June 21
Boris FX Fire
Our first peek at the Continuum package reveals real promise for the retail release

by Dave Nagel
Executive Producer

Beginning July 25, Boris FX will make available a new set of 23 filters for Adobe After Effects—Continuum. We hadn't seen the slightest hint of what this package would contain until yesterday, when Boris announced it was offering one of the effects in the set for free—of course as an incentive to buy the entire package ($395)—without any restrictions except that it has to be downloaded before June 30.

This freebie is called Boris Fire. Well, we've all seen fire filters before—for video and paint applications—and, frankly, they're not terribly impressive. You might as well shoot a match in a dark room and composite that over your sequence. But the Fire filter that's part of the Boris Continuum package is different. It's better. Much better. It's like space aliens landed at the Boris FX offices and handed them the secret to some mysterious technology that's probably too dangerous for mankind to play with.

At any rate, rather than using this alien technology to conquer the world, Boris instead chose to use it to develop an outstanding effect plugin that bodes incredibly well for the full retail release of Continuum.

What it does
The Fire filter is a part of the Natural Filters package in Continuum. This particular filter's sole purpose is to create a fire effect. But there are two differences between Boris Fire and fire filters offered previously. First, the effect is just better. The flames have a richer feel to them, and the patterns look less ... how do you say? ... crappy. Second, and equally important, Boris Fire gives the user a lot more control over the effect.

Serious control. Actually, there are 47 individual controls, including everything from standard size and shape options to bias, gain, wind, mapping and texture detail—all of which work together to produce some stunning results.

Since I just downloaded this filter yesterday, I haven't had a lot of time for After Effects rendering. But if you click on the images to the left, you can see four QuickTime examples. (There's one more with multiple applications of the filter on the next page.)

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