If you take a look at the Boris FX website and the demo video for Boris Continuum Complete (BCC), all you’ll see is a bunch of motion graphics and texture generators. And that’s fine if you are developing advertisements. But for filmmaking, the power of BCC5 isn’t really showcased there. With 180 filters and hundreds of presets, it’s just impossible to show everything that the package can do. When I started to experiment with the plug-ins my expectations were low. As with most other filter libraries I’ve tried, I expected 98% motion graphics and maybe 2% effects useful for narrative filmmaking. But once I dug into the powerful co2llection of filters and tried the amazing presets, I was blown away. And I’ve included a great number of sample images in this article to show you why. Just take a look at this example:
Incredible Effects with BCC5: I wish I’d shot at a different time of year! (Figure 1)
Wrong season? Wrong weather? No problem. These shots would have been almost impossible in real life. Raining: Ever try shooting with the camera pointed up into the rain? The lens gets wet. And when some elements are in sunlight the exposure is impossible.
Hot Day: Never point a video camera directly at the sun – it will burn out the sensor. This shot might have been a camera-killer.
Snowing: Too bright. The exposure is impossible.
Here are a couple of larger images so you can see the detail in the snow and the rain.
Detail of SNOW Effect (Figure 2)
Detail of Rain Effect (Figure 3)
BCC5 is available for After Effects, Avid, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Combustion. I tested the package on After Effects CS3 on a Mac.
As with the Boris FX Final Effects 5 package, the real story isn’t the plug-ins, it’s the presets. With most effects (including native AE effects) you could spend hours tinkering with the controls trying to understand exactly what the filter is doing and how it works. But with BCC5 you click the little “L” button in the effects title panel and you can load presets that will “get you in the ballpark” very quickly. Just the range of effects displayed in this article could have taken weeks to produce without presets. And as you can see, applying two or three effects can virtually transform the footage.
If you take a look at the Boris FX website and the demo video for Boris Continuum Complete (BCC), all you’ll see is a bunch of motion graphics and texture generators. And that’s fine if you are developing advertisements. But for filmmaking, the power of BCC5 isn’t really showcased there. With 180 filters and hundreds of presets, it’s just impossible to show everything that the package can do. When I started to experiment with the plug-ins my expectations were low. As with most other filter libraries I’ve tried, I expected 98% motion graphics and maybe 2% effects useful for narrative filmmaking. But once I dug into the powerful co2llection of filters and tried the amazing presets, I was blown away. And I’ve included a great number of sample images in this article to show you why. Just take a look at this example:
