If you edit films digitally and/or work on visual effects, you must have heard of Borix FX. It’s a company that is famous for its Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects plug-ins. Its product Boris RED is a stand-alone application similar to After Effects. Boris RED is used for motion effects. It’s available for Windows and Mac OS (PPC and Intel Macs). Compared with After Effects, Boris RED is somewhat oriented for 3D visual effects.
Let me first mention that Boris RED is not so cheap. It’s priced at US$995. It’s as expensive as Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional, which is priced at US$999. Good news is that Boris has a free trial version, which is fully functional for 2 weeks. In order to use it on a trial basis, you need to register to get a trial license and then download the installer. The installer will let you install the stand-alone application (Boris RED Engine) plus plug-ins for Avid and Final Cut Pro if you want.
When you first launch the application, you need to set up your project. Project Settings is located under Edit. (See Screenshot 02) In this window, you can set the resolution, duration, frame rate and so forth. (See Screenshot 03) And then you need to create a layout file called Composition just as in After Effects.
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If you use Adobe After Effects, you won’t probably have a hard time getting around with Boris RED. In Boris RED, there are three mains panels: Controls, Composite and Composition. Boris RED’s Controls window is somewhat equivalent to After Effect’s counterpart. It will let you change the parameters (scale, opacity, rotation…) of clips and control effect settings. The Composition panel is something unique in Boris RED to the extent that there are more than 2 dozen buttons to click on.
As far as media formats are concerned, Boris RED is better than Adobe After Effects. After Effects doesn’t support such media formats as M4A, MP4, MPEG, M2V, OGG, WMA, WMV and so forth. And Boris RED supports the following media formats: AI, BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, PSD, TIF for graphics; AIFF, MOV, M4A, MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA for audio; AVI, DV, MOV, MP4 and WMV. (In order to import OGG, WMA and WMV files to Boris RED, third-party QuickTime plug-ins may be required.) By the way, neither application supports MKV, M2V and MPEG.
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If you use Boris RED for the first time, you will probably be amazed with some of its basic functions. For example, there’s a button called Add Page Turn in the Composition panel. As the title suggests, this feature gives a still image or video the look of a turned page. Furthermore, there are such buttons as Add Cube, Add 3D Sphere, Add Cylinder and Add 3D Plane in the 2nd row. Any of these features will let you turn a 2D still image/video into 3D. (See Screenshot 08.)
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Once you import a media clip, there are many parameters that you can control under the Controls panel. Every image or video clip is treated in a 3D space. You can control such parameters as X-Y-Z positions, opacity, scale, rotation, lights, shadow and motion blur. If you use Final Cut Pro, you probably know how Boris 3D video generator works. There are many minute settings like Tracking, Kerning, Leading, Style Skew, Style Baseline and more. Take Gaussian Blur as an example. There are settings labeled Blur Threshold, Max. Deviation, Blur Quality, Iterations, Apply Mode and so forth. (See Screenshot 13.) These minute settings could rather scare motion effects beginners off Boris RED.
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Boris RED comes with many effects. It seems that Boris RED comes with all the plug-ins that are available in Boris Continuum. There are so many effects and filters that it’s difficult to tell if there are any unique ones available in just for Boris RED.
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Boris RED is a powerful motion graphics application. So is Apple’s Motion. But no matter how good they are, Adobe After Effects is still the industry-standard application for motion effects. One good reason for After Effect’s non-changing status comes from the fact that Adobe Photoshop is the best 2D graphic editing application. Neither Boris FX nor Apple has graphic editing software. Many default functions and filters available in Photoshop are also available in After Effects. After Effects CS3 even supports Photoshop’s Liquify. If you want to use After Effects, you have to know how to use Photoshop. And After Effects recognizes Photoshop’s individual layers. So does Apple’s Motion. But Boris RED doesn’t and merges Photoshop’s layers into one. That’s a big disadvantage for the software developer that doesn’t sell graphic editing software.
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By the way, Boris RED has an online help menu. You can access it from Help on the menu bar. (See Screenshot 20.) It contains text-based tutorials. This online menu is incompatible with some web browsers for Mac OS. We have tested 4 web browsers. Safari and OmniWeb users should have no problem. But Firefox and Camino may not read this help menu correctly. (See Screenshot 21.)
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In summary, Boris RED is a great motion effects application especially designed to create 3D works. There are some unique features that aren’t available in Adobe After Effects or Apple’s Motion. Boris RED enables users to make minute settings for visual effects. It supports more media formats than After Effects does. Nonetheless, a major disadvantage is that Boris RED doesn’t recognize Photoshop’s individual layers.
Boris RED is a product of Boris FX.
Click on the button to watch a simple video created with Boris RED 4.1.
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