Integrate Review—Boris Red 3GL

OpenGL support aids compositing creativity.

Red 3GL now packs the tools to bring out your inner PowerPoint, with new many options for creating animated charts. Charts can be 3D, and chart data can be imported from Microsoft Excel.

Red 3GL is the latest update to Boris FX's flagship digital compositing program, Red, which has been around for years and continues to be used by thousands of desktop producers. The software is a dense mix of digital effects. It can run on its own or plug into most major desktop NLE programs including Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Avid. (Twenty NLEs are supported.) The program keeps getting more and more feature-rich, with filters, true 3D compositing, animated text, texture- and bump-mapped primitives, and lots more.

When I last reviewed Red (Video Systems, June 2002), my major complaint was the speed of the preview screen. For example, when you spun an object in 3D space or moved text around your preview screen, the response was a little sluggish, especially with multiple items in a composition. This new version tackles this drawback head-on with full support for OpenGL. OpenGL is the standard for hardware acceleration, and its addition to Red makes creative experimentation all the more fun. I was quite impressed with the redraw speed when using an OpenGL card. In fact, Red seems almost like a new program with its realtime (and often faster-than-realtime) preview options.

The dual-platform program checks for a compatible card when it launches and if it finds one, it automatically utilizes OpenGL. If not, the program works as it normally does. The preferences in Red allow you to tweak the level of OpenGL manually (for example, by setting the minimum texture caching or maximum texture caching) or toggle it off entirely.

While OpenGL support certainly is the biggest news for this update, bear in mind that Red also allows previewing to an external monitor. The program automatically detected a Canopus realtime editing board on my machine and sent live video from the timeline straight to it. In addition I was able to swap over to my FireWire output and view the video of my composites playing on the screen of my connected Sony DV camera.

Red 3GL's interface has not changed much since the last version, but under the hood there are hundreds of new features. Here is the requestor for exporting movies.

Also new in Red 3GL are 3D primitive shapes and 2D/3D animated charts. Red has always been a true 3D compositing program, meaning elements in your scenes can reflect light, cast shadows, and can be texture-mapped. This update takes 3D a step further by offering one-click buttons for various built-in shapes such as spheres, cylinders, and cubes. Once you add a shape to your timeline, you can switch it to a different shape with one click.

Red has always rocked at dressing up a 3D surface. This new version offers just about any texture you can imagine, from plastic to glass and from gold to steel. There are lots of presets and various options not only for bump-mapping but also for animating the texture maps. You can even map video onto just about anything in your scene.

The 2D/3D animated charts are a tremendous boon to anyone who has to do PowerPoint-like video presentations (thank goodness that's not me). I was pretty floored when I saw how many options and features Red contains for making just about any chart imaginable. Pie, line, and bar charts all can be customized, sized, extruded to 3D, and colorized. I don't really produce charts, but I often work in Excel for my business. I track clients and log outgoing invoices, and Red can import my Excel tab-delimited file and automatically produce a chart from the data.

Animated gradients are new in Red 3GL. This does not sound too exciting until you begin to play around with them and use them as complex bump maps and displacement maps.

Title animation capabilities have been extended. You can now control words and lines separately and add sassy bouncing and vibration. Also new is text justification along a path, and being able to move the text away from the path. Text, by the way, now can be typed directly onto your live video screen via the composite window; there is no longer a need to compose titles in a separate interface.

Boris Red has always had tons of filters, and the new version adds 40 more for a total of 110. New filters include DeGrain, Light Wrap, Spiral Blue, Scratches, and many more. Red also supports Adobe After Effects plug-ins, which can allow all of those third-party plugs to run inside your NLE if you use the Red 3GL plug-in version inside your editor.

Boris Red also features lots of presets (1,600 total) inside various parts of the program. Just click to launch a preset effect before you approach the learning curve that the effects parameters present.

The program supports 20 NLEs, and I like the fact that I can use Red as a standalone program as well. What's interesting is you can take a Red project file in one NLE and import it to another for excellent flexibility. The OpenGL option allows OpenGL to work inside your NLE for compositing. Many desktop editors lack that support, and internal NLE effects must be tediously rendered for previews. I was happy to see support for Sony Pictures Digital's Vegas.

I especially liked the new sliding tracks option, which allows shrinking and enlarging the timeline to make a sequence faster or slower, while leaving the relative location of your keyframes intact. There are lots more features in the new Red — over 300 in all — so this is quite an extensive upgrade.

While the program has extensive built-in help and two humongous reference manuals, the learning curve for new users may still be steep. The icons are tiny and cryptic: leave the Tool Tips option on. The Intelligent Assistant is an extensive built-in help system; however, when I ran it I kept getting error messages for files missing and the like.

I also had two instances where Red 3GL not only exited but caused a complete and sudden system reboot. Not good. But aside from those two instances, the program kept up with me no matter how hard I pushed it.

I am not exactly sure why, but I still find the various windows of the interface slightly awkward. Unlike most composting programs that run in one window with dockable palettes, Red runs in four Windows XP windows; some can be minimized and some can't. In addition, each window has its own set of pull-down menus. Very odd. I know Boris FX wants to let users organize and size their on-screen windows according to their own preferences, but I would love a workspace option that locks the interface together on one screen in the manner of Adobe After Effects or Discreet Combustion.

Price is a definite consideration; this package might cost more than the NLE you are plugging it into! But if you need to do it all — and have almost every conceivable digital compositing option at your disposal — Red 3GL is in a class by itself as far as breadth of features, legacy of development, options for power users, and constant refinement.