Pro Editing @ Home

by Kevin P McAuliffe

Anyone who reads my articles knows that I like plug-ins. Let me rephrase that. I LOVE plug-ins, as they make my day to day editing life so much easier. One of the premiere plug-in designers in the business today is BorisFX, and I had a chance to ask their president Boris Yamnitsky some questions about their current products, and what we can expect from this plug-in giant in 2009.

 

PE@H: Can you give me a bit of history of BorisFX, and why you decided to create the company?

BY: I started BorisFX (or rather Artel Software, it became Boris FX a few years later) in 1995 after spending a couple of years with the Media 100 engineering team working on the first Media 100 FX Option. The big idea was to create DVE style transitions for Adobe Premiere on the Mac and for Media 100. Both were badly lacking any DVE capability comparable in quality with more expensive hardware solutions from Sony, Grass Valley or Pinnacle. The first product, called Boris FX, was introduced at Mac World Boston in 1995 where it won Best of Show from DV magazine. The Boris FX company was launched.

PE@H: What does BorisFX offer editors and motion graphic designers that other plug-in companies don't? 

BY: Although the first Boris FX plugin started out as a software-based DVE, the product line quickly expanded to include chroma keying, text, compositing, vector graphics, spline masking, paint, motion tracking, optical flow, 3D extrusion, etc. Most plug-in packages remain the creation of a single person and lack the breadth of technological base. Our products, leverage from the work of a larger engineering team, the best and the brightest engineering minds in the industry (yes, being in Boston, near MIT is a plus).

Here is an example: the UpRez filter from BCC 5 has a mode called Magic Sharp. The quality of this algorithm is unmatched by any competing product when compared side by side. It was a result of very extensive R&D. Smooth Tone and DV Fixer in BCC 6 resume this quest for top-notch image processing.

 

Magic Sharp

 

PE@H: What do you think has been BorisFX's biggest achievement in special effects?

BY: Our products are always on the forefront of technology in editing, compositing and post-production. The early success with DVEs taught me to seek out the missing pieces of the workflow puzzle and quickly provide state-of-the-art solutions, especially where the technology is most challenging. We introduced vector text to compositing and editing in the nineties when it was still a domain of specialized DTP applications such as Illustrator, we brought high quality Motion Tracking to desktop apps when it was only available on six figure online suites, and now with BCC 6 we made realistic 3D text available in compositing apps without a need to learn complex 3D products. In general, our filters always provided a way to save time, to shorten the learning curve and to avoid round trips from your main system to a specialized application to get the job done. I see this as our mission in this market.

Example: Optical Stabilizer effect, made possible by our Optical Flow technology. The filter does a perfect job of steadying a shaky image including camera tilts where similar plug-ins fail. Again many years of R&D are paying off now.

PE@H: I know that your plug-ins and programs are like your children, and you love them all, but if you had to pick one plug-in in any package that you are most proud of, which one would it be?

BY: That’s a very hard question to answer. I’m very fond of our text-based products. Perhaps the most interesting is the Boris Calligraphy package that is included with every install of Final Cut Pro since version 2. The most commonly used text generators are called Title 3D and Title Crawl. Interestingly, the 3D text objects in BCC 6 are based on the same idea: custom UI for typing in text and native controls for styles and animation. Every Final Cut user who is familiar with Title 3D will find himself or herself at home with 3D Objects.

Boris Calligraphy within Final Cut Pro

 

PE@H: A while back BorisFX decided to release BORIS Continuum Units, which are select plug-ins from BCC packaged as a smaller package.  With the complete overhaul to the plug-ins with BCC6 (OpenGL/Multiprocessor support), will we be seeing more of these "Units", and will there be updates to the current ones?

BY: The units were created in response to our customers need for select features of Continuum. We pick the most popular filters or groups of related filters and release them as individual units. I can see this trend to continue into the future. Since most BCC filters have been improved in version 6, it makes sense to update the previously released units. But these of course will be free updates. We only charge upgrade price for brand new filters. I do not have a timeframe for these updates yet.

PE@H: One thing that blew me away was the integration of true 3D inside BCC6 from within the Effects Pallette.  There was no need to go to a third party application to extrude your text (or spline).  How long has this been in the works for, and how do you see it changing how developers look at After Effects plug-ins?

BY: The idea to include a real 3D text plug in has been around for a long time. In fact the early Boris AE product included an extruded text plug-in but it was software-based and quite slow. Our recent Open GL research and development opened a way for true 3D objects to render fast. Hence the first installment of 3D Objects in BCC 6. And this is just a beginning.

PE@H: In my opinion, Extruded Spline is a huge step in the right direction towards "real" 3D in After Effects.  Where do you see Boris' 3D plug-in development going from here?

BY: We have a way to extrude EPS, import 3D models, create 3D particles, etc. There is a lot to look forward to in the future releases of BCC. And seeing how popular BCC has become makes me spare no effort or resources on this product.

PE@H: When I look at BCC6, I see the future of plug-in design with more focus on the plug-ins integration with After Effects (with Extruded Text & Spline's integration with AE's Camera and Lighting system).  What do you see when you look at BCC6?

BY: I see an opportunity for an even tighter integration following the same path of using native AE camera, light and masking system. However, in BCC 6 we also explored other integration options such as saving and restoring animated effects based on the very rich AE keyframing model. A huge time saver for users since BCC 6 comes with hundreds of “pre-animated” presets. Boris FX pioneered the concept of presets in our earlier products. Today it is a widely accepted feature of any plug-in package. With BCC 6 we took it to the next level. Now you can save animations in AE and restore them in another project, share them with your colleagues, even across applications such as After Effects and Avid. In fact BCC 6 is the only plug-in set on the market today that is capable of sharing animated presets. Another great integration feature, although not as novel as animated presets, is saving and restoring motion tracker data. In the past, a domain of standalone applications, now it became part of your plug-in workflow. Save tracking data from one plugin and re-use in another BCC plug-in or even After Effects itself. Our integrations story continues.

PE@H: What do you say to people who think that $995 is pricey for a plug-in package?

BY: I must agree with them. Affordability has always been a priority for Boris FX pricing structure. The real question - is it worth the price? How much time can you save by using BCC filters? How does this price compare with the price of alternative solutions? BCC alone can replace several standalone applications and many plug-in sets! Considering that it is about 200 filters the average cost per filter is $5 when you buy the full set. That’s cheap.

And to make this highly desirable filter set even more affordable we priced the individual units in the $99 to $299 range. That is way below many competing solutions.

BCC Units

 

PE@H: BCC6 is something I expected to be shown at NAB this year, and it was sprung on us (with great surprise) almost out of nowhere.  Can you give us a sneak peek of what else we might see from BorisFX in 2009?

BY: We try release a major update for our products every 18 to 24 months. At this time we are still finishing BCC 6 for FXPlug and AVX so that at NAB we can have the full range of host platforms to show. At the same time the work is underway on other Boris products. I can’t really comment beyond that but I invite our customers to join our beta programs to lean first hand about our development process and new features. To learn more about our beta programs feel free to email directly to me at boris@borisfx.com

 

PE@H: I have to throw this last question in, as I have been wanting to ask you this for a while, and that is will Mac users ever get to enjoy Blue on OS X?

BY: Absolutely. Open GL support has greatly improved on the Mac platform with the Leopard OS. Now we are able to exercise our proprietary shader routines on the Mac as well as on Windows. The living proof of that is the 3D Objects in BCC 6. So Blue on the Mac is well within reach.

I want to thank Boris for taking the time to talk to us. If you are a Final Cut Pro/Motion user, you really should check out the free public beta of BCC6 by clicking here! You can check out my review of BCC6 for AE by clicking here! For more information about BorisFX and their product line, you can check them out at www.borisfx.com .