Product Review: Page (1) of 1 - 09/24/06

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Boris Blue Real time 3D compositing By Stephen Schleicher

Nothing ruins an edit session more than a client asking for an effect that requires you to waste time rendering a preview to be approved or rejected.  With Boris Blue, you can quickly create 3D elements, animate in real time, and render almost as fast.

What makes Boris Blue rock in real time is the ability to push the rendering to the GPU.  Currently, Boris Blue only supports graphics cards from NVIDIA (GeForce 6800, 7800, and 7900 cards, and the Quadro FX 1500, 3450, 3500, 4000, and 4500-based cards).  Boris was kind enough to send a HP dual Xeon 3.2GHz beast with 1GB of RAM and a Quadro FX Nvidia card with 256MB of onboard RAM for my testing of the system.  Boris Blue is a stand alone application for Windows XP, and there is no direct connection to NLE applications like Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or the Avid line.  It will import and export AVI and QuickTime movies (among others), so users will be able to export content from their non-linear editor to Boris Blue for manipulation.

Users not familiar with the Boris interface will need to spend some time getting used to how Boris Blue deals with elements in the timeline.  However, even those with a basic understanding of compositing systems will have most of the features figured out in a couple of hours.

As a 3D compositing application, Boris Blue does its job very well.  Blue allows you to create simple primitive shapes, or import 3D objects in the .obj format.  With the objects loaded, you can then deform, warp, surface and animate them quickly. 

3D objects can be loaded complete or in the 3D Container which allows you to animate each part individually.  In one of the sample projects included in the review, a 3D goldfish is loaded into a 3D Container.  Warp deformers are then applied to each fin and tail section of the fish to create a swimming motion.  Traditional animation properties like scale, position, rotation, and so on are there, so moving objects in true 3D space can be achieved with relative ease.

The one feature I like most about Boris Blue is the ability to import custom logos created in Adobe Illustrator and extrude them quickly into 3D objects.  From there you can use the pen tool to further refine the bevels and edges of the text with custom edges.  I?ve been stuck for ages with other applications that allow something similar using third-party plug-ins, but these slow my system down to a crawl, so being able to create 3D text, complete with surfacing, deformers and more in real time is a huge plus.  Like After Effects, Boris Blue makes animating text a breeze with Type On Containers.

The other feature I like is the particle engine.  You can have particles follow a motion path or spline created with the Pen Tool, or have particle emit from said path, or object in the scene.  Particles can be anything from a simple shape to a complex 3D object with thousands of polygons.  This allows the user to create realistic smoke and fire effects that appear to rival the abilities of both Wondertouch?s ParticleIllusion and Trapcode?s Particular.

In this release, there aren?t a lot of effect filters (called Image Processors) that can be applied to a track, and those that are included, like the chromakey filter, are not as good as those found in other compositing applications.   Still, spending a bit of time tweaking will yield acceptable results, and best of all, it is in real time.  Is a lack of filters an acceptable tradeoff for real time interaction?  That is up to you to decide and will depend on the demands of your job.

Boris Blue does allow you to install third-party plug-ins, but in order to use them in near real time, they will need to be applied to a texture map track to use them in real time.  Also, any third-party plug-ins that are not optimized for OpenGL will be pushed off to the CPU and here is where you might see the system slow down or hiccup a time or two.

Even with these drawbacks, Boris Blue seems to be a solution that will impress your client when you are able to generate the graphics they need without wasting time waiting for a system to render.

The render engine isn?t photorealistic, but this isn?t a 3D package for that type of work.  Instead Boris Blue is geared toward the motion graphic artist who needs to create visual elements in a short amount of time.  With this in mind, Boris Blue does an excellent job.

Boris Blue is available for $995 and receives a Good Buy Recommendation.

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