Learning Boris Red

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi David,

I don’t know of any officially sanctioned books that are in print apart from the “Instant Boris FX” book which was authored by Chris Vadnais in 2004 – there may be some other books out there but I know not of their existence. You might want to take a look at the free tutorials that are up on our web site at http://www.borisfx.com/tutorials – there are some good tips that can help in your understanding of the product.

Cheers,

Peter.

[David Frisk]

Thanks for the help. I’ve looked at the tutorials before, but I think I need to go back to even more basic things regarding the interface and just the way Red works in general. I think basic tutorials would be even more beneficial than more advanced things. For example…I was just playing around and I masked an object and then wanted to scale it and move it and stuff. In After Effects it’s simple…you mask it and then transform, because transforms are rendered after the mask. In Red, it appears the rendering order is the other way around, because my mask stays in place when trying to do transformation. That’s just one example of course, but I think the program is just a lot more different than AE than I initially thought it was going to be.

Maybe I’ll check out that book though, even if it is a little old now. Maybe it can at least get me started on the right track. Thanks again for the help.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi David,

In RED, all tracks feature both upstream and downstream masking, so you can place the mask in either pre or post transform slots, with the order of render being: media, upstream mask, transform, downstream mask.

If you create a 3D plane shape and twirl down the top track level, you will notice that there is a mask sub-track and then the transform controls track and then the face sub-track and if you twirl down the face sub-track you will notice that there is another mask sub-track and then the media sub-track.

Spline shapes placed on the face (upstream) mask are subject to transforms made to the track, while spline masks that are placed in the top (downstream) mask are not transformed with the shape. If you want the spline shape to lock on to the media then you place it in the face mask (upstream), if you want the mask to remain static (like a letter box for instance) then you place it on the top mask (downstream.)

And here’s another tip – there are tracks and containers in RED. Tracks have a media element, such as image clips, static images, EPS files, text etc, while containers are group controllers (similar to a null object) for 1 or more tracks. There are three types of containers – “Standard 2D” container for grouping flat 2D tracks, “3D” container for extruded elements and also for 2D/3D layer interaction in 3D space, and “Title” containers for automating rolls/crawls etc. In a 3D container, you can have extruded text or extruded vector art along with 2D objects all of which can be animated in 3D space along with the lights, camera and shadows.

I believe you’ll find that RED is quite a robust compositing solution and with a little practice you should be able to use this software to complete highly sophisticated composites.

Cheers,

Peter.

[David Frisk]

Awesome Peter. Thanks so much for taking the time to get me headed in the right direction. I think that’s just the kind of info I needed to get started. There’s probably still a bit of digging into the program I need to do before I get relatively proficient in it, but this is definitely a good start.

All the best,

David

[Peter Mcauley]

Glad that helped David. Feel free to post any questions you may have regarding use of the software and I’ll help out whenever I can. Just like everything else, there’s a bit of a learning curve but once you get past that it’s all pretty much clear sailing.

Cheers,

Peter.