I use RED pretty much exclusively for all of my video effects and titling. It's clearly built for editors, which is important in a high-intensity shop like mine. Other effects applications are dumb -- you have to tell them where to go and what to do. But BORIS KNOWS what you want to do.
One of the first places you see that this is the Boris interface. What I like best is that it's big: you can see what you're doing. Lots of shortcuts are immediately visible, so I don't have to spend a lot of time hunting for tools.
RED's interface is also very thoughtful. I rarely work with fewer than 30 layers at a time, and Boris names them all automatically. You can't even believe how helpful this is with text, where each layer is named for the text that it contains.
BORIS also understands that one of the biggest needs I have is for high-impact titling. Nobody comes even close to doing this as well. It's usually just a few clicks to get what I need; I get results that I simply can't get using anything else.
After titling, one of my biggest needs is keying. I just finished an opening for a new show for Charo on the Food Channel "Cuchi-Cuchi Cuisine." In addition to lots of compositing and titling effects, I used a lot of blue screen. Nobody does this better than BORIS.
Even though it's so fast and easy to use, the interface is crystal clear. In fact, when I'm working with clients and sometimes open other effects apps, they get lost. They don't like that I have to do so much clicking and twirling before they see anything, so they usually just ask me to go back to RED. It moves fast enough for the client, and is clear enough for them to follow along and make meaningful contributions to the creative process.
One of the things that I love about video production in Las Vegas is that my work is seen in so many places in so many ways. My clients include The Venetian, Madame Tussaud's, the Hermitage and Guggenheim museums, and Canyon Ranch Health Resorts to name just a few. All of them have extremely high standards, and a wide variety of display needs: their messages play everywhere from the tiny screens in taxicabs to the 100 foot Daktronics screens on the Strip. The work I do in RED looks amazing at any size.
Speaking of big pictures, I do a lot of pan and scan animations. I recently used a lot of them in a commercial for The Hermitage, starting with photographs of work by Picasso, Cezanne and Kandinsky. These kind of animations are faster and easier in RED than in the other applications I've used before.
When people ask me what we do, I tell them, "Everything." And it's true. We have over a terrabyte of storage mounted at any time, we shoot DigiBeta, DVCam, DV, output to DVD, broadcast, in-house channels, and billboard-sized monitors on the street: whatever the client wants. I need my effects application to be every bit as flexible, and RED is.
I work all day, and sometimes all night, seven days a week. Las Vegas never stops, and neither do I. That's why it makes such a huge difference to me that Boris RED is completely integrated with my NLE.
I use Media 100, which has the ability to export a program to After Effects, and that's just not good enough for me. For two reasons, really. One is that it's a one way street -- I can send a program to AE, but it has to be one that I've created just for that step. And the only thing I can bring back is a rendered movie. It's a major hassle if I have a long program that needs lots of effects, or have to make any changes after I've been to AE, but before the final output of the video program. It's so much easier, and makes much more sense, to keep everything live and interactive inside RED, inside my NLE. The other drawback to this approach is AE, which isn't as fast or easy as Boris, and can't do everything that I need it to.
So even though a lot of people, including me, were drawn to Media 100 for reasons that included industry-leading integration with AE, I've moved completely over to Boris because the integration is even better. I can do things like open clips in RED directly from my bins, and use media with no importing or exporting. More than that, I can work the way I want to work, truly inside my NLE, and do everything I need to do, quickly.
Here's the bottom line: I make more money with Boris RED, because it looks like my work took a lot longer than it really did.