[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Doug,

Well … if you are asking for general compositing knowledge / training then you should start by reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Compositing-Kaufmann-Computer-Graphics/dp/0121339602

The text in book should provide you with answers for many of the questions that you may have regarding the fine art of digital compositing.

If you are looking for tips / tricks / techniques that are specific to the Boris product line, there are several tutorial DVD’s that we offer for sale on our web site. You can find them here:

https://www.borisfx.com/store/cart.php?target=category&category_id=36

You might also want to consider taking a class … there are most likely some editing or compositing user groups close to where you live and I’d suggest finding one near you, going to one of the meetings and asking some of the folks there for some good training resources.

I hope this helps,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hey Daniel,

Glad that helped.

So regarding the alpha issue … keep this rule in mind: any track that is outputting alpha can be nested in the mask track of any other track (pre or post transform) to act as an alpha matte for that track. With that, I’d suggest the following steps:

• click on the monitor icon on the track with alpha to view the output of this track in another viewer so that you can ensure that this track is indeed outputting alpha / transparency. (if you have not done so already, you might want to enable the checkerboard option to view alpha information or you can set the viewer mode to alpha instead of rub)

• once you have confirmed that the track has alpha, you can move forward and nest this in the mask track of the track that you need to have the track matte. TO do this, just drag the track with alpha onto the mask sub-track of the second track

• if you need to invert the matte, you can click on the invert mask button, which is at the far right of the mask track

Please let me know if this helps.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Daniel,

In Boris RED, you will find that you can twirl open any track to reveal what we refer to as sub-tracks. When you do this you will see the following sub-tracks in this order, from bottom to top:

Media – Mask (face mask) – Face – Transformations group – Mask (shape mask) – Track Shape

The two mask sub-tracks are used to apply a matte / mask either pre transform or post transform. Here’s how it works … you can drag any track containing a media element (a binary bitmap mask shape or a soft/hard pixel matte or any combination thereof) onto either the pre or post transform mask tracks. If you place the mask media track on the face mask then the mask will move as the media is transformed. If you place the mask on the shape mask track, then the mask will remain static, regardless of any transforms that you apply to that shape track.

To invert the matte, you can click on the invert mask toggle button, which is located at the far right of the mask track, beside the keyframe control section of the timeline.

For depth compositing, you might want to experiment with the BCC Z-Blur filter – it was designed specifically for this task. If you load the filter and click on the Help button, this will launch a detailed PDF that will walk you through how to use the filter.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hello again William,

Further investigation into this issue. We’re seeing something unexpected but slightly different than you are with the Optical Flow filter (in MC 6) at 50 percent in a 23.978 project.

What we are seeing is that the Optical Flow filter appears to be missing a frame during the render. This seems to be happening only once in the render and not every 7 frames as it is on your system.

With that, we’ll open up a support case and attempt to resolve the problem. In the meantime, as I suggested earlier, for clip retiming effects, you might want to use BCC Velocity Remap, which does not exhibit this problem.

Thank you for letting us know about the problem – when I have more information regarding this issue, I’ll share it with the list. .

Thanks,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi WIlliam,

We just tried reproducing the problem that you described using our MC 6x systems with BCC 8 and for us the BCC 8 Optical Flow filter operates smoothly, just as expected on both platforms.

Next, we’ll move back and check on an the older MC 5.5 systems to see if it’s related to using the previous version of Avid Media Composer.

Stay tuned.

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi WIlliam,

I’m not sure why you’re seeing that result and I’ll take a look this morning to see if we can reproduce the issue on our systems. In the meantime, you should be able to set the Blending Mode to Frame Blending Only and continue working. If the problem persists even after you have changed the Blending Mode, then try using BCC Velocity Remap instead of BCC Optical Flow while we investigate the issue.

Thanks,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi,

To make a flickering light effect in RED / Avid FX, apply the BCC Film Damage filter and disable all options except for Flicker.

For a wiggling effect, you can either use the Shake option in the BCC Damage TV filter (for XY axis shake only), or you can use either the BCC Jitter or BCC Jitter Basic filter.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Chris,

Both the Extruded EPS filter and the Glitter filter are OpenGL effects. You should be able to stack multiple OGL effects without encountering an error – I wonder if your system is equipped with a video card that can process the OGL effects though. Have you cross checked your system config with the supported video card configurations listed on our web site? You can check that here:

https://www.borisfx.com/sony/bccsvp/Graphics-Cards.php

If your system meets the min specs for OGL then you might want to put a call into our support dept and one of our tech support folks would be happy to work with you on resolving the problem.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Stewart,

Here are the steps to achieve that effect:

• layer the text file over a video background clip (I recommend using an 8 bit tiff with alpha)
• move a few frames down the timeline so that you are not at the first frame of the text layer (this way you can watch the particle form as you change the settings)
• apply the bcc particle emitter 3d filter directly to the tiff with alpha layer
• in the PE3D filter, set the particle shape to host image layers
• in the PE3D filter, set the image layer pop-up to source layer
• in the PE3D filter, set the layer mode to color and alpha

And from there, animate the particles and emitter to complete the result that you are trying to achieve.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Stewart,

In the Sony Vegas Pro host, you need to apply the BCC Stage Light filter to a clip that is positioned on a track above the clip over which you want to see the effect.

I hope this helps.

Peter.