Sapphire 2027: Bubbles, Film Glow and Faster Pixels

For those who don’t know the tool: Boris FX Sapphire is a VFX and motion-graphics plug-in suite with more than 270 effects and transitions and over 3,000 presets. It works in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, Flame and other supported hosts. Its effects range from light treatments and film looks to textures, distortions and compositing tools. The official Sapphire 2027 release page covers the latest changes.

The short version, for people with a render queue to babysit

Sapphire 2027 tackles three recurring production problems: making digital images feel less digital, creating visual material when there is no footage to start with, and keeping elaborate effects usable after the person who built them has gone for coffee.

Halation adds the reddish highlight fringe associated with film, MultiTone makes colour treatments easier to experiment with, and Texture Cells turns mathematical patterns into everything from floating particles to frosted glass.

The less glamorous improvements matter just as much: colour controls, presets and Effect Builder changes mean fewer trips through an intimidating parameter forest. In Boris FX’s tests, Premiere Pro on an M2 Mac Studio posted the biggest reduction in combined render time for the selected effects, at 76.6%.

Halation: when highlights develop a red personality

S_Halation recreates the warm red-orange fringe that can form around very bright areas on photographic film. Unlike a general Bloom or Glow, which spreads light more broadly, halation concentrates its character around highlight edges. Neon signs, car headlights and practical lamps can pick up a subtle analogue warmth without turning the entire frame into a strawberry milkshake. The trick is to keep the effect attached to the light, not let it become the light.

Halo Strength sets how visible the fringe becomes, and Halo Width determines how far it reaches. The supplied presets distinguish between Rec.709 or sRGB material and scene-linear footage with values above one. Choose the wrong variant and the effect may barely register, or the highlights may acquire colours nobody signed off on. The presets also assume a UHD/4K frame-filling image, so other resolutions and framing may require a width adjustment. Optical character is welcome; accidental radioactive edging is less so.

For troubleshooting, raise Threshold to isolate only the brightest pixels and use the Threshold display to inspect the selection. On Rec.709 footage, increasing Threshold can also reduce the perceived halo, so compensate with Strength if necessary. Large daylight whites and bright clothing may need lower Strength, a higher Threshold or a Mocha-tracked mask. Edge Band Width and Edge Band Falloff control how the glow meets the highlight, but heroic slider movements can create an obvious hard rim. Subtlety remains a feature, even if it has no marketing department.

A reusable film look can combine S_Halation, FilmEffect and UltraGrain inside Effect Builder. Halation handles the highlight fringe, FilmEffect supplies negative/print colour and contrast, and UltraGrain finishes the texture. Disable FilmEffect’s internal grain and glow to avoid doubling the seasoning. Exposing only halo strength, halo width, the FilmEffect colour/contrast scale and grain amplitude leaves four meaningful controls for the next shot. That is much kinder to an editor than handing over an entire node excavation site.

Texture Cells: the bubble bath is procedural

S_TextureCells traditionally draws polygonal networks, but the new Bubbles mode gives those cells volume and a softer personality. Round produces smooth domes, Puffy creates broader, flatter highlights, and Bumpy makes irregular, pebble-like surfaces. From that basic geometry come animated backgrounds, floating particles, mattes and frosted-glass overlays, all without a single pixel of source footage. It is an unusually productive bubble bath.

Frequency decides how many cells appear, Vary Size stops them looking suspiciously identical, and Vary Grid moves their arrangement away from an orderly square formation. Rotate Speed animates the centres: at 90 degrees per second, a complete turn takes four seconds. For a still image, set that speed to zero and adjust Rotate Centers until the pattern behaves. Texture Only generates a standalone graphic or matte, while Combine modes let the result interact with footage. The controls are mathematical; the finished look need not be.

The colour ramp begins with two colours, but extra stops let it develop a more deliberate palette. Hue Shift rotates that palette, while Saturation decides whether it whispers or arrives wearing a fluorescent jacket. The same geometry can become crisp graphic discs by increasing Scale Lights and reducing Offset Darks; amber fireflies by lowering Pre-Offset and using Add; dark ink spots with Bumpy, higher Pre-Scale and Invert; or condensation through Puffy with Multiply or Bumpy with Overlay. The important point is that these are variations of one procedural effect, not four separate assets to design and maintain.

MultiTone and the colour cupboard

S_MultiTone expands the tonal remapping approach of QuadTone. Rather than washing an entire shot with one tint, it maps chosen colours into brightness regions such as shadows, midtones and highlights. Each colour can be switched on or off independently, making it practical to compare a restrained grade with a full graphic treatment while keeping the source image and structure intact. A client can ask for three palettes without requiring three separate effects and a small support group. Three more colour controls across 13 existing effects, including Gradient, Clouds, Texture Ridges and Texture Cells, extend that flexibility to procedural designs.

Sapphire cuts to the chase, stopwatch in hand

Sapphire 2027 has taken a cut to the render queue. In Boris FX’s benchmarks, 48 selected effects in Premiere Pro on an M2 Mac Studio went from 1 hour 55 minutes 30 seconds to 27 minutes 3 seconds. That’s 76.6% less combined render time, or a coffee break with its feature-length ambitions curtailed. Boris FX reports GPU optimisations for Apple silicon via Metal and NVIDIA via CUDA. Sapphire 2027 also adds support for Adobe’s GPU Suite in Premiere Pro. Boris FX tested with that suite off in 2026.5 and on in 2027, so the Premiere results capture both changes together.

The stopwatch started with the same shots on the same machine in the same host, once per Sapphire version. Boris FX timed renders to disk, so the clock also covered reading footage and writing frames. For each setup it added up the render seconds, subtracted the 2027 total from the 2026.5 total and divided the saving by the 2026.5 total. The 341 side-by-side results cover 48 effects per Premiere Pro setup and 49 per Resolve or After Effects setup. Footage, codecs and clip lengths could differ between setups, so keep your stopwatch in its lane and compare the two times in each row.

A company says its software is faster and then publishes the stopwatch readings. More of this, please. Boris FX lists all 341 side-by-side results and explains how it ran the tests. Its breakdowns for Premiere Pro, Resolve and After Effects add context on the hardware and test projects.

Builder, flares and assorted small mercies

Effect Builder combines Sapphire treatments into a single reusable effect. That is handy until the resulting control panel starts resembling the cockpit of a modest aircraft. Sapphire 2027 can enable or disable parameters across every node at once, making it easier to expose only the settings someone downstream should actually touch. The internal Noise tool gains three colour controls too, so layered textures can develop more nuanced palettes without another round of effect stacking.

The flare collection adds ten new and updated designs, along with faster rendering for complex setups. These can suggest real optical behaviour around an existing light, or turn a perfectly innocent shot into a deliberate sci-fi spectacle. Neither choice is inherently wrong, although the second should probably be discussed before final delivery. Hundreds of refreshed presets offer starting points, while new S_WarpPolar edge parameters help keep polar distortions from announcing themselves with an untidy seam.

The practical advice remains gloriously unromantic: test the looks in the actual host, colour pipeline and delivery resolution. If render speed is part of the sales pitch, benchmark the specific effects on your own GPU. A glorious lens flare is an artistic decision. A missed deadline generally results in a meeting without the comforting bubbles.