- Boris FX Continuum 2023.5 presents a brand new filter
for the ultimate in stylized pixel treatments.
Introducing Super LED.
It replicates the look of LED bulbs
we've come to know and love from TV and billboards,
while also providing tons of stylization options
to help dial in that perfect treatment.
Start by choosing a base LED shape
of either circles, squares, or polygons
and build up the look and feel of your shots from there.
The Super comes from the ultimate in property options,
allowing you to add glows, glitches, blending options
and prismatic looks all with just one effect.
Like always, the FX editor has you covered
with a variety of preset options
to get your creative juices flowing.
Super LED is great for social media content, titles,
commercials and music video treatments.
So what are you waiting for?
Head to borisfx.com now
to discover more about Continuum 2023.5
or stick around with me to learn more about Super LED
and how this effect might fit into your next workflow.
(bright music)
Alright, we're gonna get familiar with the basics
of BCC+Super LED
inside of Premiere Pro and After Effects,
but this works very similarly in Final Cut Pro,
DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer
and VEGAS to name a few.
Let's hop inside of my Premiere Pro timeline.
I have a please stand by clip inside of here
and I've already done a search inside my Effects tab
for BCC+Super LED.
Once I place that on the clip,
we're gonna see a pattern of circular pixels
representing LED bulbs overlaid on top of the footage.
If I press Shift + five, I can take a look
at this in Effect controls.
And you might be tempted to scale down each of these shapes,
but it's better to see some of the intricacies
for the shape patterns large.
So first off, I wanna go to Scale and make this 50.
And then under LED Shape,
we can choose from square, as well as polygon.
And with polygon, we can choose a side count,
nine being the max and three being the minimum.
All shapes, let me select square right now,
also have a gap that we can leave in between them
to create some interesting patterns.
Let me bring down that gap to its default value of two
and go back to the polygon shape.
Each shape also has the ability to fade it around its edges.
If I turn the bulb fade on,
I'll increase the scale even further
to an amount of a hundred, so we can see this even clearer.
We can see that the fade amount is gonna be set to a hundred
along with a fade width softens the edges of the shape.
I'll reset both of those base values,
that we do have a little bit of a soft edge
and you might notice that the pattern of LED bulbs
are also staggered.
Right now, into rows by default.
We can set that to columns as well,
or even turn off that staggering pattern.
I'll change it back to columns.
The next values will allow us to introduce
a few dead LED bulbs
to add some randomization to our overall grid pattern.
Let me go to dead LEDs and up that to an amount of 30.
We could see parts of our grid are now black.
And if you add some flicker,
now various bulbs will turn off and on because they're dead.
So we get instant random animation.
Now, some animation that you're seeing here
was also just turned on by default.
I'm gonna close the LED group,
and I want us to pay attention to flicker
'cause there's quite a few values on here by default.
Right now, flicker has a speed of 25,
creating a constant motion across all of our bulbs.
If we increase that amount to a hundred,
we'll be able to see this a bit clearer
and just notice that the only value that is flickering
happens to be the brightness.
We can increase the brightness value,
as well as change the flicker type from this sharp flicker
to something smooth, if required.
Let me press Command + Z just to go back
to the default 10 brightness and the sharp flicker
to see how a large flicker is affecting our LED pattern.
In addition to this, we also have blinking LEDs
and there are four values associated with that.
First off is how many of the LED bulbs we want to blink.
Now, notice this changes the color pattern of our polygons.
Then, there's a flicker amount,
which is set to quite high right now,
and a blink intensity and speed.
The higher the speed,
the more these bulbs will actually flicker
across our source footage.
Let me press the Space bar to stop
and press Command + Z to undo.
Last but not least, if I close this flicker category,
there are some values by default for Prism,
which is just giving a little bit of RGB separation
across our bulbs.
Not to mention key light, which is set to parallel right now
and just allowing each of the bulbs to be lit
in a way that brings them to life.
We can change the strength,
not to mention the angle to play around with the look.
Now that we know all of this,
I'm actually going to go into the LED settings
and decrease the scale of these bulbs to something like two.
So we can see the random pattern that we've created
of both dead LED bulbs and blinking bulbs
across the please stand by, not to mention the flicker.
In addition to all of this,
if you look at the bottom of the Super LED effect,
you do have the ability to blend it into the source footage.
In this case, I'll just choose overlay
so we can see a bit more of our footage
and the LED bulbs aren't as strong.
Another option would be to change the gap fill
from a solid color to alpha
to get a slightly different brightness of those super LEDs.
Now let's put this into practical use
in a few different ways.
So I wanna hop over to another sequence here
inside of Premiere Pro
and I already have super LED applied
to a background shape pattern.
Let me just turn off the text temporarily.
And here, I'll turn off and then on BCC+Super LED.
Noticing some of the properties under the LED section,
we can see the scale of the LEDs is set to 10,
as well as that they are currently staggered into columns.
A few other things to notice
is that we have some blinking LED bulbs,
the brighter ones here,
and we'll be able to see those values set
in the blink LED section,
not to mention an intense flicker
across this entire shape pattern.
So right now, I'm gonna turn on the V2 track
of the loading content
and what we'd like to do is use Super LED
as a way to animate this on screen.
So we have those pixelated bulbs start,
as well as another section called Video Glitch Enabled
and slowly trickle it down
so that we can see this original text source.
Already have Super LED ready to go in the Stylize section,
so I'll apply it to the loading content
and now we get our pixelated bulbs.
Let's start off the scale to be 25 in this case,
but work with a square pattern.
I'll also turn the bulb fade on,
but let's set the bulb fade amount to be 75 in this case,
and we can start the gap to be a little bit greater,
we'll set it to be five.
And now we can see the loading content.
We don't even see this, so let's decrease the scale
in this case to be something much lower.
I'll set it to 10 so we can somewhat make it out.
In addition to these LED settings,
I'm just gonna close this out
and I'm gonna open up a section called Video Glitch.
So video glitch is not on by default, but just keep in mind,
it is common for glitchy-based sources
to be part of these LED bulb treatments and screens.
So let's enable it.
And now, if I go to the beginning of the project,
we see the loading content come up
and a little bit of a video glitch occurring.
I'll increase the glitch intensity to be much larger,
not to mention the shift amount,
so we can see this a bit clearer across the tech source.
Now in order for us to eventually see the text clearly,
we're gonna animate the scale, the gap,
not to mention glitch values
over a span of just over a second.
So I'll move my playhead to the beginning
and let's add a key frame here for glitch intensity
and I'll open up the LED section
and add a key frame for scale, not to mention gap.
Later, after this bar has been loaded up
at around four seconds instead,
let's change the scale of these LED bulbs
to be much smaller, one,
and the gap to be virtually nothing, zero.
We'll also change the glitch intensity in this case
to be zero as well, so there is no glitch running through.
Let me move to the beginning, press the Space bar.
We can see that loading content
and eventually reveal our text with no glitch
and pretty much no LED bulbs.
There's also a mixed value at the bottom of Super LED
where we can blend in the original content, if desired.
Taking a look at one more example,
let's go inside of After Effects.
So you saw this example at the beginning of this tutorial
and it uses Super LED on both clip sources,
not to mention the text.
Let's take a look at this a little bit closer.
I'll select the first clip that we see and press the U key
so we can see the key framed properties here
in After Effects, not to mention the effect controls
that have BCC Super LED on this clip.
One thing to note is over time,
the position of the clip, we scale in on it.
In addition to this,
we eventually mix in the Super LED source
over a span of time so it doesn't start
with any pixelated bulbs
and then animate certain individual Super LED properties,
including the scale of the bulbs
and some random glitch values that also go off.
Close to the end of where we get really close,
the bulbs scale up quite a bit.
So what could be cool in this example
is scaling up your source footage using AI
so that you get some really cool patterns with Super LED
as you zoom in on this footage.
Now, as we leave this clip, the next clip comes in
and let's take a look at its properties, I'll press U
to see this and we could see similarly,
scale and glitch intensity from video glitch are animated,
not to mention the amount of the glitch,
as well as its position properties and dead LEDs.
There are a few to begin with
when we first come into this clip this.
This eventually comes into place
and reveals the source clip.
And believe it or not, this is still Super LED bulbs,
but at a very small scale and no gap.
So I hope this gives you an idea of how Super LED works
inside of Continuum 2023.5.
Don't forget that you can use
some of Continuum's masking tools from Mocha,
as well as parameter tracking
to really integrate this into scenes.
If you've liked this video, give it a thumbs up
and don't forget to subscribe to see other content,
as well as features of Continuum
and all of the other Boris FX Suite plugins.
I'm Nick Harauz and I'll see you next time.
(mysterious music)