Since 2005 Silhouette has made its mark on film and television visual effects and post-production. Silhouette is an award-winning GPU accelerated compositing application that runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Silhouette’s standout features are advanced rotoscoping tools and a non-destructive 32 bit, HDR paint system. Silhouette is also a node-based compositing tool with integrated planar tracking, keying, matting, warping, morphing, and a total of 400+ different nodes, including premier plugins Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Particle Illusion wrapped in one integrated node-based package–all stereo enabled. Silhouette supports ACES color management via OpenColorIO. In 2019 the Silhouette team was recognized with Academy and Emmy technical achievement awards for the software’s contribution to the feature film and television industries.
Silhouette is now shipping version 2022 with multiple purchase, subscription and bundle options:
Yes, the fully featured Silhouette interface for roto, paint and compositing can now be launched as a plugin from industry standard VFX applications. In previous versions, the “Silhouette Paint Plugin” was limited to paint only functions. Now, the entire Silhouette node based workflow for roto, paint, tracking, warping, keying and compositing is a plugin for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro and OFX hosts: Foundry NUKE, Blackmagic Resolve and Fusion, and Autodesk Flame.
Existing Silhouette Paint Plugin customers with an active subscription can install the Silhouette 2022 Multi-host Plugin and their existing license will work for the duration of the subscription.
The Silhouette Standalone and Plugin have the same feature set with the main difference being the Plugin is responsible for loading source inputs and final rendering. Although the Plugin doesn’t allow more than three inputs, additional sources can be added directly within Silhouette. In addition, the plugin does not include Sapphire and Particle Illusion. View our compare chart.
The Silhouette Plugin is included with all new Silhouette 2022 purchases and your license enables the ability to run inside Adobe or supported OFX hosts. You can either run the Silhouette Standalone or the Silhouette Plugin at one time on the same CPU, based on the amount of licenses you own.
Silhouette Standalone owners on current upgrade and support plans also receive the Silhouette Plugin for free. Your current license will work and does not require reactivation. If you are unsure if you qualify, contact our sales team.
Silhouette owners running legacy versions and are not on an upgrade and support plan, do not qualify for the free Silhouette Plugin.
Yes, Silhouette Standalone and Plugin projects are interchangeable with a couple of caveats.
Yes, Boris FX offers Enterprise licensing options for customers with 5 or more users that require floating licenses or virtual license serving. Please visit our Enterprise Program page to learn more.
At the current time, RE:Vision Effects and Neat Video plug-ins have been qualified to run in Silhouette.
Silhouette can export to the following shape formats: Autodesk®/Discreet® gMask, Elastic Reality®, Eyeon Fusion®, Nuke® and Shake® 4.x SSF shapes.
The integrated Mocha tracker tracks directly within the Silhouette user interface and links to Silhouette’s spline tools. The Mocha Pro plug-in launches the Mocha user interface and provides access to GPU-accelerated tracking and object removal, stabilization, lens calibration, AdjustTrack module, 3D camera solver, stereo 360/VR support, and more. Learn more about the differences: Silhouette and Mocha Pro Comparison Chart
A fully working, 15-day trial can be obtained by launching the Silhouette Standalone or Plugin and completing the in-application request trial form. After 15 days, the license will revert to a demo mode where saving is disabled.
Yes. Please find more information and a verification forum for our EDU/Academic program here. If you still have questions, please contact us.
If you are unable to activate, please disable your anti-virus and/or firewall software while activating. You can find licensing instructions for all Boris FX products here.
We require that proper tablet support is enabled in the X server. This part is left up to the user, as it is very distribution and version specific. This site can be used for more information: (http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/all)
Silhouette runs in Linux distributions that conform to the CY2021 VFX Reference Platform as specified at (https://www.vfxplatform.com)
In the Linux console, GStreamer module errors may appear and are related to hardware accelerated decoding if certain libraries are not installed. These are benign errors and can be ignored. However, to remove these errors, please follow the instructions here: Hardware Video Acceleration
Silhouette 2022 uses Python 3.
Please visit the version history posts in the Silhouette Forum for a complete list of known issues.