Working with BORIS RED 4

Project Window with Integrated Render Queue

The tabbed project window has a tab labeled List, which displays in a list information pertaining to each particular media element or composite. The list is accompanied by a small thumbnail which can be enabled or disabled by clicking the eyeball at the bottom of the window. Next to that is a tab which is labeled Frame, which is simply a single frame thumbnail of the items that are also in list. the Frame tab does not display any of the list information. The last tab, which is titled Imported Media is a repository for media elements that are being used in the current project. The difference between the list/frame tabs and the imported media tab is that the imported media tab does not display any comp information and only shows imported media elements.

Another one of the tabs in the project window is the render queue. Comps are placed into the render queue for export to any of codecs that are available on the system. Attributes for comps that are in the render queue, such as the destination folder, codec type, field settings etc are all controlled from within this window by a series of pop-up menu items. When a comp has been rendered to disk, a checkbox appears beside the comps name - simply unchecking this box resubmits this comp to the queue for rendering.

Sticky and Magnetic Windows

A new feature in the RED 4 user interface is that all of the main windows in the UI have the capability of being both sticky and magnetic. We'll disable the sticky windows for a moment in the preferences palette by opening the preferences and unchecking this option and enable the magnetic windows option. In this state, magnetic windows jump to butt up next to each other when they are moved within a few pixels of an adjoining window - they also slide along the window to which they are magnetically attracted to.

Now lets reset the position of all of the open UI windows by using the snap to home command and we'll go back to the preferences pane and switch from magnetic windows to sticky windows. Now you can see that as I change the size of one window, the other windows change size too. We'll leave both of these options enabled for the time being.

Options Palette

Another change in the user interface of RED is the addition of the Options palette. Many of the settings that users will change frequently, such as default keyframe behavior grids/guides etc, have been moved from the modal preferences window into the non-modal options palette. This speeds workflow by enabling the user to make changes on the fly without having to open or close the preferences window to see the change.

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