Organic Transitions: Beyond Burnt Film

Boris FX has its roots in transitions and DVE. Indeed Boris FX was the first to introduce a true third dimension to the world of nonlinear editing, and continues to expand the possibilities of 3D compositing for video editors.

We recently took a look at how to use some of the new filters in Boris FX to create uniquely artistic visual effects for video, such as charcoal and watercolor. This time up, let's combine the two, using some of the new filters in Boris FX 6.1 to create organic wipe transitions.

Let's begin with Burnt Film, one of the new Distortion filters in Boris FX. As always, Boris RED users can of course take advantage of these tips, since RED contains everything that's in Boris FX, and much more. Boris CONTINUUM COMPLETE and CONTINUUM COMPLETE AVX users can also play along. Although the screenshots here apply to FX and RED, the parameters themselves are the same in Continuum

I showed some of the fun you can have with Burnt Film in an earlier tutorial, which combined it with the Boris FX Fire filter, for the effect of one video layer being consumed by fire to reveal another.

This time, we'll go a little deeper into the Burnt Film filter itself.

Start by creating an effect in your NLE timeline of the appropriate length for a transition, a second or two, and apply and launch Boris FX. Once the Boris FX windows are open inside your NLE, click the red button in the Boris Controls window, which exposes and selects the Face track.

With the Face track selected, go to the filters menu: Filters> Distortion> Burnt Film. The goal is to have the Burnt Film filter applied directly to the Face track, as seen below.

This applies the filter upstream (before the transformations), which will come into play as we customize this effect.

At its most simple, this filter is very simple indeed. It dissolves your layer in a way that simulates celluloid film getting too close to a hot projector bulb. Animate the Burn Amount from zero to one, and you're done. I tend to make my interpolation Linear, with Accelerate a strong second choice, but there's no reason for you not to choose whatever amuses you.

Burnt Film works by animating along the luma values of a built-in gradient, from light to dark, and adding some customizable colors to the edges. So I tend to start customizing this effect by playing with the gradient itself, adjusting its position and scale. You can animate these values if you want, which can add a tasty dynamic element to the transition.

As I start tweaking parameters, I tend not to animate the position and scale values. So I click the "key" icon in the Controls window, so that any of the changes that I make are static, maintaining the values through the duration of the effect.

Most of the values that I set when building these kinds of effects are in fact static. I let the motion come from the wipe itself.

I also tend to park the CTI in the middle of the timeline, so that I can get a good idea of what my changes really look like. If you'd like to park your CTI in the middle of the effect, even though you're working on a selected keyframe elsewhere in your animation, be sure to turn off "Snap CTI to Keyframe" in the Track menu.

Unless I'm actually applying fire to the Burnt Film filter, I rarely stick with the default colors. They do indeed make sense if you want your video to look like it's being burned up, but may not lend themselves to the organic feel that's our goal here. I tend to use the eyedroppers next to the color chips to sample colors from the image itself.

As always, if you're going to be changing a handful of values that you don't want to animate, you can press the "key" icon on the controls window, so that any parameters you adjust will maintain those values throughout your effect. Again, that's what I've done here.

I also sometimes turn one or two of the colors off altogether by setting their amounts to zero. Depending on the nature of the gradient you've tweaked, you might find that values of zero introduce aliasing, or stair-stepping, along the edges. This is easily remedied by adding a very small Char Amount. Settings as low as .01 might be enough.

Alternatively, you can head to the other extreme and make the colors wild, animate them, and make them really wide. In fact, you don't have to animate the Burn Amount at all, but animate everything else for some lava lamp effects. That's getting away from the idea of an organic gradient transition, but far be it from me to suggest restraint or good taste.

Before we get to more extreme settings, though, I'd like to show you a couple of options making this kind of wipe really pop. My favorite is the Edge Lighting filter, another new one added in Boris FX 6. Like Burnt Film, we're going to apply this filter upstream, that is, to the Face track.

I'm not sure that we don't need to change the defaults of this filter, because there are a few settings I almost always change. The first of these is the direction of the light. I set it to -135, giving the illusion, such as it is, that the light source is generally coming from above. You can animate this if you want to, but I usually don't. Again, I'm the last guy you should listen to regarding good taste, but I associate light from below with the kind of cheesy horror movies that wind up on Dialing for Dollars or something.

This is already a remarkable improvement, adding a very nice sense of dimension to the effect. The great thing is that it has only a negligible effect on render times, as you'll see when you preview to RAM what you have so far.

I enjoy tweaking the highlights of Edge Lighting, which is, naturally enough, on the Highlights tab. Intensity adjusts what the name suggests, and Post Blur has the effect of both widening and softening the amount of the highlight. Think of it as a "Puffiness" control for this semi-embossed effect.

Depending on what kind of footage you have, you may find that blob of white color along the edges to be less than desirable. Casting a glance down to the Apply Mode pop-up, you'll find that this is precisely the case by default - the color white, piled right on top of your video. Other apply modes offer much more organic ways to have the highlights combine with your footage, but the specifics will vary depending on the footage you're using.

My first stop is always Overlay, which works especially when the footage tends toward lighter, rather than darker. If your footage is darker, you might start with Multiply, but this pop-up makes it very easy to experiment. Modes like Differencex4 and Subtract are good if you want a more extreme look, but what you see below uses Overlay, a perhaps uncharacteristically subtle effect for me.

To finish off this section of the effect, select the topmost level of your video track, also known as the Shape Track. Go to the Shadow tab, and turn on the drop shadow. I find that drop shadows look very nice with gradient wipe effects, and tend to make them a bit softer than the default.

This, by the way, is where having applied the filters upstream comes into play. You can drag the filters up to the Shape level and see the difference. With Edge Lighting downstream, that is, applied after the shadow, it bases the edge on the shadow, rather than the edge of the layer. Moving Burnt Film downstream (to the Shape track, which applies it after the shadow) makes the shadow disappear altogether. To be precise, it's still there, but now being cast to the lower right of the entire frame. Again, our goal was to create a new outline for the layer using Burnt Film, and calculate the shadow LATER. That's why we've applied both filters upstream: we want their results calculated first, and have the output serve as the basis for the shadow.

We've done a nice bit of work on the first tab of the Burnt Film filter, but we can go much further still by stepping onto the Map tab.

First, turn on Use Map Track, which will default to V1, the same footage you're using. Now use the Map Function pop-up to select Luma Gradient. As the name suggests, it uses the luma values of the selected layer to create a wipe, keying out light pixels first.

Depending on the footage, that can look mighty cool on its own. The image above shows my effect halfway through: because the sky was (not surprisingly) the lightest part of the scene, that's what dissolved away first. A rendered copy is below.

You'll find the Map track in the timeline by twirling down the Burnt Film filter track using its disclosure triangle.

You can also use that to select any layer at all. I get a kick out of using the luma from the incoming layer (V2 will likely be your choice) to lend a feeling that the lower layer is eating away the top one.

Hey, eating is definitely an organic function.

What I like about using Burnt Film this way is that it's massively flexible. There are other gradient wipe tools out there, but most of them require the gradient to include the full range of luminance, from zero to 255, or else they don't key correctly. To put it another way, they require an actual gradient. The Burnt Film filter will take whatever luma values you throw at it, and animate along them from lightest to darkest. This really does add much more flexibility.

That said, things get much more interesting when you use actual gradients. There are a number of possibilities here. One of the most popular, and with good reason, are the gradients that are part of the Pixelan Video SpiceRack family, Video SpiceRack PRO and OrganicFX. http://www.pixelan.com These gorgeous gradients are optimized to work as elegant transitions for video and film, and indeed, I assure that you've seen them more times than you can count. Simply use the Media pop-up to select your favorite Spice as a still image file and you're good to go.

Another possibility is to use the Media pop-up in Boris to select the Gradient media that FX generates. That's good enough if all you need is a straight linear or radial wipe, but not terribly organic. The place we start to have even more fun with this is yet another new filter introduced in FX 6.1, Noise Map.

First, select the Map Track in the timeline. Then choose Filters> Noise> Noise Map.

If you've ever applied this filter before, you've noticed that it doesn't use the video of the track you've applied it to. Instead, it uses that as the foundation for generating its own media, which in this case is - hooray! -- a gradient.

You'll immediately see the output of the Noise Map in your Composite window, but you can also look at the gradient itself by clicking the Preview monitor for the Map Layer.

Preview the effect to RAM with Noise Map in its default state to get an idea of what's going on. (You'll immediately notice that, unlike Edge Lighting, Noise Map is quite render intensive.) The short version is that it's a gentle, organic gradient, animating gradually downward. All of this is, of course, subject to any changes you make.

There are several especially fruitful avenues to pursue here as you experiment. Your experiments will go much more quickly if you turn off Edge Lighting for now, which you can do by clicking on the "eye" to toggle the track's visibility.

You may even find that at more extreme settings of the Noise Map that Edge Lighting adds more detail than you need, and decide to leave it off altogether.

Flow Direction is a good place to begin tweaking.

I generally prefer these gradient wipes to animate in an upward direction, but that wholly varies according to the footage you have. If you have any motion at all in the video, you'll get excellent results by animating the flow in the same direction as the action.

Next is scale. It's likely the case that the gradient may be too finely resolved to be useful to you, so make it bigger. I usually start with a scale around 150, and work from there.

The parameter I enjoy most is Turbulence. Experiment with this to see what you find, but I find that a value around 5 or 6 makes the video look as if it's being consumed by rust. Or maybe Ebola or some other kind of rotting, but still altogether organic, function.

For the image below, I have Edge Lighting turned back on.

Last but not least, there are a total of three different kinds of gradients that you can create with Noise Map: Smooth , Bubbly and Stringy. The illustration above shows Smooth noise. The first image below is Bubbly noise, and the second is Stringy. All parameters in the three images are identical, and I'm sampling the same point in time. Only the Noise Type is different.

Most of the parameter values that I've set haven't been animated. The motion has come from the luma gradient animation of the Burnt Film filter, and the direction of the Noise Map. If you want even less motion, you can set the Flow Speed and Morph Rate of the Noise Map to zero. Likewise, there's nothing at all preventing you from animating every one of the parameters that I've touched on so far.

As is usually the case with these tutorials, I've just begun to show you what's possible. I haven't even finished showing you all the possibilities in the Burnt Film filter alone, which allows you to use the alpha channel of an imported still image (say, a logo) to serve as the basis for the wipe. RED users can also use text on the Map Track in the same way, and of course, all of it can be animated.

Combining filters to create transitions is exceptionally easy in Boris FX, and offers a nearly limitless range of possibilities to create truly unique and versatile looks. When you come up with a combination that looks even remotely appealing to you, save it. You can always come back to it later for further refinement. And with the effects this easy to create and customize, I know you will.

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