Maxon’s Red Giant suite picked up an AI relighting effect for After Effects in its 2027.0 release on October 14. It’s called Scene Light, and the pitch is simple: add a light to footage you’ve already shot and have it behave like it’s actually in the scene, instead of painting a glow over a flat image.

What changed

It works out the scene’s shape first. According to Digital Production’s breakdown, Scene Light analyzes your footage to estimate a depth map and a surface-normal map (which way each surface is facing), then uses those with regular After Effects lights. Depth is what lets a light sit behind a person or object in the foreground instead of washing evenly across the frame. Maxon’s own page describes it as true 3D lighting that travels even behind foreground objects.

Typical jobs. The examples Maxon and the trade coverage give are adding interactive light from a muzzle flash or explosion, matching the light on a VFX element you’ve inserted, light from sources inside the frame, and broader changes like a day-for-night look. The lights stay adjustable inside your comp.

CG passes work too. If you’re relighting a render rather than live action, Digital Production notes you can feed in real depth and normal passes from Cinema 4D, Redshift, or another renderer instead of relying on the AI’s estimate.

It runs locally. Maxon Japan’s release note says the calculations happen on your machine, footage isn’t uploaded, and it isn’t used to train AI.

Scene Light is an After Effects effect. Red Giant as a whole supports several hosts, but Maxon’s announcements describe Scene Light as working directly in After Effects.

Why it matters for designers

Adding believable light to a shot after the fact has usually meant a lot of rotoscoping, masks, and hand-tuned color work, and it’s the kind of fix that tends to get cut when a deadline is close. A depth-aware light you can just place and move makes it realistic to warm up a flat interview, add the flash from a practical effect that wasn’t there on set, or make a composited element look like it belongs.

For motion designers working on social and brand video, it also opens up mood changes without a reshoot. A day-for-night pass or a moody accent light becomes something you can try in a few minutes and throw away if it doesn’t work.

What to watch out for

The whole effect depends on how well the AI reads your shot’s depth. Renderu notes that the result depends on how accurately the tool reads the frame, so test it on your own footage. Tricky edges, reflections, hair, and overlapping objects are the usual weak spots for any depth estimate, so check them in motion, not just on a still frame. Shots that are hard for the AI may still need hand-made maps and masks.

Digital Production also lists some known issues at release: the Edge Smoothing control is broken, the buttons for placing spot and point lights can freeze After Effects when it’s running in a language other than English, and the Depth Generator’s Render to Comp option can crash After Effects on some systems. Their advice, which we’d echo, is to try it on a duplicate comp before using it on a live job.

We haven’t used Scene Light ourselves, so everything here comes from Maxon and the trade coverage linked in the sources. See the sidebar for the data and cost details.