Everyone who has spent any significant time in an edit bay has come across Boris Continuum Complete (BCC). BCC is a staple in the post production industry and most edit bays are considered incomplete without its presence in your effects pallet. For many editors, their knowledge of Boris’ offerings start and stop at Continuum Complete. This month in Tech Edge, we are going to take a look at the army of offerings Boris has amassed over the past few years.
Soundbite
Have you ever found yourself searching for a clip of video based on something someone said in that clip? Do you ever find yourself digging through transcriptions looking for a specific piece of dialogue? Then Soundbite is for you.
Soundbite is a search tool that searches your media phonetically. What that means exactly is Soundbite will index your media by the audio in the clips. This type of functionality is used all of the time in the news where during an interview, the news anchor will say to the subject “You recently mentioned President Obama’s stance on equal marriage.” and then they play the clip. That news show had products that can search their media database phonetically and they had found that clip in less than ten seconds. They didn’t scrub through tape after tape; it was all done with Soundbite.
The phonetic analysis that you get in Soundbite is powered under the hood by Nexidia. Nexidia is the number one company when it comes to phonetics. Nexidia technology has been used in matters of critical national security down to trivial matters such as searching though the audio of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” The media that is indexed by Soundbite is done in seconds and you will be stunned on how quickly you can search for video clips just based on audio dialogue alone. Soundbite is available only on Final Cut X and Adobe Premiere Pro on the Macintosh operating system. Like all Boris products, it comes with a trial version so you can try before you buy.
Mocha Pro
In 2012 a company named Imagineer Systems won a technology Academy Award. In 2014 Boris made a great acquisition by purchasing said company Imagineer Systems. Most people know Mocha Pro as “Those plugins that come with After Effects.” But Mocha Pro is so much more than that.
Mocha pro is planar tracking image engine. What that does for people is tracks screens, graphics and products. It will research your clips for patterns of planes. Once something is defined as a plane, Mocha will let you key under and over that image. A good example of this is imagine you had a clip of video where someone was using their finger on a smart phone. You could key whatever you wanted into the screen of the smart phone, but you also have to have that keyed image you put on the phone allow finger swiping and gesturing that comes with smart phone usage. You have to let fingers go over your keyed screen to make the shot of the smart phone look realistic. Mocha Pro does all this by creating layers for each plane that it sees.
Mocha is compatible Windows, Mac and even Linux. It works as a stand-alone product or within just any editing of compositing software on the market. Best of all, like Soundbite, you can try it for free.
Media 100
Just about everyone in our industry has a friend or knows someone that worked at Media 100. The people of Media 100 were the “other New England-based editing company”. Media 100 was the Marvel to Avid’s DC Comics. It wasn’t a rivalry, but there was a mutual respect and admiration across the two companies and across its employees. Media 100 faced bankruptcy in 2004 and was rescued by Boris FX in 2005. Boris Yamnitsky was one of the founders of Media 100, so this was a project dear to his heart. When people talk about Media 100, they speak fondly about what the product once was. In 2015, people should start talking about what Media 100 is.
Media 100 is starting to pick up steam again mostly because Boris is really making a huge push towards getting Media 100 into people’s hands again. First and foremost, Boris is offering a sixty day trial of Media 100. Another way to get your hands on Media 100 is through a current promotion Boris is having where if you buy Boris Red for After Effects, you get Media 100 for free. Boris has also tried to raise Media 100’s visibility by partnering with MacVideo Promo, a company that hopefully will raise awareness of Media 100. So awareness and availably are both up for Media 100.
So what can Media 100 do that’s new? It now supports XML Transfer so you can send your project out to an After Effects system. It supports all the latest Mac based file formats and you can move XMLs in and out. So the collaboration tools are better than ever. Media 100 also supports most of the popular AJA and Black Magic IO devices so you can push up to 4K out to client monitor. Media 100 only supports Mac OS so Windows users can’t take the trial.
So in the past few years Boris has grown quite a bit. They have a new office in Boston, they have acquired an Academy Award winning company and their core product line of Continuum Complete and Boris RED are still innovative. With free trials throughout the product line, it makes sense to give this Boston-based company another look. If you fell out of touch with the products, it’s the perfect time to get reacquainted.
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Pentagon, Powderhouse and many others. You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com. Learn more, visit www.HBCommunications.com.