- Hello and welcome to this look
at the HUD and the Compare tool within Boris Continuum
with me, Ben Brownlee, from Boris FX.
Now both of these tools are gonna be used
in interesting ways to speed up
our effects creation and make sure
that we're not pushing the effects too far.
So let's pop over to the other side
and see what we can do with the HUD
and with the Compare tool.
(bright, calming tones)
Compare is one of the most useful
features you can find in Boris Continuum.
So I'm gonna come over to my first shot here
which is bringing coffee.
And, as you can see, it's a bit soft
so I'm gonna add a bit of sharpness to it.
And to do that, I'm gonna use my BCC Magic Sharp.
I'll just apply that onto the clip, itself.
Now, as with all the continuum filters,
we do have a number of presets to work with
and my favorite for Magic Sharp
is the high threshold sharp edges,
which generally tends to get me
into the right place just with a single click.
So that means the only thing I have to worry about
is how much sharpening I have to do
using the sharpen amount.
And it can be very easy and very tempting
to over-sharpen at this stage,
so it's worth being able to see
what the clip looked like before we applied an effect.
Now we could toggle things on and off using the bypass
but there's a better option as well.
If we have a look in the effect editor,
we can see we have the Compare twirldown
which we can use and I can choose
which Compare mode I want to do.
I can use a side by side, which
gives me my before and after,
I can use Compare.
So we'll look at the full clip
just divided by the wipe line,
which I can change either by clicking and dragging
in my viewer window or by using
the wipe slide in the effects control.
I can also Compare it with another layer,
which we're gonna do in just a moment.
But for this one I'm gonna compare it side by side
and I can use the wipe/slide amount
to slide over to an area that I think is important.
I can also use the right offset slider
to slide the after side into an area
that I think is even more interesting.
And at this stage I can just change
my sharpen amount so that I can see the difference.
We sharpened but we're not over sharpening.
Nice, easy way of seeing a before and after.
When I'm happy, I can just turn
my Compare mode off again and there we are.
Again, quickly using the bypass
to show before and after.
Now, I can use Compare to look at a different layer as well.
So we take a look at our clip here.
What I want to do is to match this
to our incoming shot, which is this
spooky, nighttime hut.
So I could use any number of color effects
but to get a fast look here, I'm actually
just gonna go to Fast Film Process.
I can apply that as a filler layer
over the top of the image there.
And let's just bring the effect editor back up again
and come up to my effects browser
and find something that gets me
into the right sort of area.
So I'm looking for something that's kind of cool,
pale blue is lookin' all right.
Night interior should be round about the right size
but I think with this one I'm going to use blue wash.
Hit apply on that and let's see how close I've got.
So in Compare I'm gonna turn my Compare Mode
to compare with a layer and I'll have
a new drop-down to show what I want to compare it to.
By default it looks at the layer below
and because I've used a filler layer here
the layer below is the original layer
so I want to go two layers below
so now I can see my spooky hut.
And, again, just change where the wipe is going to be
and I can come over to the post-process areas here
and maybe just give this a little bit more contrast,
change up the balance and hue just a little bit,
move that over there and maybe touch the saturation down.
And if I'm happy I'll just
turn the compare mode off one more time
and let's just fudge this along,
there we go, let's just move that over, there.
And play that back again, see how that cuts together.
And I think that's lookin' all right.
So that's how simple it is
to use the Compare controls in Continuum
within the Avid Media Composer host.
Now, the HUD's an intuitive way
of controlling effects directly within our viewer.
And different effects have different HUD controls,
depending on what we need to do with them.
For example, if we come over to our first clip
and look at this blue screen,
I'm gonna want to key this out
and Boris Continuum has a number
of different keyers available.
But I'm gonna use the Primatte Studio keyer.
And I'll just grab that onto my clip,
come into the effects mode, and you see
with Primatte Studio I have a whole UI available to me.
So this means that I can click on auto analyze
and Primatte will go along and see
what color my background is most likely made of.
We come down the bottom and see
how good that matte actually was
and if I need to I can use any of these other tools,
such as clean background, to just tidy up
my key directly within the interface
just by drawing over it there.
I could even use a matte status
to just really check to see if I'm missing
any sort of small areas which wouldn't otherwise
be visible to me.
And once this seems fine, I can just
click on final composite and I've got
a very nice, convincing key with very little work.
And for straightforward keys,
or for doing the first part of a key,
I never have to go over to my effect editor
to do any sort of twirling down
or changing anything in here.
I can do it all straight in the viewer using the HUD.
Other effects show the HUD up in a slightly different way.
So if I come into a blur and have a look
at my BCC blurs here, I can choose
a directional blur and put that
over the top of my animated background.
So you see, again, I have a HUD
directly within the viewer so I can change
my blur amount, I can change my blur angle,
all within the viewer here.
Now if wanted to do anything different with this,
I can easily come over to my effects editor
and, for example, if I wanted to shape
the apply mode, I could change the apply mode to screen
straight here, and just find the effect that I'm after.
So we're not limited to only doing corrections in the HUD,
it just shows out the most common controls
that you might want to adjust.
Now let's say we wanted to change
what widgets are available to us on the viewer.
We can do that over on this panel
in the effects controls on the right-hand side.
So we can choose these standard UI widgets, as we have now.
We can change this just to scale and position
or to crop or we can turn off the UI widgets.
So if you want to see the Boris Continuum ones on,
we just turn it on at the top button,
and we wanna turn the widgets off,
we turn it on at the bottom button.
And as we'll see later on, these widgets
will also change and update, depending on
where we are within the effect.
So if we do have things like the pixel chooser turned on,
which we're gonna talk about later,
then you'll see that we also have
the pixel chooser available to us in the HUD as well.
And that's our quick look
at the HUD and Compare
within Boris Continuum. (upbeat electronic music)
If you found this video useful,
then remember to hit the like button
for more ways to master Boris Continuum in Avid,
subscribe to the Boris FX YouTube channel
and check out our other tutorials.
If we're missing something then let me know
in the comments below.
My name's Ben Brownlee from Boris FX
and thanks for watching.