Boris RED User Story

Tim Rice - WLVT, a PBS Affiliate Promotions Director

As the Promotions Director of WLVT, the PBS affiliate in Bethlehem, PA, Tim Rice doesn't have time to waste when creating the station's programming promos and underwriting credits. With WLVT's three Emmy-nominated productions and an all-new children's programming schedule just starting, more work than ever falls on Tim. That's why he uses Boris RED 3GL.

"The speed is amazing," he says. "I animate a lot of large stills, and create a lot of specialized text treatments, and everything in RED 3GL is instant."

Tim began using RED about a year and a half ago. After taking the Boris classes at Future Media Concepts in Philadelphia, Tim quickly built his expertise. He's now one of the community leaders on the Boris FX forum at the Creative Cow. So you can check out some of his tutorials and benefit from his expertise at www.creativecow.net.

Although most people use Red as a plug-in to their NLEs, Tim finds himself using RED just as often as a standalone application. "I'm not necessarily using Red to treat video as often as I use it for graphic tasks, like moving large stills to create backgrounds, or adding titles to video that's already edited," he says.

"I really love the new Jitter controls in RED 3GL," says Tim. "I've done a series of spots alerting viewers that our kid's lineup is changing, and directing them to our website. A gentle jitter, usually to scale and position, really draws attention to the text. It's kind of subtle, so the text appears to be sitting on a line and dancing, but it also adds a sense of playfulness that's perfect for the subject matter and the audience."

He's also amazed at how quickly he's gotten used to other new tools in RED 3GL. "I can't get over how fast it is to just click the Composite window and start typing without opening the Text window. It's great to have so many of the formatting tools in the Controls window, too." At the same time, Tim's going deeper into some of the features that have been in RED for a while, like animating text along a path. "I've just gotten into it lately, and I'm going crazy with it!" he admits. "I've discovered the great design principle of following background elements with text. With a recent shot of a carnival scene, I made my text come in and out following the architecture of the scene. It looks better than a straight line, and it's incredibly easy and fast to set up."

REDs filters are also a part of Tim's daily routine. "We get a number of spots from PBS that we customize for local use, and I use the Make Alpha Key to pull out the super-black elements," he says. " The filter I use the most is probably Tritone. It's always been very fast, and it only takes a few clicks to get dramatic results. There's nothing that can beat it for customizing animated jumpbacks. Instead of a red flowing silk curtain, it's very easy to shift the tint and still keep whites and blacks where they need to be."

"Since I do so much titling with Red, I use a lot of Light Zoom, another great way to draw the eye to the text. Like Jitter, I use it in subtle ways – I want it to call attention to the text instead of itself."

Because of the amount of work he does with RED, Tim has also grown to appreciate the many productivity enhancements in RED 3GL. "Using my mousewheel to scrub the timeline and scroll through tracks, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and just the overall feeling of speed. There's really so much here that it's almost impossible to pick out just a few specifics."