Light-Painting With BORIS RED

Animating The Strokes

RED is well suited to stroke animation. Because paint is always kept live, strokes can be animated with a few simple keyframes. Animation can be done on an individual stroke level or over the entire paint layer. In my case, I want to animate all strokes simultaneously.

• Switch Timeline selection to the top Paint track.
• Control Window should display global Paint layer parameters.

Note that we have a choice between Sequential and Parallel styles of animation. With Sequential choice, strokes will animate one after another while Parallel will animate all strokes at the same time. I chose Parallel.

With CTI still at the beginning of my effect, I change the interpolation popup button to Linear on the Stroke End parameter.

And I set the initial value for Stroke End to 0. What that means is that in the beginning of my animation the end of the stroke is at the same 0 value as the beginning of the stroke. As time goes on the stroke end will grow to 100% to complete the animation. Press Space bar or Play button in Composite window to convince yourself that this works. That is all there is to it. Simple!

Now that we are done with Paint tool (sigh of relief) let's make paint glow. That can be done with a BCC filter specially designed for this purpose and included in both BCC and RED products. It is called BCC Colorize Glow. But first, feel free to collapse Paint track and lock it with the lock button to avoid accidental modification.

BCC Colorize Glow filter is found under Filter Menu in the Effects Category. As soon as the filter is added to the Timeline, its controls will appear in the Controls window.

As you can tell by the number of available controls, it is a very sophisticated tool capable of producing a wide range of glow effects. Fortunately, we do not need to learn the multitude of its parameters. Instead, we will load one of a dozen bundled presets, called Dr. T Soft Glow. Dr. T, otherwise known as Emile Tobenfeld is the original designer of this filter. His preset gives a soft neon look to our paint strokes.

Now it is time to turn on the background track. I'm going to cheat (as I do in all my tutorials) and use one of the still digital photos from my iPhoto library. You will be using your client's clip from the host NLE where BORIS RED resides as a plug-in.

Hmm, the result is not what I expected. The glow filter is affecting the background as well as paint. How do I fix that? Since Paint is a filter by itself, it is not possible to nest a Glow filter inside Paint filter, as I would normally do had it been a Shape. Well, there are many ways to work around this problem in RED. Here is one: I will nest both filters inside a Spline shape but not draw any new splines. This way I will have full control over compositing of my paint. Here is how you do that:

• Add a new Spline track with a menu Track/NewMedia/Spline Object.
• Nest both Paint and Glow tracks inside the new Spline track (if paint is still locked you have to unlock it now)

• With Spline track selected, switch to Apply tab in Control window
• Change Apply Mode popup to Screen

Now you should see your paint nicely screened over the background video.

Wait! How did it know to change the glow color to match background? No magic here. I went back to the Glow filter and chose a different color gradient preset- Red-Yellow.bcp

You may have to scroll down Control window to get to this part of the controls. As I said, they are pretty deep. Another trick is that I went back to Paint layer Transform tab and scaled and moved the entire paint object (yes you can do that!) Even rotated a few degrees.

Even more tricks: I did not like how the stroke animation cuts at the end. I wanted to hold fully completed strokes for a moment before ending the shot so I added a keyframe toward the end and held Stroke End at 100% .

To do that:

• Move CTI where you want the animation to end
• Change interpolation option for Stroke End parameter to Hold

• A keyframe will automatically pop up in Timeline

• Change Stroke End value to 100%
• Preview to RAM to see your animation (Cmd/Ctr 0)Voila!

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