Tutorial: BorisFX Continuum Complete 10

The Beauty Studio

For the last effect that I’ll show you, I found a subject that really needed some help in the beauty departmentThe Beauty Studio found in BCC 10 is pretty handy for a lot of things. In this case, I have some 1280x720 footage that I shot at 60 frames. It’s not great quality. I’ve got a lot going on in my face in Figure 14 (below): pores, creases, wrinkles, moles, stubble that aren’t very flattering.

Figure 14. Before a visit to the Boris Beauty Studio

I can easily just turn on the Beauty Studio, chose the Strong Smoothing effect and voila, it completely got rid of all the imperfections except for the darker side of my face, and when that light comes on it really goes away (Figure 15, below).

Figure 15. After applying the Beauty Studio’s Strong Smoothing effect

As you can see in Figure 16 (below), it doesn’t really do too much to hurt the sharpness of the image. For example, my shirt is still nice and crisp. It doesn’t overly blur everything and it doesn’t blow out anything. It just gives it a nice smoothing effect to help the facial appearance look a little better.

Figure 16. Sharpness still mostly intact

BCC FX Browser

The last thing I want to show you is kind of an effect and kind of not an effect at the same time: the BCC FX Browser. This, to me, is one of the most interesting features of the entire package. If you look for the browser and apply it to an effect, nothing happens, but it does give you a button to launch this browser in the Effect Controls for the clip (Figure 17, below). Like Mocha, there’s an entire interface built into this that will launch inside of Premiere Pro.

Figure 17. The BCC FX Browser button

What this allows you to do is, on whatever clip you have selected, you can go through the entire library of effects found in BCC 10 and A/B every effect available (Figure 18, below).

Figure 18. BCC FX Browser open

For example, I can choose Perspective > Image Shatter and click Play, and I can just start cycling through the effects to see what they look like applied to my clip (Figure 19, below). Again, these are all playing in real time, no rendering. Some of them are a little bit lighter and some are a little bit heavier. Depending on your machine, it may struggle with some of these. I found that to be the case especially the ones that are generating lights. Still, it gives you an idea of how powerful this is. That's one of the beauties of the OpenCL processing.

Figure 19. A real-time look at how an effect would alter the clip. Click the image to see it at full size.

The one downside of this is you can’t just apply the effect from the browser. Let’s say you previewed the Fast Lens Blur and like it. To apply the effect, close the browser and go to Lens Blur > Fast Lens blur, apply it, then render it, and you’re done.

That’s a quick look at a few of the plugins, effects, and transitions available in Boris Continuum Complete 10, available now.