 150 pre-built “advanced effect presets” and over 50 pre-built “advanced transition presets”, with you can start using it right out the box. When working in Builder, you have access to the full suite of over 270 effects and more than 3000 presets, now filtered by common tasks, rather than effect name. For example, you can now search for “color correction” effects, “lighting” effects, or “text-based” transitions. This new way of browsing can be a massive timesaver when it comes to developing looks, grades, and custom effects. Another way people use Builder is just to create a custom Sapphire node, ie. you can turn on/off all the parameters in S_Glow and only keep Brightness and Threshold, if you so desire. It’s a really cool tool, and I am happy to bring it to the Flame market. There will be more Flame specific content to come, but you can check out this page right now for more info:
Sapphire Builder.
What do if I have older Batch setups with Sapphire Sparks? How does that work?
Unfortunately, older spark setups cannot be opened up in Sapphire OFX, so we recommend keeping the older Sapphire install alongside any new Sapphire OFX for working with older setups.
What about that annoying “upgrade setups” script you have to run when upgrading?
Glad you asked! Thankfully, that is dead. With OFX, you will never have to run a script to upgrade older setups. It just works now, like all the other host apps.
I just bought Sapphire Sparks, and now I want OFX. What do I do?
Reach out to us at sales@borisfx.com. If you are on a current Sapphire US contract, it’s a no-cost cross grade. This is a great benefit of the Upgrade and Support plan. If you are on an older Sapphire version, now is a great time to upgrade and move up to Sapphire 2019.
What version of Sapphire do I need to run Sapphire OFX?
Sapphire 2019.4 is the current version of Sapphire and the only version that works for Flame 2020. Older versions of Sapphire will not work in Flame 2020.
What about other Boris FX OFX products for Flame 2020?
We are actively working on Mocha Pro OFX for Flame and hope to announce support this summer. Particle Illusion and Continuum may partially work on Flame 2020 Mac only, but this is an area we are working with Autodesk team on to rectify.