From the course: Learning Boris Continuum 2020

Boris common controls

From the course: Learning Boris Continuum 2020

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Boris common controls

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- [Instructor] One useful quality of Boris Continuum FX is a shared set of common controls. Let's take a look at those controls. I have a demo project here, which has one layer. I'll select that layer, and grab our first Boris effect. You can see that with this generation, they all have the BCC prefix. Let's start with Blur, Fast Lens Blur. And that blurs the frame. The common controls are up here at the top, under Effect Presets and Docs. Let's go through these one at a time. The question mark launches a browser, with a help page for that effect. And this is quite useful, because it has every property and what that property does. Next is a gear button, it gives you additional special preferences. I don't use this too often, but it's worth checking out. The license button shows you the current state of the license. The big B button takes you straight to the Boris FX product page. The HUD, or Heads Up Display, is very unique. I'll turn it on, and this gives you an interactive handle with which you can adjust the most important properties of that effect. For example, I can click-drag this large circle to adjust the iris scale, and affect the blurriness. If you're not sure what a HUD component does, hover your mouse over it. For example, here's scale X, so I can create a non-square blur. I'll turn off the HUD. Next up is the FX browser, which allows you to preview various presets. This is very useful. The presets are at the top left, you can click through these, and see the result in this player. If you find one you like, you can select it, and then click Apply. Now you can always adjust the properties after applying a preset, and you can apply presets as many times as you want to. You can also see presets by using these arrows, and step through them. If you adjust the properties, to produce a result you like, you can save out your own special preset. Go to Save, and save it out as a BSP format. If you've saved out your own preset, you can always reload it, through Load. So there are common controls, be sure to check them out as you're using the various Boris Continuum FX. I also want to mention the pixel chooser, which works with mocha. And this is something you'll see with most Boris Continuum FX, it's very useful. Pixel chooser allows you to limit where an effect is working within a frame. You can do that with a standard mask, with a pre-made mask, or you can go into mocha, create a shape, motion track it, and then pass the information back to After Effects. Extremely useful, and we'll take a look at that through several videos. So there are some common elements you'll have with pretty much every Boris Continuum effect. You'll find they come in quite handy.

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