Lumit v0.3.0

The largest release Lumit has had by far, with a complete overhaul to the design, along with many smaller changes and additional features. The introduction of the node system in Lumit, along with the beginnings of the audio workspace. Tracking, Roto, and Puppet tools are all included in this release as well. Lumit now also supports OFX, CLAP and VST3 instruments. After Effects projects that you can directly port, with builtin and some 3rd party effects transferring across too.

This is still a beta. With a large update comes a large number of bugs and issues, please test and report any issues so that we can clean them all up before the next release.

What is new

The new UI

• With this update every panel has been rebuilt: Timeline, Viewer, Project, Effect controls, Settings, Welcome screen, Export, etc.
• Despite this, Lumit is still largely customisable, with themes still altering colors application-wide, and Sharp/Round options, as well as a basic density toggle. You can also adjust if text is displayed, or icons, across many parts of the ui.
• The webpage for Lumit has recieved an overhaul too ^_^
• If you find any issues with the look or improvements, feedback is welcome, and we want to make this as accessible to as many users as possible.

The Timeline

• Two views: Layers for bars and summary keys, Graph for the curves and customising keyframes.
• The addition of a navigator above the timeline ruler, which indicates the playhead position, as well as the region of the composition you’re zoomed in on
• Keyframe shapes in the layer view are altered by their interpolation, which can be different on each half of the keyframe.
• Marquee selection, add items to a selection with shift, and clicking a property’s name selects all its keys. Drag the edge of the marquee to strech out all the keyframes that are selected within it.
• Certain columns of the outline area can be adjusted to hide items you may not need. For instance you can alter the width of the switches, modes, and hide the parent column.

The node graph

• An alternative way to composite. It works seamlessly with the effect controls stack. With this you can wire effects into each other, and create inputs driven by layers or randomness. The node workspace is built with nodes being the centre of your workflow.
• Wire types have colours, to indicate what can be wired.
• The introduction of a point stream, which outputs a list of positions which can be used to drive behaviour.
• Custom shader: write WGSL and it acts as a regular effect. To access double click it.
• The viewer can now also display what an effect does to a layer with a new “at effect” preview that appears when selecting a node or an effect.

The Audio workspace

Still a lot of work required to make Lumit capable of doing audio work properly. But these are some of the parts that have been included in this release.

• A Mixer with a strip per row with sound in the composition, and a master fader ahead of a limiter.
• Pan, as a constant-power balance.
• Fades are keyframe pairs, if you have issues with these, they are likely going to be changed in the next release.
• Beat detection writes markers and numbers bars from a grid the project keeps.
• A spectral lane per layer, drawn from a tiled spectrogram, beside the waveform lane.
• Lower behind ducks one layer under another, wired through a Volume socket on the Layer out box.
• Detach audio copies a layer’s sound onto a sibling.
• Audio-only export is possible.

Plugins

• Lumit is an OFX host. Plugins installed are found at start-up and sit beside the built-in effects, grouped, searchable, and starrable like any other.
• CLAP and VST3 instruments and effects host as inserts in a layer’s own audio chain.
• After Effects effect import OFX plugins when they are installed and availalbe in Lumit, if not, if Lumit has it’s own version of the effect it transfers to that instead for specific effects.

After Effects projects

• Lumit imports .aep files directly, under File ▸ Import ▸ After Effects project.
• Keyframes carry across value for value, along with eases. Masks, mattes, parenting, markers, and blend modes are also imported.
• There may still be some bugs when importing projects from AE, so please report those. Additionally, there is currently not support for transferring expressions to Lumit.

Tracking

• Camera track solves a shot: pose per frame, focal per segment, a point cloud you can select from, and a Camera layer linked to the solve.
• Planar track solves for a surface, and can add the track to a corner pin effect, or follow one or two points, and Create transform keys bakes it onto a layer’s Position, Rotation and Scale - added to what is already there.

Roto brush and Puppet

• Roto brush: scribble on a frame, and the matte propagates through the shot on the in-tree optical flow, if it is incorrect, you can update as you go.
• Puppet: pins on a conforming mesh, four tools available for it in the Viewer.

Paint, shapes and text

• Paint strokes land on any layer that draws, and if using a tablet, adjust width based on pressure.
• Shape modifiers: Trim paths, Repeater, Offset path, dashes, gradient fill, and a boolean combine of two shapes.
• A shape’s path can be morphed by keying the path.
• Text animators: one selector, two shapes and five property groups. Text can also be placed on a mask path, and convert into shapes or points.

Particles and the points family

• Particulate is the first particle tool in Lumit. Emit particles from a point or shape and set how they move and evolve over their lifespan. Particles live in 3D space and moving the composition’s camera adjusts the view of them.
• A points stream is carried on a wire, and six effects produce or consume one: Grid, Scatter, Emit from image, Clone to points, Trail and Connect points.

Effects

• Now with over one hundred built in effects, Generate and Transition categories are new.
• Every effect can be driven by a matte, through one row that picks its channel, and a Mix row that picks its blend. These aim to adjust the strength of an effect per pixel, but for more infomation visit the effect docs.
• Curves and levels now have an interactive curve and histogram respectively.
• Expression controls - slider, angle, checkbox, colour and point added to help control expressions or other effects.
• Drivers, are controls used specifically for driving values in the node graph, with several options built in currently, with an expression driver planned.
• The physical lens flare gained spectral ghosts, Fresnel edges, a field-dependent starburst and per-element coatings.
• Every distance and every point is measured in pixels at composition size. No effect uses percentages of the composition width anymore.

Colour, export and media

• Five built-in colour spaces, and a resize that picks a filter.
• The export dialogue is one page with a table of contents. If the format you’re exporting doesn’t support a section it appears disabled.
• Proxies are a second media reference which you can generate from any layer. It displays in the project panel if a proxy is in use, and exporting will by default re-render with the actual layers.
• A folder of numbered stills imports as one footage item.

Smaller things

• Guide layers: a per-layer switch.
• Layer groups: groups layers within a composition without precomping them.
• An Easing panel of curve tiles that apply on click.
• Rulers and guides on the panel, with the magnet.
• Snapshots photograph the visible region at the resolution it is drawn at.
• A workspace can be saved.
• Effect console can be accessed with Ctrl+Space.
• Every Project row carries a hue square that sets its label, and a folder’s colour tints what it holds.
• A composition remembers where you were, and a precomp opens on the frame it is showing.
• Translation has moved off Crowdin and onto the site.

Performance

• The Timeline builds only the rows in view and reuses them across a scroll.
• A drag asks the engine nothing about a document it is not changing, and an edit’s work is one wave rather than a call per item.
• Each effect’s output is kept, so editing the last effect in a stack re-composites only that one. A precomp’s frames cache as one unit, and layers under a full-frame opaque layer are not rendered at all.
• The idle cache fill wraps the work area and keeps going into RAM.
• A lost graphics device is rebuilt.

Known gaps

• Colour management is half built: the OCIO implementation is in, the surfaces around it are not finished.
• Custom shader nodes - the graph inside a shader - are still to come; the shader effect itself is here.
• Lights and camera depth of field are not built. Layers are planes in space.
• Roto brush propagation is well over its frame budget on the classical path, so long shots are slow.

Fixed

• The razor cuts through an eased speed ramp without moving the keys either side.
• Changing a composition’s frame rate leaves the playhead where it was in time.
• An animated aperture no longer stops the lens flare’s frames from caching.
• A beat source picked by name is always heard, whatever the comp mix is doing.
• A layer added into a composition that has a solo up is born soloed.
• Tile’s output window is centred on the tile centre.
• A click on a row that is already the lone selection is not a second command.
• A project saved under a bare name gets .lum.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to all these sections, but considering how large an update it’s been these are some of the main items. With this, going forward releases should be smaller again, and with some many new people looking to try it, we’ll aim to make sure it doesn’t impact any work you begin in Lumit now!

Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you have a great time using and testing Lumit <33