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Some Important News About GridIron X-Factor for Adobe After Effects

For quite some time, many of our X-Factor users have been asking for news on support for After Effects 7.0. We have an update but unfortunately, it is not the answer most users have wanted to hear.

We will not be releasing an update to support After Effects 7.0. In fact, we have decided to discontinue the X-Factor product line and its support effective immediately.

We know that you may have been eagerly awaiting a release of X-Factor for Adobe After Effects 7, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The Good News

For ALL of our customers with GridIron X-Factor Plus, Plus 6-Pack, and Workstation/Unlimited licenses, we are offering the following discounts to users who have purchased X-Factor products in the past:

Purchases prior to January 1st, 2006
Upgrade your X-Factor license to Nucleo Pro at a 50% discount.

Purchases after January 1st, 2006
Upgrade your X-Factor license to Nucleo Pro at no cost.

Both of these options will be available until January 1st. 2007.

Obtaining your discounted upgrade or free cross-grade is simple - just log in to the GridIron account that was used for your purchase (the email address that was used for the original purchase) by visiting our website at http://www.gridironsoftware.com/Login and you will be redirected to the "Your Account" page.

The "Your Licenses" section of the page will list all of the licenses assigned to your account.

Those eligible for the free cross-grade will have a "Cross-grade to Nucleo Pro" link to the right of the product name & license number. Click this link to automatically generate a new Nucleo Pro license. You®ll receive your new Nucleo Pro license info by email, and it will also be immediately added to your list of licenses.

Those eligible for a 50% discount will have an "Upgrade to Nucleo Pro for $247.50" link to the right of the product name & license number. Click this link to add the upgrade to your online shopping cart with the discount applied, and proceed through the checkout process.


Why not support AE 7.0?
There are a number of factors that contributed to this decision, but the most significant, the one that's given us the most pause, is user experience. Over the past few years, as we have released new products and developed a good relationship with the motion graphics community, we have learned (and acknowledged) that the user experience with GridIron X-Factor for 6.5 was not always great or easy. Updating X-Factor to support After Effects 7 unfortunately does not make anything easier. In fact, it will make the user experience worse, and we can't in good conscience release a product that would be more difficult and unwieldy for our users to work with. We cannot release (and stand behind) a product that is going to be more frustrating than useful - to do so would be a huge disservice to our customers and potential new users.

Why cancel the product?
The main factor in our decision to discontinue X-Factor was performance. Simply put, with the adoption of new multi-core and multi-processor computers, many of our users are seeing better performance using their local and powerful workstations with GridIron Nucleo Pro than they have seen with X-Factor over a network. As new hardware gets faster and includes more processing power, we can see the divide between network render farms and local rendering beginning to widen - and widen in favour of the less complex local workstation solutions.

What about Nucleo and Nucleo Pro?
Please note that sales and support will continue for both Nucleo and Nucleo Pro.

Again we apologize for any inconvenience. Please understand that this decision is based on how we can best serve our user community. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact our sales & support team at support@gridironsoftware.com.