Tutorial: BorisFX Continuum Complete 10

Temporal Blur

The next effect is an interesting blur. It goes along with our Witness Protection effect that we just used. I could use it in my next true-crime documentary to make my reenactment look a little more convincing (or maybe a little less convincing). The Temporal Blur (Figure 8, below) gives your clip a weird kind of a frame-delay sort of appearance, kind of dreamy, everything blurred together frame over frame. Again, you have a lot of different options for the amount of blur, as shown in Figure 8--the number of frames, the frame separation, and so on.

Figure 8. Temporal Blur. Click the image to see it at full size.

Glint

The next effect that I’ll apply to this clip, called Glint, gives it a dreamy appearance. Figure 9 (below) shows the shot without the effect. There's a slight camera move. It’s dallying to the right and it’s going on a slight incline. It’s very smooth, kind of pastoral. He kayaker gotten past the wildness of the rapids that came in the clip before it, and it’s a lot smoother now.

Figure 9. Before applying the Glint effect

We can enhance that effect by using this Glint filter. As you can see in Figure 10 (below), there are a lot of parameters that you can adjust in the Glint effect; I used one of the presets that Boris provides, Intense Vertical Streaks.

Figure 10. The Glint effect applied, using the Intense Vertical Streaks preset. Click the image to see it at full size.

Once again, you can go up and down through a number of presets to choose the look you want. After I chose the preset, I customized it by reducing the amount of streaks because I didn’t want the kayaker to be blown out. If I turn off the mask that we applied to the kayaker in Mocha, it gets blown out and turn into a white mess like the rest of the image does. Once again, the effect goes through the tracking process where it follows him out of the frame. That way, when he's in this image, if I just turn some feathering on, it still shows right around him, but it doesn't completely cover him up.

Transitions

Now, let’s look at some transitions. The transition shown in Figure 11 (below) is actually an older transition that has been available in Continuum Complete for a while, but it can be used very effectively on a couple of things. Where I’ve applied it in this instance, I’ve got two overhead shots in a row, where the kayaker passes under a bridge, then we see him on the other side. Because the shots are not distinctly different, I wanted to ooze from one to the other by using the lens transition shown in Figure 11 (below). See the transition demo’d at the 10:12 mark of the tutorial video.

Figure 11. The Lens transition. 

It looks as if the lens just slowly goes all the way out of focus and then comes back in, but when it comes back in, you’re on a completely different shot. Because the imagery is so similar in these two shots, it blends nicely because you don’t see where the green changes as easily--it blends in with the river over the top corner.

The next clip finds the kayaker back in stronger rapids. I chose to apply a more unusual transition here, the Cross Glitch--a new transition making its debut in BCC 10. Again, this has many different options that you can tweak. In my case, I left it as the default; Figure 12 (below) shows what it looks like. You can spend a lot of time in After Effects trying to manually create something like this--especially when it covers a transition between clips--but the ability to just throw it on there, and then tweak it to make it look how you want, is a huge time saver. See the transition demo’d at the 10:57 mark of the tutorial video.

Figure 12. The Cross Glitch transition. 

Another transition that’s new in Version 10 is the Light Leaks Dissolve (Figure 13, below) which simulates a light burn in your negative if you’re working with film. This analog effect is a lot harder to pull off when you work in a digital format. See the transition demo’d at the 11:34 mark of the tutorial video.

Figure 13. The Light Leaks Dissolve transition. Click the image to see it at full size.

This transition has multiple generators that you can pull from. I’ve got all four turned on in Figure 13, but you can reduce the number to get just the look that you need. You’ll probably want to render most of these transitions to see them play smoothly, depending on the machine that you’re using, but you can scrub through the effect and get a basic idea of what it looks like.