Light-Painting With BORIS RED

Did you know that your NLE has a powerful paint system capable of creating colored glowing light strokes? But only if you run BORIS RED or Avid FX as a plug-in. Let me show you how to "draw with light" over any background video.

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Getting Ready To Paint

Apply BORIS RED filter over a clip in the NLE of your choice. A video clip will be showing in BORIS RED Composite window. I suggest hiding it with the eyeball icon. For the purpose of this tutorial, it will be easier to draw over black background and composite paint as the last step. If a checkerboard is visible in the Composite window turn it off with the popup button.

Paint is best done with a tablet input device. Although some painting can still be accomplished with a mouse or even a track pad, a tablet will let us utilize BORIS RED to its fullest potential. In a moment you'll see why. I will be using a (borrowed) Wacom Intous 3 tablet, but really, any tablet will do, even a very small, inexpensive model. In addition to location and (mouse) clicks, a tablet is capable of recording other data (or channels) such as pressure, tilt, velocity, etc.

Drawing Your First Stroke

To test waters pick a brush tool from the Tool Palette (to open the Palette use Ctrl. (Cmd.) + 6 shortcut) and draw across the black screen.

TIP: Make sure the background track in timeline is deselected. Otherwise a new paint track will be nested inside the selected track.

Notice that the Timelline window now has a new Paint track above all other tracks and a new Color Stroke track is nested within the Paint track.

Now turn your attention to the Composite window. There we find the parameters and options pertaining to paint strokes. Since we are going to use a tablet to draw, let us change the "modulation" options to utilize the special tablet features. As I mentioned, the tablet allows us to vary some of the paint properties such as brush size and opacity over the length of the stroke as we draw.

I'm setting Opacity and Size modulation to Pressure. As soon as the modulation is changed from None, new parameter sliders become available for setting the range of modulation.

My strategy is to increase both opacity and size of the stroke as I press harder on the stylus to create a natural-looking paint stroke. To achieve that, I set Alt. Opacity and Size parameters to a lower value.

Now delete the first trial stroke and draw a fresh one changing pressure on the stylus as you draw.

TIP: If your stroke is showing individual paint dabs with gaps in-between, reduce the Dab Spacing parameter to make the paint smooth.

While your stroke is selected in the Timeline you can still change the Alternative values on that stroke. BORIS RED paint remains "live" at all times with any parameter fully adjustable. Adjusted parameter values will be applied as a starting point for the next stroke. Once we are happy with the overall look of a stroke, we can go on painting.

If you are poor draftsman (such as myself) there is still hope! Not only the brush properties are always live, but even position and shape of the stroke. Let us switch to Transform tab in the Control window.

There you'll find controls for XY position, scale and rotation of a stroke currently selected in the Timeline.

TIP: To check the correct stroke selection, toggle the eyeball button on/off to see which stroke will react to it.

To move strokes in XY, select the numeric field of the corresponding control and use Up/Down keys on the keyboard to nudge your stroke where you want it to be. Scale and Rotate can be useful too if you can't draw at all...

So far so good. I got my buttons painted and ready to complete the drawing.

Here is my attempt to draw a rectangle. Not very pretty.

BORIS RED comes to the rescue. Every paint stroke starts as a raster object where the entire path is recorded as a sequence of sample points, which in turn drive the paint dab generation. It would be too tedious to edit all these sample points even if there was a way to do this in the UI. But it is not necessary. Paint can be raster but it can be "vector" which means that the path can be transformed with very few points very quickly. To change my ugly raster stroke to vector I press the Spline Path checkbox at the top of the Control Window.

Now, as soon as I switch to the Pen Tool, the stroke acquired the familiar Bezier control points in the Composite window and I'm free to fix my rectangle to make it look right.

TIP: When converting free hand drawing to splines you will end up with more control points than necessary. Simply select unneeded points with the mouse or pen and hit the Delete key.

Now I got a picture resembling what I had envisioned from the start.

If it's still not perfect, blame the artist, not his brush. My next step is to animate paint strokes in time.

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