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| Tim Wilson BorisFX WWUG Host |
Article Focus: Tim Wilson, the WWUG's BorisFX Worldwide Users Group host, answers some of the many questions about Boris RED that he's heard while doing demos and other presentations around the country. He also answers some questions that he only thinks he heard, some that he wishes he'd heard, and others we're pretty sure he just made up.
What
is Boris RED?
The short answer is, the whole enchilada.
How about a slightly longer answer?
Boris RED is a resolution independent, cross-platform plug-in that offers
advanced filtering, compositing and DVE. Using the basic BorisFX interface,
it integrates titling/CG with 3D text and custom EPS extrusions. RED
also offers a variety of advanced rendering options, including motion
blur and field rendering. RED is for editing applications (Avid, Media
100, Premiere, etc.) rather than for compositing applications (AE, Effetto
Pronto, Commotion, etc.). It's based on the interface introduced with
BorisFX 4, which I discussed in an earlier article, and includes all
of the powerful keying, DVE and compositing power I started to explore
there.
However,
RED also offers editors all of the filters that had previously only
been available in BorisAE, Artel's
compositing plug-in package. These include displacement maps, clouds,
noise generators, a 3D shatter filter that also allows custom shape
mapping (explode an image into particles shaped like your logo, for
example), and some extremely powerful and easy to use lighting filters.
Here, for example,
is the Boris logo mapped to a video clip of fire, a few frames into
the 3D shatter. I also added a light source to highlight the orientation
of the particles. All of this is as easy to customize as all of Boris's
parameters, of course.
RED also
offers support for AfterEffects-compatible
plug-ins like DigiEffects'
Aurorix and Berserk, Puffin
Designs' Knoll's Lens Flare Pro and many more. Just drop them in
the RED Filters folder and they show up inside the Filters menu. While
that may not sound like a big deal to compositors - most of the applications
they use already do this - it's a huge deal to editors: very few editing
applications offer direct support of AE plug-ins.
Is that really such a big a deal?
Generally speaking, absolutely. Even cuts and dissolves editors who
specialize in nature documentaries - like me, for example - are getting
called upon more each day to up the ante in production values. As part
of that, we're increasingly being asked for special effects that had
previously been in the sole realm of full time compositors. Thank goodness
that BorisFX has grown along with the needs of its users as quickly
as we've needed it to - and certainly far more quickly than our editing
applications themselves. As a result, editors now have many more options
than before, right in their editing applications.
It's an ever bigger
deal for some users in particular. Avid
editors, for example: once you buy the AVX version of RED, you don't
need to buy the AVX versions of other plug-ins to use them. Simply drop
the standard AE versions in the RED filters folder, and they show up
ready to use in RED, from your Avid effects palette. You can save a
pile of money, as well as a pile of frustration from waiting for developers
to release AVX versions of your favorite plugs.
Media 100 users of course, haven't
been able to spend ANY amount of money to have much choice in plug-ins
apart from BorisFX, which has been very frustrating indeed. Now, through
RED, you have access to literally hundreds of new effects in dozens
of packages. This is a whole new game for you.
Finally, ICE users should look at
RED as yet another return on their investment. In addition to Boris
RED being natively ICE'd (that is, the features of RED that can
be accelerated by ICE already are, no extra purchase necessary), RED
supports the use of ICE'd plug-ins in your editing applications. Think
about it: all ICE is looking for is the combination of ICE'd hardware
and software. Other than that, it doesn't particularly care where you
put them, which is why the same set of ICE'd plug-ins runs in - among
others - AE, Commotion and Effetto
Pronto (and lordy, do they run in EP, but that's another story).
So now, you can drop those ICE'd plug-ins inside RED and have them available
inside editing applications that otherwise have no access to either
AE plug-ins or ICE apart from RED.
Scads of new
filters, both built in and plugged into RED, might be reason enough
for some folks to buy it.
The title
graphic for this article is in fact a screen grab from Boris RED, and
everything you see was created entirely in RED. On the 3D text, I mapped
a movie of shimmering water to the front, applied the Hue/Saturation/Lightness
filter to make the water's hue cycle from blue to red (naturally), applied
the Clouds filter to the bevel, and a wood grain to the sides. There's
a hue cycle applied to the background layer, as well as RED's Edge Lighting
filter, an alpha-channel mask, blah, blah, blah...
The whole
thing is admittedly a little garish, but it makes the point well enough:
anything goes.