Boris Continuum Complete 7 AE

Layers by Rod Harlan

MORE THAN 200 FILTERS FOR AFTER EFFECTS

Boris Continuum Complete 7 AE (BCC) for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro brings more than 200 filters to Macintosh and Windows versions of Adobe’s CS5, CS4, and CS3 suites. This latest version features 11 new filters, including an audio-driven keyframe generator, a new OpenGL particle engine, a 3-way color grade filter (with built-in keying and masking tools), a new video noise reduction tool, a spline-based warp filter, and still and video morph technology. More importantly, each BCC filter has been re-engineered for 64-bit operating systems and OpenGL acceleration.

While many reviews of software plug-ins oftentimes focus on listing a bunch of the effects found in the package (which are all found on the manufacturer’s website anyway), I want to focus on the underlying technology improvements found in version 7 of BCC. Graphic software manufacturers are moving away from coding their applications to run on the CPU (central processing unit) in favor of having them run on the GPU (graphics processing unit) of your video card. OpenGL is an industry standard for defining 2D and 3D images and it works well on all graphics cards from both NVIDIA and ATI. In particular, OpenGL excels in rendering a large number of polygons and supports 3D cameras, lights, textures, and bump features. So it’s best suited for 3D extrusions as well as composites and geometric image distortions like those found in 3D text, lens flares, and particle systems.
These are the exact types of filters and effects found in BCC 7. In fact, each BCC effect found in version 7 has been re-engineered for the new and faster 64-bit operating systems and includes optimization for OpenGL acceleration. It is this new underlying technology acceleration that I believe is the biggest selling point for BCC 7 for both new and existing users. The results are noticeable and very much appreciated by anyone using effects as part of their everyday workflow. read more...