- [Ben] Sapphire PrismLens
is a beautiful new video filter from Boris FX.
It's designed to replicate shooting through physical prisms,
reflect, refract, and catch lights in surprising ways
to create cinematic, dreamy looks.
(upbeat electronic music)
PrismLens has three initial styles to choose from,
single, linear and radial.
Each one gives you unparalleled freedom
to design the perfect look for your shot.
Harness the power of Mocha,
built directly in the plugin,
to track your shot or create wild custom shapes.
There's a lot to explore,
so why not experiment with a preset?
The preset library is always a great place
to get inspiration, or find the look you want.
Find one you like,
and make any tweaks or animate it up.
Sapphire PrismLens is great for music videos,
travel logs, opens, social media,
basically any way you need
to create uniquely beautiful and eye catching images.
Go straight to BorisFX.com now
to learn about Sapphire and PrismLens,
or hang out with me a bit longer
as we start to explore this effect on a few shots.
(uptempo electronic music)
And we're gonna start out in After Effects,
although all the things I'm gonna show you with PrismLens
works in whatever host you are using Sapphire in.
And we're gonna take a look at a couple of other hosts
later on as well.
So the first thing to do is apply PrismLens,
which is found in the Stylize category.
And these are the default parameters.
If we have our effect selected,
we can use the onscreen widgets to reposition
where the reflection is,
or change the source position,
and we can even change
how the sparkles are looking, as well.
Play that back.
Let's have a quick overview of the parameters now
to see what PrismLens is doing.
It's actually broken down into several modules,
and I'm just gonna ignore the first quarter of these,
because these are mainly to do with setting stuff up.
What I'm interested in at the moment
is reflection shape and reflection details,
and the differences between those.
Reflection shape sets up how that prism shape looks.
So we can do things like change rotation up,
change up the size,
change the number of sides,
and as we did before,
also change the position
of where that shape is on the screen.
Now, reflection details is all about
what's shown in that shape.
So we have things like opacity,
so we can fade things on and off,
and we choose what's being reflected
with the source position,
which we also saw a little bit earlier,
just by controlling the widget here.
And we can update things like the Z distance,
and add a bit more rotation to this as well if needs be.
Or even just flip the whole thing
vertically or horizontally.
Moving down the list,
color correction affects the image within the shape.
Chromatic aberration changes the chromatic aberration
on the shape here.
And we can, you know,
do some funky things with changing shift position.
I'll just leave that back at where it was previously.
We can add in some of Sapphire's lovely glow,
or add a tint to the reflection
to make it look like it's being shot through coated glass.
And we can change all of that stuff up here,
so we can take that really, really wild
or take it down to zero and get a regular reflection there.
Lights, we'll come back to in just a moment,
but those are the sparkles that we see.
So we can easily simplify or add to
what our PrismLens looks like.
Let's take a look at our next clip now in Premiere Pro.
And we have our default PrismLens set up right here.
Let's look at the area of the parameters
we ignored last time.
And under the Effect Type,
we actually have three different types
of PrismLens available.
We have single, we have linear,
and we have radial.
Now we can see those three are different,
but it can be a little bit tricky
to see exactly what's happening
just by changing that effect.
So I always like to start with a preset.
So if I go to load preset,
and that loads in our preset browser,
and we can see the presets down here.
And flipping through here,
we can see some of the looks we can get using PrismLens.
And I wanna show you the the linear preset,
so we can filter these out just by typing in linear.
And I'll start with the angled linear fade,
and let's scrub us over so we can see it
in like a little bit of a better frame.
So in the parameters we can see that the effect
is now set to PrismLens linear.
And if we look at the reflection shape,
this looks exactly the same as it did previously,
but underneath it we have a few more options
opened up to us.
We have the number of copies that we have,
we can just scrub that up
and that goes up to a maximum of 10.
Let's take this down again.
We have the angle which that's being reflected out at,
so let's keep that around about where it was.
And we can change up things like the distance,
which is the distance between the reflections
and the start offset,
which is the distance that the reflections start at
from the center.
So we can leave a nice little gap in the center,
nice little clean gap in the center there.
And bias will move those reflections
or bias those reflections to one side or the other.
We also have opacity fade and size fade.
So with both of these set to zero,
every copy is going to be exactly the same as the original.
If we change the opacity fade,
we're gonna start getting the outer copies fading out
the further they are from the center.
And same with the size fade.
If we have this going in a positive way,
the copies are gonna get smaller,
and we have this set in a negative way,
the copies are going to get bigger
as they move further away from the center.
So this can give us some really nice effects.
Now of course, all of this can be animated.
So if I grab my position widget,
set a key frame,
over at the first frame,
and then I can just move and animate this over
either by using the widgets or by changing things up
in the parameters.
And then we have the first steps
to a more interesting animation.
And obviously you can take this further
and create something even more special.
Let's take a look at our next shot now in DaVinci Resolve.
And in Resolve we have our clip loaded in,
Sapphire PrismLens applied to the clip.
And let's start again with a preset.
Now I wanna take a look at the radial presets this time.
So I'm just gonna type in radial,
and we have a few different ones to to choose from,
but I'll start with the the big one,
multi-row radial sparkles.
And looking over at the parameters on this one,
we can see that the mode we are working with here
is set to PrismLens Radial.
And we have basically the same types of parameters
as we saw with the linear,
except if we come down here, we have,
instead of the linear copies, we have radial copies.
And because we're doing reflections around a circle,
we have things like the start angle and the total angle.
We also have rows, as well,
so we can set up multiple rows of reflections,
and this goes up to three.
The rest of the controls work as they did with linear.
But with this example,
I wanna have a look at some of the more advanced features
and one of those is the integration with Mocha.
So if I click on edit Mocha,
it's gonna bring me into the Mocha interface
where we can do masking and tracking.
So instead of hand animating a lot of this stuff,
we can let motion tracking do the work for us.
And we have four different tracking points set up.
We have light pivot,
which I don't really care about at the moment,
so I'm gonna turn off the cog to stop it from tracking,
and turn off the visibility to stop it from showing up.
We have light start position.
I'm just gonna drag this over up into the corner
by this light over here.
We have have position,
which is obviously where the center
of the PrismLens is going to be.
And with this one I'm gonna track the head,
and we have source position,
which I'm just gonna turn off as well,
so we don't need to worry about that right now.
I don't care about rotation for either of these,
so I'm just gonna turn off rotation
in the track motion options and track backwards.
And then track forwards afterwards.
So now I have nice tracking points going
for the position and a source position.
And what I'll do is I'll just place this blue crosshair
in the exact position that I want
the Mocha tracker data to be in.
So let's save that and let's exit.
And you'll see that by default nothing actually changes.
That's because we need to tell PrismLens
to use the position data, and
we'll go down to the lights as well,
because of course we need to tell it
to use the lights position.
Now I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial
that these sparkles are controlled by the lights.
So if we come down in here into lights,
we can control things like the light's brightness,
their size, and crank this up quite high
if we want to have these big soft sparkles,
or take the size down really low
and you get these little bits of of glitter,
but I find this works probably best between one and
maybe max three depending on what you want to do.
And instead of always having to animate the lights,
either using the start position or the pivot point,
we can use shift speed X and Y
to get some auto animation on here as well.
So it just gives us a little bit of movement
going between frames.
And personally I like to keep these at quite low values,
because otherwise it can get a little bit distracting.
Now the final secret behind these lights
lies within the edit lights button.
If I click on this,
PrismLens is going to start up the flare designer.
Yeah, so what's actually driving these glints
is the Sapphire lens flare engine.
So if you know how to work the Sapphire lens flare engine,
you're gonna be in good stead here.
And we can turn off excess elements that we don't need,
and just leave ourselves
with some much more sparsely looking glints.
Of course, we can add some more in there as well
if we want to.
So to get back to the default lens flare,
all we do is we search under all for Prism,
and there's a preset called PrismLens Glints 01,
and that will be the default glints
that we have normally within the effect.
We can also use Mocha to create masks,
either to drive the shape or just to mask
where the effect is being applied.
So let's just turn off the visibility
on my effect trackers there,
and I'm gonna come up to my X-spline,
and I'm just gonna draw a loose shape
around the bottom of the screen,
and right-click to close that shape off,
and just adjust that area there.
And I'll call this one, Effect Mask.
I don't have to rename it, it's just for my sake.
So let's save that again, exit out of here.
And when we come back in,
it will now only show the effect where our Mocha mask was.
And if I open up Mocha here,
I can add softness at this point,
or we can add softness directly in Mocha
and we can choose how we use that mask
using this drop down here.
And we have some more advanced techniques
for mixing and matching what these elements are doing.
And this is why I always counsel
that you should look through the presets,
because the presets themselves
contained a lot of these more interesting techniques
for you to take a look at and explore yourself.
And if we play that back,
we start to see our PrismLens effect
being animated by Mocha and constrained by a Mocha mask.
So PrismLens is a fun and deep effect,
and there are loads of different effects
that you can start to create with it.
And because it's modular,
you can just turn off the modules you don't want
and focus on the ones you do.
And like all Sapphire effects,
the most creative effects come through play and exploration.
So to learn more about PrismLens, and Sapphire in general,
head on over to BorisFX.com
where you can also download
a free trial version of the software
and find full information
about the different license types that we have available.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I'll see you again soon.
(uptempo electronic music)
Remember, BorisFX.com also has a treasure trove
of free tutorials.
So if you want to learn about a specific effect,
or how professionals are using them in the field,
take a look at the video section of BorisFX.com.