Maxon Studio in 60 Seconds

Maxon Studio is a one-stop interface for browsing, applying, adjusting, and iterating Maxon capsules.

What’s a capsule? Well, imagine you have a need for a motion graphics overlay in your project. You want something that impresses with attractive design and clean professionalism. Building it yourself might take more time or expertise than you have available, so you turn to conventional, pre-packaged templates.

With templates, though, you might not know exactly what you’re buying or how it behaves when animated. Templates incorporate a host of parameters, properties, and presets, but good luck remembering which attributes and values you needed upon subsequent use or sharing all those settings with your colleagues.

Capsules place all those parameters and settings into searchable, preview-ready, easy-to-modify package. Studio is the interface through which you can browse and manage those capsules. Check it out:

Studio and capsule construction

Here’s a screenshot of Studio showing a collection of background capsules within After Effects:

Cool design, right? But how did the artist create that capsule? With a collection of project layers, each of which employed different tools, effects, and preset values. Below, you can see how just one of the layers used Adobe’s Turbulent Displace and Twirl as well as Maxon’s Magic Bullet Colorista V.

With Studio, you can quickly create multiple instances of a capsule, then tweak each one and overlay them to create unique outcomes. Here, you see two of the above capsule instances applied in the same comp, with one rotated and the other using the Lighten blend mode.

Bringing five or six effects into a project may mean juggling hundreds of parameters. This cumbersome complexity can bog down workflows. With Studio, capsule creators can select the most essential controls to expose within Studio’s editing interface. This makes big changes a snap while still leaving users full editing control within the host application. Moreover, you can tweak and iterate any capsule you please, then save those changes as unique capsule presets for later use.

Studio includes a range of capsule categories, such as Text, Effects, and Transitions. In the time it takes to slap together a sandwich, you could combine and customize various capsule types into an attractive, ready-to-deploy project.

In short, Studio takes everything you love about presets and templates — that finished look, the quick convenience — and makes it all an order of magnitude better.

If you're more of a "show me, don't tell me" type, we've got you covered. Check out our 27-minute Getting Started video right here.