A Canadian affiliate of ESPN, RDS was the first all-French sports network in the world when it was founded, and is still the only one in North America. ""We cover pretty much everything in the world of sports: NHL, NBA, Major League Baseball, tennis, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, Indy and NASCAR racing -- you name it. Everything we do uses RED."
"Sometimes, it's something simple. We needed a quick graphic for one of our Olympic feeds, so I used RED's spline primitives to make a ring, extrude it, then made copies to create intersecting rings. It was really only a few clicks inside my NLE, without having to go outside to a 3D program, or wait for somebody else to do it for me.
"More typical is a project I'm working on right now for CART racing. I started with a background that our graphics department created for scoreboards, then added some clip video. I used RED's compositing modes to combine the layers, but I wasn't happy with the colors it created. One of my favorite color filters in RED is Tritone, which creates custom maps for black, white and midpoint colors. This created a very nice electric blue for the overall color. I duplicated this composition, and used another composite mode to combine them.
"One of the features that RED's compositing modes have that nobody else does is the ability to actually combine modes in a single layer and animate them. There a bunch of other adjustments that you can also make on the Composite tab, such as contrast and brightness, as well as mixing the composited combination of layers back to the original, uncomposited layer. I kept one layer fully opaque in the background, then animated the apply mode to control how much of the background came through.
"Between these two composited layers, I used primitive spline objects to make lines that I animated to create movement when there wasn't too much action.
"I love how all of the Boris filters can be used as adjustment layers, simply by dragging the filter tracks above the layers I want to modify. I used Tritone to continue modifying my color palette, the Levels filter to play with the intensity, then used Alpha Spotlight to selectively reveal parts of the full composition for dramatic emphasis.
When talking about drama and French sports, curling comes immediately to mind. "We just wrapped up the Nokia Brier, a 2 week event that's the biggest tournament for men in Canada, so we did a lot of graphics for curling. When stones are in motion, the intensity is very high, but there are other times when we have the opportunity to use graphics to move the story along.
"I wanted to add a fog effect, but all the ones I tried were much too slow. So I decided to use RED's Fire filter -- I turned the fire off, turned the smoke on and colored it white, and found that I had a beautiful effect that rendered really fast, and gave me exactly what I was looking for.
"It's great to have RED inside our NLE to build effects, but we're also finding more and more uses for the RED Engine. Our editing machines keep editing, while the RED Engine renders the effects we've created.
"I used to use After Effects for about 75% of my work, but I'm using it less than half the time now and slipping as we use RED more. There's really nothing else out there that combines the filter and compositing power of RED with 3D, special effects, vectors and titling. Truth be told, for editors, RED is a better product. It's a major part of what I do, and getting bigger every day.