What’s new with Nx Nexus?

The first release of Nx Nexus, a subject-tracking engine for editors and colorists. Drop it on a clip and it finds the people, vehicles, animals and objects in the shot, gives each one an identity that holds from frame to frame, and then lets you do something with that: draw a cinematic HUD around them, cut them out, blur or spotlight them, push the background back into fog, or pull focus to whoever matters. Everything runs locally on your machine — no footage ever leaves it.

It ships for DaVinci Resolve (OpenFX), Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, and Final Cut Pro / Motion, on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel, one universal installer) and Windows.

Finding subjects

• Smart Detect (AI) recognises 80 everyday object types and names them, with a 12-way Class Filter (people, vehicles, animals, sports equipment, and more). Face Detect (AI) is a tiny, fast dedicated face finder.
• Six classical vision modes — luminance, edges, saturation, a chosen colour, bright spots and dark spots — for lights, markers, particles, reflections and anything the AI has no name for. They are peers, not a fallback, and they are far cheaper.

Tracking that holds

• Multi-object tracking with stable IDs through occlusions, crossings and handheld camera motion. IDs are deterministic: scrub, play backwards, render on a farm or in any order and you get the same numbers every time.
• Click-to-select in the viewer in Resolve, After Effects and Final Cut Pro: click a subject to solo it, click more to build a set of up to four, click a selected one to drop it, click empty space to clear the selection. Selected subjects get a soft white halo while the others dim. The Subject controls and the Select All Subjects / Clear Selection buttons do the same thing on every host, and are the way to choose subjects in Premiere Pro.

The HUD

• Tracking boxes in seven styles, coloured one way, per object type, or by distance; centre markers in ten styles; velocity arrows; timeline-driven animation (marching ants, spinning reticles, pulsing markers).
• Every overlay stroke is anti-aliased and layered properly: a one-pixel box edge is a clean one-pixel line, overlapping boxes, markers and lines blend where they cross instead of one recolouring the other, and text sits over its plate without a halo.
• Connection lines between subjects — sequential, star, mesh, proximity, nearest-neighbour or spanning tree — routed straight, curved, as a wave, or as circuit-board traces and bends, with dash patterns and arrowheads that follow the route.
• Labels with object name, ID, coordinates, speed, depth and confidence on a rounded legibility plate, stacked automatically so they never overlap.
• One Overlay Style group for all of it: a thin dark outline, on by default, that keeps light overlays readable on bright footage, and an optional glow around boxes, markers, arrows and connections, in each overlay’s own colour or one you pick.

Mattes, effects and glow

• AI subject mattes that follow the exact outline, with a High quality mode that zooms in on each subject so edge detail scales with how large they are in frame; feather and grow/shrink controls; a depth-based silhouette matte for hair, smoke and held objects; or the plain tracking box.
• Twenty Region FX applied inside or outside the subject. Utility: Solid Fill (redaction bars, rotoscoped silhouettes), Sharpen and Posterize (cel shade). Looks: zoom, pixelate, blur, black and white, invert, thermal, night vision, hue shift, glitch, spotlight, hologram, chromatic ghost, ASCII mosaic, halftone, ink sketch, retro dither and heat ripple. Hologram was rebuilt as a projected image made of light — a blue-to-cyan tone map with bloom, scanlines, a rolling band, flicker and row tears — and Night Vision gained bloom. Effects stay clean right up to the frame border, and the animated ones are driven by the frame number, so they render identically on every pass and on every GPU backend.
• The Diagnostics toggle is now “Visualize Detection Field” and, in the AI modes, shows the detections themselves (each box in its class colour, brighter with confidence) instead of an unrelated luminance field.
• Subject Glow: a smooth rim-and-halo light wrap on the matte edge.
• One Subject Mask group holds the selection and the matte controls, ahead of Region FX, Subject Glow and Output, which all use it.

Depth

• Scene depth estimated from the image drives depth labels, depth-ordered occlusion (nearer subjects hide the HUD behind them), 3D-tilted connections, atmospheric Depth Fog, and Rack Focus — a depth-of-field blur whose focus can follow a tracked subject, the nearest one, or the farthest, easing between distances like an operated pull.
• Depth-driven features switch the depth engine on by themselves; the Enable Depth switch only governs the Depth group’s own overlays.

Output

• Output modes for compositing downstream: Normal, Matte Only, Matte in Alpha (a real cutout), Depth Map and Depth in Alpha, with invert and a black/white remap of the exported depth range.
• Overlays Only: just the HUD on a transparent frame, so you can put a glow, a blur or a blend mode on the overlays alone and lay them back over the plate.
• Pixels Nexus does not touch pass through untouched — linear, ACES and HDR timelines keep their full range through the node.

Performance and reliability

• All heavy analysis runs once per frame on the CPU or neural hardware; the GPU only paints. Frames you have already rendered are remembered, so scrubbing back is instant and identical.
• Models compile in the background on first use (the outline model can take a few minutes the very first time) and never freeze the host; if the AI is ever unavailable the frame renders untouched rather than black.
• A Show Performance Stats readout tells you where the time goes.

Disk usage. On macOS the AI models are prepared for your GPU once and the result is kept in ~/Library/Caches/NxColor/nexus/coreml-cache (about 1.6 GB for the full set). One copy is shared by Resolve, the Adobe apps and Final Cut Pro, and it is safe to delete — Nexus simply rebuilds it on the next launch (which then takes a minute or two longer).

Support. If something misbehaves, Nexus writes small diagnostic logs you can attach to a support email: ~/Library/Logs/NxColor/ on macOS, for every host, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\NxColor\ on Windows. They never grow beyond a few megabytes.

Requirements. macOS 14 or later (Apple Silicon or Intel); Windows 10/11 64-bit with a DirectX 12 GPU for AI acceleration. In Premiere Pro, GPU rendering uses Metal on macOS and CUDA (NVIDIA) on Windows; other GPUs and Software Only mode render on the CPU with every feature available. After Effects renders on the CPU by design. One activation online; afterwards Nexus runs offline and checks in quietly whenever you are connected.