Product Reviews

Boris' collection of After Effects and editing effects plug-ins is known for its robust variety and its many time-saving attributes. Boris Red 3GL is centred around one significant new foundation: the hardware support for Open GL-based video cards. This upgrade takes the bulk of the work of rendering output to the screen from the Mac's CPU and hands it to the graphics processing unit on an OpenGL graphics card. This dramatically speeds up previewing of effects and titlings, such as multiple 3D objects with materials and texture maps, pan and zooms of oversize images, and multiple upstream filters. Footage can be previewed to screen or to a FireWire video camera or a monitor. Depending on your video card, previews can be generated faster than the final renderings, and there are no delays when adjusting sliders in the Controls window or scrubbing in the Timeline window.

There are more than 40 new effect filters in Boris Red 3GL, bringing the number to more than 110. New filters include Dust and Scratches, DeNoise, Fast Blur, Glow Edges, Match Grain, DeGrain, Light Wrap, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Spiral Blur, and a tool for wire removal.

Boris Red 3GL also incorporates Boris Continuum Complete, which is focused primarily on video and image compositing, image processing, keying, colour and distortion. It also has a large collection of generator-based effects, such as snow, rain, stars, fire and clouds.

Text effects haven't been left out in this upgrade, either, and these come from Graffiti. It's now possible to directly write on the composition window and just start typing with a new track being created in the Timeline. Several formatting functions are now embedded in the Controls window while styles can be applied directly from the Style Palette to the text on screen, without the need for passing through the

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Text window. Funky animated ghost writing can be created with Type On, which sports multiple settings across both words and lines, as well as individual letters or groups of letters.

Boris' approach to its plug-ins is based around a standardised engine across the product line that will work as a standalone key framer or reside within the host program, be it Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro. With all its effects and plug-ins, Boris Red 3GL is functionally very much like a basic version of After Effects with a timeline, composition window and render queue. If registered, it will run as a separate application and render any assembled footage out to a wide range of formats. When used embedded in the host program all the rendering is handled by the host. What's really brilliant is that any number of unregistered copies of Boris Red 3GL can be can be run in an off-line mode to prepare effect sequences.

When we tested it by itself the Boris engine ran smoothly and was easy to use, but when loaded into Final Cut Pro 4 it secretes a single effect link into each of the categories, whichthen works like any other effect. However, we found this method of invoking the Boris engine to be very intermittent in launching the application. Once it does open though, the standard effect viewer loads and you can proceed as normal.

The system specifications needed to make full use of Open GL are steep even on a G4 processor, with the standard-issue 32MB video card just barely squeezing over the minimum needed; G5s are fine with 64MB. However, to see the real effectiveness of Boris Red 3GL, you'll need a graphics card with quadruple the minimum RAM requirement.

If you're familiar with Boris FX or the company's other effects packages, you'll be at home with the user interface on Boris Red 3GL, as it's really a fusion of all the specialist Boris plug-ins in one unit with a handy upgrade path if you want to move from one of the components to Red. The new features in Red are pulled and expanded from these other packages.

With so much built into Boris Red 3GL it can all be somewhat overwhelming and easy to get lost in. Likewise, the two manuals are huge and there are only video tutorials online. Nevertheless, Boris 3GL does deliver the goods in the end, and if a quick and easy application of myriad effects, transitions and generators is what you need, then Red 3GL has all the bases tightly covered.