Elizabeth Lowrey is the founder of Amore Productions in Milton, Florida, a firm dedicated to telling compelling personal stories through broadcast quality documentaries. She holds degrees in music from Berklee College and in law from Florida State University and one day hopes to write, produce, direct, and score her own independent film. As a fledgling video producer, Elizabeth attributes her clientele, pledges for repeat business, and the muscle of her evolving demo reel to the power and flexibility of Boris Red 3GL.
“I purchased Boris Red 2.5 some eight months before acquiring Vegas, without any knowledge that Red plug-in support for Vegas was on the horizon. Red quickly established itself as my favorite piece of software, and its versatility has helped make it one of my soundest equipment investments. So I consider it great fortune that the latest release of Rws, 3GL, now plugs into Vegas, allowing me to integrate these two outstanding tools.
Elizabeth is yet another of Boris’over 200,000 users who have found themselves enamored with Red 3GL’s seamless integration into over 20 of the industry’s leading NLE’s.
“Red is so deep, and the visual permutations possible with it are so endless, that I will likely exhaust my imagination long before I exhaust the program. I uncover some new capability, some new modality for accomplishing a visual concept with every project.
“Using only native Red tools and ordinary media, I’ve successfully simulated a near-death experience where “life”flashes by as the viewer zooms forward through an outer-space-like tunnel to an explosion of light at the other side. I’ve created a 3D heart that turns and “beats”in time with music as flashing, shimmering particles seem to magically write text onto the screen. I’ve used animated splines to create human silhouettes that dance and cast realistic shadows on a wood floor before morphing into letters that spell the name of a dance company,” says Lowrey.
Two years ago Elizabeth was unable to understand exactly where the functions of NLE’s ended and where the benefits of effects software began. “I came to appreciate, however, that NLEs, by concept and necessity, are designed to excel at a specific subset of tasks: capturing, managing, and facilitating rapid, random-order, linear assembly of a lot of different media. Red and other dedicated effects programs are designed to excel at layering, animating, finely controlling, and even synthesizing the media itself in compositions of relatively short length. As was once cogently put to me, NLEs, Vegas included, are built for the horizontal direction while Red is built for the vertical direction.
“If I want static titles or simple title rolls, I use Vegas and get them almost instantly. If I want titles that have animated colors or that type on gradually in some programmable speed and manner or that extrude and fly around the screen, I use Red with its friendly key-framing environment and numerous title animation time savers. If I want to key a bunch of clips that will simply play end to end over a single background track, I use Vegas. If I want to key and composite a bunch of clips in one environment and have the viewer ‘zoom’past them in 3D space, I use RED.
“In terms of workflow, that means having immediate access to RED while editing within Vegas; being able to save RED creations as part of a Vegas project; having as good a preview of the effect while playing back the Vegas timeline as the given computer hardware, preview settings, and effect complexity will allow; and thanks to the Open GL technology leveraged in version 3, that editing is more responsive than ever, with previews in Red’s composite window sometimes exceeding realtime.
“Considering its unparalleled flexibility, extraordinary feature set, and plug-in availability within Vegas, Boris RED 3GL is a product I enthusiastically recommend to all Vegas users who are looking to elevate their productions to new aesthetic heights. I know it will keep my imagination and creativity busy for years to come.”