Getting Ready To Paint Apply Avid FX or Boris RED over a clip in your editing system. A video clip will appear in the Avid FX or Boris RED Composite window. Hide the video clip with the eyeball icon. For the purpose of this tutorial, it will be easier to draw over a black background and then composite paint as the last step. If a checkerboard is visible in the Composite window, turn it off with the popup button.
Light Filter Paint is best done with a tablet input device. Although some painting can still be accomplished with a mouse or even a track pad, a tablet will let us utilize Avid FX or Boris RED to its fullest potential. In a moment, you’ll see why. I will be using a Wacom Intous 3 tablet, but really, any tablet will do, even a very small, inexpensive model. In addition to location and (mouse) clicks, a tablet is capable of recording other data (or channels) such as pressure, tilt, and velocity.
Drawing Your First Stroke
To test the waters, pick a brush tool from the Tool Palette (to open the Palette use the Ctrl. (Cmd.) + 6 shortcut) and draw across the black screen.
Lighting Filter TIP: Make sure the background track in the timeline is deselected. Otherwise, a new paint track will be nested inside the selected track. Notice that the Timeline window now has a new Paint track above all of the other tracks and a new Color Stroke track is nested within the Paint track.
BORIS RED Now, turn your attention to the Composite window. There we find the parameters and options pertaining to paint strokes. Since we are going to use a tablet to draw, let’s change the “modulation” options to utilize the special tablet features. As I mentioned, the tablet allows us to vary some of the paint properties such as brush size and opacity over the length of the stroke as we draw.
BORIS RED I’m setting Opacity and Size modulation to Pressure. As soon as the modulation is changed from None, new parameter sliders become available for setting the range of modulation.
Video Effects My strategy is to increase both the opacity and size of the stroke as I press harder on the stylus to create a natural-looking paint stroke. To achieve that, I set the Opacity Alt. and Size parameters to a lower value. Now, delete the first trial stroke and draw a fresh one changing pressure on the stylus as you draw.
Video Effects TIP: If your stroke is showing individual paint dabs with gaps in-between, reduce the Dab Spacing parameter to make the paint smooth. While your stroke is selected in the Timeline, you can still change the Alternative values on that stroke. Avid FX or Boris RED paint remains “live” at all times with any parameter fully adjustable. Adjusted parameter values will be applied as a starting point for the next stroke. Once we are happy with the overall look of a stroke, we can go on painting.
Video Effects If you are a poor draftsman (such as myself), there is still hope! Not only the brush properties are always live, but even the position and shape of the stroke. Let’s switch to the Transform tab in the Control window.
BORIS Plugin There you’ll find controls for the XY position, scale and rotation of the stroke currently selected in the Timeline. TIP: To check the correct stroke selection, toggle the eyeball button on/off to see which stroke will react to it. To move strokes in XY, select the numeric field of the corresponding control and use the Up/Down keys on the keyboard to nudge your stroke where you want it to be. Scale and Rotate can be useful too if you can’t draw at all… So far so good. I got my buttons painted and ready to complete the drawing.
Light Paint Here is my attempt to draw a rectangle. Not very pretty.
Light Paint Avid FX or Boris RED comes to the rescue. Every paint stroke starts as a raster object where the entire path is recorded as a sequence of sample points which in turn drives the paint dab generation. It would be too tedious to edit all of these sample points even if there was a way to do this in the UI. But it is not necessary. Paint can be raster but it can also be “vector” which means that the path can be transformed with very few points very quickly. To change my ugly raster stroke to vector, I press the Spline Path checkbox at the top of the Control Window.
BORIS RED Now, as soon as I switch to the Pen Tool, the stroke acquires the familiar Bezier control points in the Composite window and I’m free to fix my rectangle to make it look right.
BORIS RED TIP: When converting free-hand drawing to splines you will end up with more control points than necessary. Simply select unneeded points with the mouse or pen and hit the Delete key. Now I got a picture resembling what I had envisioned from the start.
Lighting Effects If it’s still not perfect, blame the artist, not his brush. My next step is to animate paint strokes in time.
Animating The Strokes
Avid FX and Boris RED are well suited to stroke animation. Because paint is always kept live, strokes can be animated with a few simple keyframes. Animation can be done on an individual stroke level or over the entire paint layer.
In my case, I want to animate all strokes simultaneously. * Switch the Timeline selection to the top Paint track. * The Control Window should display global Paint layer parameters. Light Paint Note that we have a choice between Sequential and Parallel styles of animation. With Sequential animation, strokes will animate one after another while Parallel will animate all strokes at the same time. I chose Parallel. With the CTI still at the beginning of my effect, I change the interpolation popup button to Linear on the Stroke End parameter.
BORIS RED And I set the initial value for Stroke End to 0. What this means is that in the beginning of my animation, the end of the stroke is at the same 0 value as the beginning of the stroke. As time goes on the stroke end will grow to 100% to complete the animation. Press the Space bar or Play button in the Composite window to convince yourself that this works. That is all there is to it. Simple!
BORIS RED Now that we are done with the Paint tool (sigh of relief), let’s make paint glow. That can be done with a BCC filter specially designed for this purpose and included in both the BCC and Avid FX/RED products. It is called BCC Colorize Glow. But first, feel free to collapse the Paint track and lock it with the lock button to avoid accidental modification.
BORIS RED The BCC Colorize Glow filter is found under Filter Menu in the Effects Category. As soon as the filter is added to the Timeline, its controls will appear in the Controls window.
BORIS RED As you can tell by the number of available controls, it is a very sophisticated tool capable of producing a wide range of glow effects. Fortunately, we do not need to learn the multitude of its parameters. Instead, we will load one of a dozen bundled presets, called Dr. T Soft Glow. Dr. T, otherwise known as Emile Tobenfeld, is the original designer of this filter. His preset gives a soft neon look to our paint strokes.
BORIS RED Now it is time to turn on the background track. I’m going to cheat and use one of the still digital photos from my iPhoto library. You will be using your client’s clip from your NLE where Avid FX or Boris RED resides as a plug-in.
BORIS RED Hmm, the result is not what I expected. The glow filter is affecting the background as well as the paint. How do I fix that? Since Paint is a filter by itself, it is not possible to nest a Glow filter inside the Paint filter – as I would normally do had it been a Shape. However, there are many ways to work around this problem in Avid FX or Boris RED. Here is one: I will nest both filters inside a Spline shape but not draw any new splines. This way I will have full control over compositing of my paint. Here is how you do that: * Add a new Spline track with a menu Track/NewMedia/Spline Object. * Nest both the Paint and Glow tracks inside the new Spline track (if paint is still locked you have to unlock it now)
BORIS RED * With the Spline track selected, switch to Apply tab in the Control window * Change the Apply Mode popup to Screen
BORIS RED Now you should see your paint nicely screened over the background video.
BORIS RED Wait! How did it know to change the glow color to match the background? No magic here. I went back to the Glow filter and chose a different color gradient preset: Red-Yellow.bcp
BORIS RED You may have to scroll down the Control window to get to this part of the controls. As I noted, they are pretty deep. Another trick is that I went back to the Paint layer Transform tab and scaled and moved the entire paint object (yes you can do that!). I even rotated it a few degrees.
BORIS RED Even more tricks: I did not like how the stroke animation cuts at the end. I wanted to hold fully-completed strokes for a moment before ending the shot so I added a keyframe towards the end and held Stroke End at 100%. To do that: * Move the CTI where you want the animation to end * Change the interpolation option for the Stroke End parameter to Hold
BORIS RED * A keyframe will automatically pop up in the Timeline
BORIS RED * Change the Stroke End value to 100% * Preview to RAM to see your animation (Cmd/Ctr 0) Voila!
Filed under: manual book
