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Vier kostenlose Filter aus DigiEffects Delirium werden jetzt mit Boris FX 6.1 geliefert!

Um die Unterstützung von After Effects PlugIn's von 3.-Anbietern gleich ab Installation zu zeigen, beinhaltet Boris FX 6.1 vier kostenlose Filter aus dem Filter-PlugIn Delirium von DigiEffects, einem der ersten Entwickler für AE PlugIns.

Die über 40 hochwertigen Effektfilter von Delirium waren bis zur Unterstützung von After Effects PlugIns durch Boris FX in nahezu keinem nonlinearen Schnittsystem verfügbar.

(Aktuelle und zukünftige Besitzer von Delirium oder anderen DigiEffects Filtern wird es freuen, dass auch Boris RED und Graffiti After Effects kompatible PlugIns unterstützen. Für eine komplette Liste der unterstüzten PlugIns klicken Sie bitte hier.)

Um allen Anwendern vollen Vorteil aus den mitgelieferten Deliriumfiltern zu geben, befindet sich auf jeder Boris FX 6.1 - CD eine Dokumentation als PDF-Datei. Hier ein kurzer Überblick über die vier mitgelieferten Filter (in Englisch):

DE Day for Night
One of my strongest impressions from watching Lone Ranger serials as a youngster was the sense that the nighttime scenes were in fact shot in daylight. (Is the Lone Ranger even on anymore? I'm suddenly feeling very, very old.) Although the scene itself looked like it was taking place at night, the colors were much richer than expected. This richness is in fact one of the reasons for the popularity of the shooting technique called Day for Night. (Another is not having to haul around a bunch of lights.)

The first place most of us saw a Day for Night software effect was in the Cinelook package, also from DigiEffects. It definitely worked, but didn't offer very much customizability. DE Day for Night is a different story. In offering more control, it also shows us how the original magic trick was done: a combination of gradients and composite modes.

Also known as apply modes or transfer modes, composite modes use luminance to offer very powerful controls over transparency between layers. Different modes place more weight on darker or lighter pixels in one or both of the layers. Although they're critical for providing the kind of controls that compositors crave, compositing modes are, admittedly, the kind of thing that can give editors headaches. They're also based on math, which gives many of us headaches, regardless.

By default, DE Day for Night uses a black-to-white gradient with a composite mode of Multiply. The outcome is easy to see -- you can see the gradient by clicking the Preview Effect box. The math itself is also pretty easy: the luminance values of any two pixels on top of each other is multiplied together. Since the maximum brightness level would normally be 256, and anything over that would be clipped to black, the total is divided by the total luminance range (which in this case is 256) in order to get a useful number.

So for two pixels whose luminance value is at the middle of the range (128), their values would be multiplied together (128 times 128 equals 16384), then divided by 256 (the luminance range from full black to full white), for a total of 64 -- a luminance value one quarter of the way up the scale from black. You can see the outcome in the image above: the dark areas of the gradient darken the image below

The beauty of this method is that it renders very fast -- straight multiplication and division are tasks that computers are very well suited to. It's also very flexible, as you can see from the controls. DE Day for Night actually offers an integrated gradient builder, which combined with compositing modes, can very quickly create a wide range of effects. It's up to you whether you want them to look realistic or not -- combining compositing modes with gradients are in fact an outstanding way to create otherworldly scenes.

DE Electrical Arcs
Even though it may not appear to be, DE Electrical Arcs is another particle system. It creates a "Jacob's ladder" effect by default, familiar from a childhood watching Frankenstein movies when I wasn't watching the Lone Ranger: the buzzing, climbing electricity passing between two elements, one of the most compelling parts of any mad scientist's lab.

This is a video of my colleague Dirk de Jong, something of a mad scientist himself.

press play to start movie

This is an especially good filter to play some more with composite modes. In addition to the default of Blend, Add and Screen can create pleasant results which can vary, depending on your underlying footage. You can also have a different composite mode for the arc and its glow, whose only options are in fact Screen and Add. You'll find those at the bottom of the filter's controls.

Finally, it's easy to create traditional lightening bolts simply by orienting the two points for the arc vertically, and FX 6.1ucing the number of arcs to two or three.

DE FireWorks
Because DE FireWorks is based on real-world physics, it's not the speediest rendering kid on the block, but the results are entirely persuasive. There really is an astonishing amount of control in this filter.

As you start to experiment with building your fireworks effects, the single most important checkbox to note is "Integrate over Time." (You'll also find this checkbox in DE Bubbles.) Delirium assumes that you don't want to animate any of its parameters -- and frankly, because there are so many, you may not need to. If you do, this is the box you need to check to enable it. You should know that this will increase rendering time, which is why the default for this box is off.

Because there are so many parameters, DE Fireworks can look intimidating, but I'll point you to two in particular. As you might expect, they're in the system section (remember, this is where many of each filter's most important controls are located), in this case, the Launch System: Launch Probability and Launch Burst. The first of these determines how likely it is that fireworks will be launched, and the latter, how many of them will be launched during each launch event.

So if you know that you want a certain number of fireworks to explode on a specific frame, set the quantity in Launch Burst, and keyframe Launch Probability to 100. Unless you want a relentless stream of fireworks from there, you'll want to animate the Launch probability down from there, after, of course, having selected "Integrate over Time."

One of the tricks compositors use all the time is multiple instances of a filter. You can easily imagine why DE Fireworks is especially well suited to this: it's quite common to see more than one kind of explosion, at different heights and times, within the same scene.

Fireworks is a very specialized effect, but when it's what you need, this filter is the absolute best.

DE Fog Factory
What makes this filter so realistic is that it adds multiple layers of fog -- you have control over the distance between the layers, the detail in each of them, and the speed at which the layers move. Just because it offers a couple of dozen parameters to adjust, however, doesn't mean you need to adjust any of them: this is another auto-animated filter.

Let's Get Delirious
That's a speedy overview of what these five free, fully functioning filters from DigiEffects Delirium have to offer. Take a closer look at the documentation for these filters on the Boris FX 6.1 installation CD, and start playing with them. They're a good introduction to the entire Delirium package, as well as an introduction to what you can achieve by adding third-party After Effects filters to your nonlinear editing system with Boris FX 6.1.

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