Tutorial: Creating Animated DVD Menu Backgrounds with the Boris Native Filter Suite

Eye Scream Factory, a provider of royalty-free animations and time-saving design templates for DVD menus, recently released DVD Clips: royalty-free animated backgrounds designed specifically for DVD menus. Each clip is provided as a 20-second QuickTime Movie for use with DVD authoring and video editing applications. In creating DVD Clips, Eye Scream Factory made extensive use of Boris Continuum Complete and Final Effects Complete filters.

In this new tutorial, Eye Scream Factory breaks down how they created their "Snowy Brook" animation using Final Effects Complete's Snow filter and Boris Continuum Complete's Gaussian Blur filter inside Adobe After Effects...

1. Launch After Effects, import the image you’d like to use as a background, and create a new 20 second composition. Download the image used in this tutorial

2. Drag the background image into the composition window and resize it and center it; here, we have reduced the scale to 35% and centered the image.

3. Now, add a slight blur by dragging the BCC Gaussian Blur filter onto the clip from the BCC5 Colors and Blurs category in the Effects Menu. Click on the Effect Controls tab and set the Blur to .3 and the Blur Quality to Gaussian Highest.

4. Next, drag the FEC Snow filter onto the clip from the FEC Particle folder in the Effects Menu. Set the Snow Amount to 15000, the Snow Speed to .2, the Frequency to 1.4, the Flake Size to 5, the Perspective to 0, and turn on the Motion Blur.

5. Finally, add the Composition to the Render Queue and render the result.