Boris Continuum Complete 10 for AVX is the tool of choice for all your effects needs inside of Media Composer

Once again our good friend Kevin P McAuliffe delivers another excellent product review, loaded with insight into all the new features and perfomance of Boris Continuum Complete 10 AVX for Avid editors. BCC is more then an FX package it includes tools for 3D animated titles & graphics, keying, lighting & particle effects as well as useful tools to correct for distortions and artifacts. With BCC10 they have integrated the mocha engine for dramatic perfomance increases in a handful of effects, and you know that list will keep growing over time. For serious Avid editors BCC 10 is a must have plug-in. It's expensive but worth every penny!

ProVideo Coalition by Kevin P. McAuliffe

This was an interesting review to sit down and write. I think a common problem for many plug-in companies is that they start to run out of steam, once you hit version 7 or 8 of an effects package. Let’s be honest, there are only so many different effects that you can add to a package that an editor would actually use, and then what do you end up having? A plug-in bundle that as the versions start mounting, becomes stale, and way too costly for what you end up getting. And worse, it’s not even worth the upgrade price. Boris FX was a company that could have very easily fallen into this trap, but they did something smart a few years ago. As much as the company is called Boris “FX”, with the “FX” being what most people associate them with, they stopped being about “just the FX”.

I did a lot of research for this article about the update history of BCC to pinpoint where I thing this shift in thinking started to happen and it looks to me like it happened around BCC7. BCC 6 was a huge release for Boris FX, as it brought a huge component/selling feature to the package, and that is the 3D Objects category which included Extruded EPS, Extruded Spline, Layer Deformer, Type On Text, and most importantly, Extruded Text. Outside of Marquee, this is really the first time Media Composer editors had access to true 3D elements in their Media Composer timelines. Now, it was no longer necessary to export your clips to After Effects, to use on of the many 3D plug-ins available to compositors. Everything the editor needed could all be done with one package. I think this release was the fork in the road to either go left, and stick to the “status quo” for large effects bundles, or go right, and really redefine what a plug-in package should be. Don’t get me wrong. At this point BCC was an effects package that had some plug-ins designed to fix very specific problems (Chromakey/Smooth Tone/DV FIxer/Motion Key), and also had a ton of effects (glints, glows, etc). BCC 8 started to introduce some essential tools for editors, that really helped address workflow areas that were very time consuming to do, without the help of third party effects. BCC 8 introduced Beat Reactor, Video Scope and Flicker Fixer to name a few. Almost half of the new effects were “tools” as opposed to “effects”. BCC 9 included the FX Browser, Chromakey Studio, Magic Sharp, Lens Correction and some more enhancements to Pan & Zoom (another “tool” at your disposal”. Again, almost half the new features are tools, and not “effects”. So, where does that put us with BCC 10. Well, let’s see.

WHAT’S NEW

With the way Boris FX is taking BCC, it’s not surprising that the first three new filters in BCC 10 are all tools that every editor will find value in. read more...