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Boris Red 4.1 > A Top-Shelf Tool for Any Video Pro Words by Trey Yancy April 2008
Incorporating the power of its sister titling and special effects products, Graffiti and FX, Red brings a lot to the table. At $995, it hits the same price point as competing professional effects and compositing applications but where other offerings tend to focus on motion graphics, Red provides a full-blown titling, animation and compositing, and in true 3-D, complete with bump mapping, 3-D paint, lighting and more. While Red can stand on its own as an independent application, its most popular implementation is as a plug-in for other applications, including Final Cut Pro, Premiere, AfterEffects, Motion and Avid to name a few. New Features Red 4 is a major step up from its predecessor. Along with support for Intel Macs, its new features include an improved user interface, support for 16-bit color, clone paint, image brushes, vector tracing, motion paths, motion keys, subtitle generation and a host of new BCC and FEC filters. Along with enough visual treats to choke George Lucas, there are some practical nuts-and-bolts improvements, including such things as support for Wacom tablets, standalone rendering via Render Queue and project consolidation, the latter providing the ability to automatically gather all assets of a project and transport it to another machine or hand it over to a colleague without having to worry about broken links. As for the new user interface, Red 4 now offers a look and feel similar to that of popular non-linear editors such as Final Cut and Premiere. This includes a mini timeline in the composite window, and "Sticky" and "Magnetic" windows. The feel may not be as polished as some of AE or Motion, but things are definitely moving forward. Hands On As one might expect with such a powerful application, there are lots of icons and controls, many of latter being hidden away within tabbed windows and often in places where you might not think to look. Fortunately, the package includes an excellent tutorial disk. Once you figure out where everything is and what it does, the fun really begins. A key to understanding Red is that, although you can confine things to 2-D, this really is a 3-D application. You can paint in 3-D, you can light objects in 3-D, you can take 2-D content, vectorize it and textured and bevel the result. You can spend endless hours with Red and never exhaust the possibilities. Thanks to the huge number of preset effects (not to speak of user-designed effects) the task of creating amazing video need not be a time consuming task but the more time you have, the more amazing the result. I only have two criticisms of Red 4. One is an occasional minor quirk when using as a plug-in within Final Cut Pro. The second is that the interface is not uniformly easy on the eyes. The user is free to select custom interface colors but the predominance of white lined button or tool icons on solid gray backgrounds is an issue. Conclusion Boris Red is a fantastic tool for anyone who needs a serious effects, titling and compositing solution. It not only takes over where other applications leave off, it takes things into another dimension. Minor interface quibbles aside, it is easy to recommend Red 4 as a candidate for the must-have list of any video professional. Product: Boris Red 4.1 |
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Desktop-based post-production has been with us for a long time and much of the titling, animation and effects that you see in television commercials, series promos and even feature films have been produced with off-the-shelf software. Some of the more spectacular examples of this work are seen in the elaborate animated logos and related graphics used in major league sports broadcasts Ð much, if not most of which being created with Boris Red from BorisFX.