Pixel Bender is a relatively young technology with a promising future. Right now, Pixel Bender support in After Effects is pretty basic, but it is enough to create some very cool plugins for After Effects. Now technically speaking, Pixel Bender doesn’t create After Effects ‘plugins’. But, After Effects recognizes Pixel Bender Kernel files and treats them as ‘Effect plugins’.
If you want to know how Pixel Bender works, you can view my introductory tutorial. Not going into too much details, Pixel Bender kernels treat every pixel individually. So every output pixel is processed individually and there is no way you can process the whole image since they don’t have memory. To understand better, take After Effects Expressions as an example. Expressions are calculated every frame and they don’t have any memory.
In the same way, Pixel Bender kernels are processed for every pixel and no data from a previously processed pixel is available. Now, before you get all confused, watch the introductory tutorial for much detailed explanation.
