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Click image to play movie. 500K
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A Tweak and
a Cheat
But
we can actually make one more change to make the effect even better.
Back in the controls window, under the Scatter Wipe tab, hit Invert
Gradient. Now, as you load the movie into RAM and
play, the sand falls from the middle. By inverting the gradient,
the black pixels are now in the middle, and the visible pixels on
top of them are displaced first, and the white pixels on the edge
are displaced last.
You can do some tweaking of the speed if you like, or see how other changes in the gradient affect the progress of the wipe as you experiment a little more with some of these advanced settings, but here's how it looks with the settings that we're applied so far.
Here's the cheat I promised you. I have to confess that I stumbled on it because I wasn't paying attention.
I was looking at the brick wall graphic, and decided that it just didn't look very sandy. It was also kind of hard to see my grains of sand because the background was too detailed. I couldn't find any appropriate images on my hard drive, but I figured that at least blurring the darn thing would be an improvement. So I selected the Background Track by clicking on it, chose a Gaussian Blur, and applied it.
I remembered at that very moment that this wasn't supposed to work....but it did!
It happened in a strange way, though. The filter didn't
show up UNDER the Background Track as expected. It showed up ABOVE
the track, acting like a lens on the track below it. To finish getting
the look I was after, I added a Directional Blur as well, and it
also showed up above the Background Track to do its business. You
can see my final track layout here.
What this means, of course, is that filters in Boris can act like Adjustment Layers in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Those are special kinds of layers that provide this sort of lens function, by applying filters to the layers below them. It's an entirely different function than layers normally provide in those programs, which is why I was so surprised to find it apparently built into the layers in Graffiti.
Just to double-check that this was the case,
I slid the Gaussian Blur filter above Track 1, which contains my
text. I found exactly what I hoped, that both the Track and the
Background Track below it were blurred. The Directional Blur was
also blurred, but the Directional Blur itself was only applied to
the Background Track below it.
I also took a quick spin into BorisFX and Boris RED to find the filter tracks work the same way there. So if you have a ten layer effect, you could apply a single filter or group of filters to all ten tracks by placing them above the top track. Similarly, if you placed the filters above Track 6, they would apply equally to the tracks below, and not at all to the tracks above.
This opens up all sorts of possibilities for advanced effects creation in BorisFX, Graffiti, and RED, and you can be sure that I'll be exploring this in upcoming tutorials. In the meantime, this adjustment layer function underscores the creative flexibility offered by the track-based composition structure in Boris FX, just as the use of effects filters illustrates the graphic possibilities added to the text tools in Boris Graffiti.
Tim Wilson, Man About Town, is a producer with Digital Media Net.