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Boris Red 2.5

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Boris Red 2.5 is the flagship product from Boris, a key player in the video-effects software market. It has image-processing filters, a text creation engine, and 2D/3D animation functionality. The software is available for both Mac and Win XP. Its interface is pretty standard, and doesn’t take much time getting used to, unlike the latest Discreet Combustion. It has standard timelines, layers and key frames, making even a Flash guy comfortable with 3D compositing. Nearly all the parameters you plan to use frequently in the software, can be preset for easy availability.

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Another important feature is the availability of Boris Red as a plug-in to a variety third party non-linear editing tools. This saves a lot of time. It still gives all the native features of Boris Red.

The number of filters in the software is amazing, from the basic blurs to particle systems (both 3D and 2D). Boris Red also has built-in basic shapes like cubes, spheres, etc eliminating the need for importing such shapes from other software.

You can place layers in any

orientation in 3D space
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Applying effects to these shapes is as simple as right-clicking on a layer and choosing the desired effect, for example cube. You can then put text, movies and still images on each face of the cube. Set the initial and the final state to get the full animation. This animation can then be exported to various formats like QuickTime, AVI and even directly to Flash, giving Web developers the power of 3D effects for enhancing their Web pages. All controls such as rotation and color control are neatly placed in stylish tabs in the control window making them easily accessible. 

Its power can be seen from the ability to place layers anywhere in the 3D space. 3D text and mapping 2D text to 3D shapes are two other major features , which give it an edge over other similar software. The text is in full vector format hence scaling to even 1000% won’t affect the precision of the final output.Titling is also simple to do with a few mouse clicks on ready-made presets. Motion tracking and Image stabilization are two valuable effects in the software. Its rendering is also quite fast. We tested it on a P4 2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM and a GeForce2 graphics card, and it gave decent rendering times. It also exported a fairly complex 10 secs movie at 30 fps, in around 2 mins to a QuickTime movie. 

To learn to use Boris Red, two options are provided. First is the very well written manual, which has precise and to the point content, but is so big that it makes an uneasy companion to the desktop. The second option is the Intelligent Assistant thatgives on the fly access to reference material in a very easy manner. It’s far better than standard Windows help systems.

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Snapshot

Price US$ 1595 ($ 999 for upgrading from previous version)
Key

specs
: Can function as standalone/plug in to 3rd party non-linear editing tools, full vector 3D text, built-in filters
Cons : Some of the functionality is hidden inside the software and takes time to figure out
Pros : Easy to use GUI based on standard concepts
Contact : Boris

Fx.
E-mail : jansons@boris.fx.com

The bottom line: The use of a standard interface also brings in a problem of the simultaneously managing a number of windows forcing the user to work at very high resolutions. The other possible workflow idiosyncrasy is that some of the features are hidden inside. For example, changing a layer name takes a few clicks, which in fact should been a single double-click function.

Overall, Boris Red 2.5 is an excellent 3D compositing software given the new features and functionality. 

Ankit Khare

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