What is Boris FX 6.0?

Boris FX is a complete integrated effects application with rotations, a multi-layered timeline, unlimited keyframes and Preview to RAM playback. Expanded capabilities include explosive particles, powerful keying and natural filters. Achieve professional results quickly using the Effects Library Browser or add personal touches and save effects for later use. Boris FX can access media directly from your non-linear digital editing systems' timeline without importing or exporting. Use additional media such as QuickTime, AVI, PICT, TIFF and Targa files to add more layers.

With the release of version 6.0, Boris FX moves beyond 3D DVE into full-blown effects creation. Composite unlimited layers of media and preview compositions with audio using RAM or Disk based playback. Boris FX 6.0 gives editors access to advanced compositing features such as 27 apply modes, motion blur, particles, lighting effects, and displacement mapping. Easily create self-animating natural effects such as snow, rain, fire, clouds, sparks, and comets, which can interact with media or video. Expand effects options by accessing compatible third-party plug-ins inside of the Boris FX user interface.

With Boris FX, you can simultaneously spin, tumble, rotate, and resize any number of tracks of full motion video in 3D space. You can also map video onto a flat plane, a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, or create a page turn. Use 3D containers to manipulate tracks in groups while independently controlling their individual properties.

Boris FX includes over 60 different compositing filters, including blur, color, distortion, keying, lighting, natural and particles effects. The PixelChooser provides additional control over many of these effects by allowing you to select the pixels to filter using custom mattes.

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Few nonlinear video-editing packages offer the depth of features you’ll find in Boris FX 6.o. Designed to integrate with your current nonlinear editing tool, Boris requires a host application, such as Adobe’s After Effects... or Premiere, or Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

Version 6.0 brings considerable improvements to Boris FX. At the heart of the overhauled interface is a more efficient timeline, allowing one-click application of video, stills, and other media effects (such as color and gradients). You can add 3D shapes and filters with the same ease. Boris veterans will be glad to know that you can still hierarchically nest layers in the timeline, collapsing and revealing individual layers as you need them.

Boris FX lets you work with an unlimited number of layers of media in three dimensions. You can also animate and mix apply modes, making it possible to produce a vast range of results with a selection of over 60 filters. The comprehensive filters give you control over color correction, noise reduction, distortion, and blurs as well as light, particle, and natural effects, and you can combine filters for an even broader range of effects. Natural filters such as rain or stars are surprisingly realistic, while the color filters enable you to correct and adjust any aspect of brightness and contrast, color balance, gamma levels, and hue saturation. Other color filters provide tinting and multitone effects, as well as color shift.

Boris also provides keying filters for extracting part of an image from the rest of the scene. The chroma-key filter is designed to composite footage shot against blue, red or green screens, and Boris’s implementation makes short work of separating the background from the subject, even if the filming conditions weren’t perfect. The program offers a total of 13 filters, including some that remove pixels of a particular color and luminance and others that preserve colors. There’s even a range of filters for refining the keying process.

One of Boris FX’s more unusual features is its ability to work with footage in 3D. You can create and animate basic 3D shapes, add footage and filter effects to them, and then animate them. With over 500 fully customizable transitions to choose from, it’s possible to create just about any scene transition you can imagine. Boris provides a limited selection of audio-control tools, including level controls and a waveform display so you can synchronize audio tracks with effects and transitions. You can preview the effects in real time with the RAM preview option — the frames load into and play back from the RAM cache.

Boris FX 6 includes Keyframer, a sort of Mini-Me companion that provides the same user interface you see when using Boris FX from your host application. You can use this to create effects when your host application is busy with another task. Of course, without the host editor and Boris FX proper, you can’t render any effects, but you can create and save effects, then render them when the host computer is free — good news for production companies trying to keep license costs down.

Boris FX 6 has been optimized for OpenGL and accelerated for AltiVec, and offers multiprocessor support. But as yet it’s not Mac OS X native. Boris is overkill for simple editing jobs, but if you need prolevel DV effects, it’s a strong set of tools well worth exploring.

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Haynes, Ed. (May 2002). Boris FX 6.0. MacAddict. (pg. 54).

Download Boris FX 6.0 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

Mac OS 8.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver