MMHK - Boris RED Tour

Workflow
Integrated Effects Creation with Boris RED

Every effects application offers appealing features. The real question is, are the features accessible where you need them? Other applications talk about their integration with NLE software, but they don't mean what we do when we talk about RED's unparalleled power for integrated effects creation: its availability directly inside your editing application. No other effects application offers the range of options RED does, where RED does.

By integrating advanced 2D and 3D compositing, sophisticated titling, a full suite of vector tools (including paint, rotoscoping, and tools to create and extrude vector objects), robust 3D modeling and animation, and the industry-leading software DVE technology in a single application, you need learn only one interface to accomplish a wide range of special effects.

As a result, you save time, by learning only one interface to accomplish all these tasks. You save money, because you don't need to buy an illustration program, a 3D application, specialized titling software, and a compositing application that requires additional plug-ins to perform tasks that RED 2.5 handles natively.

Using Boris RED 2.5.0 inside your editing application avoids the challenges and potential frustrations of exporting media from your editing application, through other external applications, only to return the finished effects back to your editing application. This is equally true when using RED inside such compositing applications as After Effects: RED provides a wide range of effects that other compositing applications do not, such as vector animation and 3D extrusion and animation.

RED thus allows you to avoid workflows that cost significantly more, and reduces time that would be spent learning additional interfaces. RED offers a crucial advantage: using all these tools in one place, inside your NLE, in a single application.

Below: Boris RED 2.5 inside Avid Xpress DV.
RED Engine

RED has always offered both integrated effects creation, and methods for creating effects offline, using license-free Keyframer. Keyframer offers the full power of Boris RED in a standalone shell, in order to build titles, transitions, and other effects compositions on any computer, then import those saved effects into the fully integrated version of Boris RED for rendering.

You're free to copy Keyframer to as many computers as you like, knowing that saved settings are platform-independent: create on Macintosh computers to render on a Windows workstation, and vice versa.

RED 2.5 introduces another innovation, the RED Engine. In addition to standalone effects creation, the RED Engine offers standalone rendering to standard QuickTime and AVI codecs, including hardware codecs installed on your computers, as well as export of vector animations as .swf files (Macromedia® Flash™). You can thus create animations, render them, and bring the finished movies into your editing timeline.

You're not limited to one workflow — integrated effects creation — or the other — standalone effects creation. RED 2.5 offers the ability to create effects inside the timeline of a video editing application where it's easiest, then export those effects for rendering in the standalone RED Engine when it's convenient. It's up to you.

As a result, RED 2.5 offers something that no other application has ever offered before: the ability to create effects anywhere you want, and finish them anywhere you want, across computers and across platforms.

Style Palette & Library Browser

The Style Palette goes well beyond simply saving text styles, although this feature alone is quite significant. RED ships with over 150 saved text styles. The number grows even higher when you consider that any combination of parameters may be applied, so that the shadow and edge treatments of one saved style may be combined with the fill and typeface of another saved style.

The fact is that any design element may be saved to the style palette, and edited and applied whenever it's needed. Other elements that may be saved include colors, gradients, natural media, paintbrushes, spline combinations of stroke and fill, materials applied to 3D objects, and extrusion parameters for extruded objects. More styles will be made available as free downloads on a regular basis. Below, the Boris Style Palette, showing saved Gradients in one of four supplied categories.
Productivity Enhancements
 
Boris RED 2.5 will help you do more work, better work, with less effort. Some of that comes from core features such as integrated effects creation, vector art, 3D creation and compositing, peerless text capabilities, and the RED Engine. But RED 2.5 offers many features aimed directly at working more productively.

RAM Preview and Frame Caching While you work, all frames are automatically loaded into a RAM cache, making previews to RAM remarkably fast. Only changed frames need to be reloaded. RAM previews can take place within a specified range, and at half or quarter rate.

Audio Both synch and scratch audio tracks are supported. Scrub audio to coordinate effects with music, view waveforms, even animate volume and pan from within RED. There's also an option to play back audio during Preview to RAM.

Project Window/Batch Export Save mutliple versions of compositions as you go to the new Project window. Bring in mutliple files or Project Settings through the Import dialog, or by dragging into the Project window from the desktop. Batch export functions allow multiple projects, or multiple versions of projects to be rendered in different formats or resolutions.

File Formats In addition to new export functions for QuickTime, AVI and SWF formats, RED 2.5 supports the import and export of sequential PICT, Targa, TIFF and JPEG animations. Photoshop files can also be imported as compositions with layers and apply modes intact.

Speed The RED 2.5 interface, including screen redraw times while building effects, now includes Open GL acceleration. RED supports dual-processor rendering for both Windows and Macintosh, and Altivec acceleration for G4 Macintoshes.

This ends the Boris RED Tour. Return to Boris FX products page.