[Dirk De jong]

if you run the 2.5.1 installer with an existing BLUE 2 or higher install already on the system, it will give you the option to ; Modify , Repair , or Uninstall – choose Uninstall. When it’s done with that launch the installer again to install 2.5.1

[Dirk De jong]

does the message say “unsupported driver” or something about the card not being supported ? I would expect that card/driver combo to be fine…

In any case though, a BLUE 2.5.1 update was posted recently, and I would recommend updating BLUE and the GeForce driver first of all. If you’re running BLUE 2 or BLUE 2.5 it’s worth updating by downloading and running the Trial version installer (it will not reset BLUE licensing on the system)

the BLUE 2.5.1 installer can be accessed here;
https://www.borisfx.com/downloads/ (click on the BLUE download link)

supported drivers for 2.5.1 are listed here
https://www.borisfx.com/product/blue/requirements.php

and you’ll find on that BLUE 2.5.1 requirements page that there is a much more recent NVIDIA GeForce driver for Windows XP supported ;
https://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_169.21_whql

and there are additional driver links on the page for VISTA and other cards as well

[Dirk De jong]

and of course the same cube maps can be used in a material with reflection as the reflection map

[Dirk De jong]

From your description of the effect it doesn’t sound like something that would be expected to put a lot of demands on RAM (only 3 objects, etc.) – I wonder if one of the tracks in particular is somehow causing a problem ? Are you able to export this effect OK disabling 1 or the other of the tracks (just to try and isolate the issue)? Does the error appear right away or somewhere into the export process ?

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, I would be curious to look at the Blue project file myself in Blue (I can substitute my own movie media). Could you email it to me @ dirkd@borisfx.com ?

And could you also run the OGL Hardware test from the Preview tab of the Preferences window within Blue (you can take the results from that test and copy to the clipboard for pasting and saving in a text doc or emailing)? – if you include this info in the email it will me provide some relevant system info

Thanks.

Dirk de Jong
BorisFX

[Dirk De jong]

Hello, Richard –

I’m the product manager for Blue and on behalf of our team here I apologize for the delay of the Blue 2 release.

If you email me off-list [dirkd@borisfx.com] I can give you information about the Blue 2 beta and you could consider if you’d like to try that.

I expect that if you bought Blue you have received the Blue 1 release in the meantime ? If you aren’t interested in the Avid plugin integration perhaps it’s possible you could do what you want (or some of what you want) with Blue 1 until Blue 2 is available ?

Again, sorry for the delay.

Dirk de Jong
BorisFX

[Dirk De jong]

In Blue 1.1 (which will be a free update to Blue users that we hope to have ready within a month or so), we expect to take advantage of some Quadro FX specific features – specifically, Blue 1.1 should be able to offer higher quality hardware anti-aliasing on Quadro FX boards – meaning even faster exports when using a higher quality of anti-aliasing (not that the current export speeds are slow…)than on the GeForce cards. Also, for Quadro FX boards offering video output (for example you mentioned the PNY Professional Video Edition that comes with the break-out box) in Blue 1.1 we are hoping to offer a Full-Screen mode for monitoring composite, S-Video, or component output of the Comp while working in Blue.

That said, the GeForce 7900 is a good fast card too… for comps involving HD source footage (big textures) we recommend using an SLI configuration (2 GPUs multiprocessing) and while the GeForce 7900 offers SLI support, the Quadro FX 1500 does not.

Dirk
BorisFX

[Dirk De jong]

Hello – my name is Dirk de Jong and I am the product manager @ BorisFX for the Boris Blue product, and I’m hoping that some general background info about Blue might be useful here (sorry if it’s a bit long-winded).

Unlike most other Boris products which use the System CPU and RAM to render video, Blue does almost all it’s rendering using the GPU processor on the video card. When I say “rendering” here I mean it in the wider sense – ANY time it displays something from the timeline in the Composite Window or exports a file to disk it is using the GPU on the video card.

Current versions of Boris RED, FX, and Graffiti offer accelerated previews with a wider range of video cards, but in this context the GPU is being used only for a more generic draft quality accelerated preview of specific RED features that is suitable for Preview only and is not capable of adequately displaying (or accelerating) much of what RED can do. To be able to render / export a High Quality final image RED uses the system CPU (we say it renders “in software” rather than “on the hardware”). And if a RED user does not have a supported OGL card, he or she can simply run RED with OGL disabled – the Draft previews won’t be as fast, but it is still very useful this way.

Blue, on the other hand, uses the GPU processor on the video card to do just about ALL of it’s rendering. Just about ALL rendering (even High Quality Final export to disk) is done “on the hardware”. Disabling OGL in the Blue software is like using the CAPS LOCK key – it basically suspends all rendering in the Composite Window – and so the product would not be useful at all without the video card. In that sense Blue is a true software-hardware hybrid product. Other Boris products are much less hardware dependent than Blue – the other products require a processor and some ram and an operating system (and maybe a host application) – but that’s about it. Blue requires a rather specific (though not uncommon) kind of video card – and that card is an absolute requirement in that the Blue software is not useful without it.

Blue takes full advantage of the power of the video card and this tight hardware integration (rendering “on the hardware”) offers several significant advantages ;
– Speed in Previews ; very fast (usually realtime) and high quality previews (including streaming audio and video files)
– Speed in Export ; very fast and high quality export to disk
– High Quality and Sophisticated 3D looks ; lighting and material properties like textures, bumps, highlights, and reflections – true 3D warping of 3D objects – that are particularly well suited to processing on this kind of hardware
– other Specific features that are well suited to hardware rendering because they can be very fast and look good ; expanded styles for extruded text and splines (like custom bevels and extrusions) – support for importing 3D Models, environment mapping, etc.

In order to achieve this tight hardware integration, it was necessary that Blue be released with some additional requirements / limitations beyond those of other Boris products ;
– Blue is a standalone application only. It is not available as a plugin for any other NLE or compositing applications
– Blue requires one of a supported set of NVIDIA cards running with a specific supported graphics driver version
– Blue requires Windows XP, sp2

As far as future versions of Boris Blue – since we have yet to officially release the first version, we are not able to provide much meaningful specific information about future Blue versions right now. As far as how the Blue release indicates future trends for BorisFX products, I can confidently confirm the following;
– Blue does not indicate any kind of movement away from developing for the Mac platform – we are very much still in the Mac software development business and will be for the foreseeable future. While the Blue release does not support Mac, Mac product development at BorisFX has never stopped and is ongoing.
– Blue does not indicate a movement away from offering plugin products – we are still very much in the plugin business and will be for the foreseeable future. Again, plugin development is very much ongoing at BorisFX.
– Blue does indeed indicate a desire to take full advantage of hardware to provide a faster and wider range of effects in our products – and that is something that we are likely to see more of in BorisFX products in the future.

Dirk

[Dirk De jong]

Calligraphy and RED 3GL can co-exist fine. You should get the latest RED update on borisfx.com, and BTW RED 3 does not support the Intel Macs.

[Dirk De jong]

What Mark wrote is right on. It’s also possible to choose not to display the Map layer (Hand) in the fire layer (show just the flames in that layer) and then put the unaffected hand on a layer below – this gives you a little more flexibility for compositing the flames with the hand – for example using Hard Light Apply mode, tweaking brightness and opacity, etc.

[Dirk De jong]

It’s not a hand that has been rotoscoped – it’s me shooting my own hand holding it up in front of a blue sky so I could key it… very high production values I know…:)