[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Barry,

1. If you need to use the BCC / FEC filter integrated motion tracker then you’ll have a different workflow than the RED tracker. Here’s a link to a tutorial that shows how to track a BCC Lens Flare effect using the built-in BCC tracker in FCP:

https://www.borisfx.com/tutorials/LensFlare.php

2. If you need to offset a tracker as you describe, then you’ll have to manually set keyframes for the tracker search and target regions.

3. Your suggestion for paint on a single frame is a god one and I’m adding it to the feature request list for RED 5.

I’m not exactly sure when the BCC Sparks for Smoke on Mac will be available but as soon as we have something I’ll make sure that I get in touch with you so that you can check it out.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hmmm … tough to diagnose without seeing the project and knowing what effects you are adding. Some effects will darken an image, even slightly, and of course this is obvious when you cut it back into the timeline. Take a look at the project specifics – are you altering the bit depth, ie, reducing a 10 bit clip in FCP into 8 bit in RED? If so then you can bump RED to 16 bits and avoid a roundoff. Take a look at the render settings in RED and make sure that they match the input clip that you took from FCP in regard to color depth, alpha support, compression etc.

I hope this helps,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

I think it’s 5 mb. Or, if you prefer, you can send up to 100 mb for free using yousendit free ftp service.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hey Paul,

The workflow that I’d suggest for Vegas and Blue is that you use Blue in standalone mode and not as a plug-in. Just import the render files that you create with Blue into Vegas. If you need to change something then open up the Blue project, make the change and rerender.

I offer this workflow because Blue is hardware based and renders so fast it’s ridiculous. When I use Blue I tend to use it in standalone mode and I think most people follow that workflow.

Currently the installer for Blue will not install the product into Vegas but I suspect that to change soon. That does not prevent you from using it in standalone mode though.

I hope this helps,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Paul,

Although the training DVD’s are host specific, you can get a lot of useful information out of them regardless of the host that you are using. We don’t currently have plans to create a training DVD for Vegas but that may change as demand for this grows.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Paul,

Well which product you end up with truly depends on the content that you need to generate. If you need titling and compositing, and it sounds like you do need that, then it’s hands down RED. You already stated that BCC is a no brainer and I totally agree – easy to use with host native UI and fast.

So I guess the question is whether or not Blue will fit your workflow. To arrive at the answer to this you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I need a real-time 3D graphics generator? Because it’s all hardware based, working with Blue provides the ability to design and tweak 3D graphics on the fly. I think it’s a better 3D graphics environment than RED. It also includes shaders and deformers which allow for more interesting designs. In fact, I used Blue to create the opener that we use for the BorisTV tutorials.
• Are shaders and deformers for 3D graphics important? Shaders give you bump maps, texture maps and reflection maps all in real time. Deformers provide things like bend/taper/twist and shatter explosion effects and 3D curls etc. All in real time. These are not available in RED.

If these are important then you should strongly consider adding Blue to your arsenal of effects. And if you call in to our internal sales guys you should be able to work directly with them to get a good deal on the software as a package.

I hope this helps.

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Ray,

If you want to send me an example I’d be happy to take a look. You can send the (zipped) file to me via email at this address: peterm@borisfx.com.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Barry,

1. From the title of this post it would appear as though you are tracking in Boris RED / Avid FX. There is a tutorial for that on our web site, which can be viewed here:

https://www.borisfx.com/tutorials/motiontracking.php

Here’s the short of it:

• launch the RED / Avid FX interface
• import into the timeline the clip that you want to track
• click in the background of the timeline to deselect all tracks
• select Filters>Motion>Motion Tracker – this action adds a motion tracker filter to the timeline
• twirl down the motion tracker filter so that you see the Source sub-track
• drag the clip that you want to track onto the Source sub-track
• click on the main track of the motion tracker filter to bring the motion tracker controls into the controls window
• click on the TV monitor icon on the motion tracker filter – this action opens a new viewer window that displays the video to be tracked and with a red rectangle within a rectangle, which is the tracker search and target region.
• position the tracker over a group of pixels that you want to follow in the scene
• in the control window there is a small green button with a crosshair – this is the tracker analyze start button. click on this button to start tracking the pixel array that you selected with the tracker search / target rectangles.
• once tracking is complete you can close out the new tracker viewer
• all of the tracking information is now contained within the filter – simply drag the filter onto any track and click on the motion tracker filter to see the controls in the control window. Then go to the Apply tab and select the target for the tracking data (x/y position, pivot, camera etc.)

2. To offset the tracking data, you must follow these steps:

• go back to the viewer of the motion tracker filter. To do that, click on the TV monitor icon on the main tracker of the motion tracker filter
• observe that there are small red squares that follow the motion of the pixels that you tracked. With the arrow tool selected, drag over these red squares in the viewer window to select them.
• hold down the shift key and drag the selected red boxes to reposition them, thereby offsetting the motion tracker path.

3. To hold a clone stamp to a single frame, perform the clone operation as you would normally. Then drag the keyframe at the end of the clone paint track to set the duration, which in this case if you only want one frame set it to one frame after the start. The best part is that it’s completely non-destructive so if you need to you can move it at any time, even if you close out the project.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

I’d also like to know if anyone has a way to do this successfully on the Mac. Thus far, I only have knowledge of users successfully generating DDS files on Windows systems.

If you have boot camp on your Mac you might be able to run Windows Photoshop and use the nvidia dds generator plug-in – have you considered trying that?

Cheers,

Peter.

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Paul,

I’ll do my best to try and clear up any confusion you may have with regard to the differences between the products that we offer.

BCC (Boris Continuum Complete) and FEC (Final Effects Complete) are plug-in image processing filters that do not have a separate user interface. They use the host application’s interface to provide control over the many different parameters in each filter.

Blue, RED, Graffiti, and FX are plug-in image processing, titling and 3D compositing applications that have a custom user interface to control the effect generation.

Graffiti and FX are subsets of RED – Graffiti is for titling, FX is for image processing.

RED includes all of Graffiti, all of FX, most of the filters from BCC and a few filters from FEC. It has the ability to generate complex spline based path masks, animated or static, and uses a vertical stacked timeline to generate composites as one might do with After Effects, Motion, Shake or any other 3D compositing application. It can be used as a plug-in or as a standalone application as it has it’s own render engine built-in to the application.

Blue is very much like like RED but has the ability to import 3D models and includes hardware rendering, so it’s extremely efficient at generating 3D titles and effects in a very short amount of time.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Peter.