...including heart wipes, which I never even considered until I was pummelled with demand when I was at Boris FX.
They were built with our (then) brand new vector shapes, and I was proud that they didn't look like anything else I'd ever seen before. They were included as a newsletter bonus, and we got crazy numbers of downloads.
BTW, a pretty elegant example from our peeps at Trapcode. I never explored using hearts in a particle system before, and I have to say, I really like this one quite a bit.
One of the things I like about it is that it shows a wipe exactly where transitions are best used...and most rarely used....which is for titling.
That said, one of the things I did while I was at Boris was dramatically increase the size of the transitions library. I can't even tell you how many hundreds it was....and the biggest single request I got, day in and day out, was for more.
One of the ways I fought back against the cheese was to focus on filter-based transitions rather than DVE...although I got some cool results from combining them. This also chummed the water for people who were always looking for newer looks and more of them.
Three more quick notes.
1) Home Improvement transitions were (I predict) once in a lifetime. I can't imagine topping them, so why would anyone bother.
2) Hollywood FX had a dandy set of Home Improvement-style transitions more than 10 years ago. Some of them were still fresh....and yet, nobody bought them. They had so many options they were hard to control (a problem because most of the presets were weak), they were overpriced (they came with a DONGLE for pete's sake), and they got bought by a company that buried them. But it really was a ridiculously powerful and customizable tool.
3) My boy Boris has some jaw-dropping tales to tell about about the early days of nonlinear effects. I asked him to write some of it down for me, and as soon as he gets me some pictures, I'm going to start turning it into articles.
One of the stories he tells is that there was overwhelming demand at the beginning for transitions that Boris is the first to say were pretty cheesy. But that was exactly exactly the point.
Many people who came up through linear editing, and the whole "computers are a fad" crowd, couldn't take NLEs seriously until they could AT LEAST do the weak-a** transitions that came with the basic Grass Valley 100.
How basic? Take a look.
See those 10 transitions I've circled. THAT basic. There were variations -- left, right, top, bottom, edged with color, etc. -- but that was pretty much it.
And computers couldn't do it for love or money. BTW, got a system that can handle 8 inputs with real-time, full-res transitions? Didn't think so. There's a reason why people still use hardware.
BTW, you can buy your own Grass Valley switcher. Or you can bid on eBay.
So anyway, it was a really big deal when computers could get around to doing full-sized video transitions.
One company had the Grass Valley switcher and its capabilities so firmly in its sights that they named their product to evoke it: Media 100.
Among their early claims to fame is that they could do INTERLACED video transitions. The launch t-shirt said "Friends don't let friends field double."
The interlacing part was just catching up. One of the ways that NLEs started to open the distance was to do MORE and BETTER transitions than the Grass Valley 100 could. That was the only play within reach, and for a while, the only one that mattered. Linear editing was light years faster, and ALWAYS more reliable, so computers had to do something NEW. At the time, this was it.
One of the amazing passages from Boris:
We signed a licensing agreement with Adobe allowing us to implement the newly released Adobe Premiere plug-in interface and even distribute the handful of plug-ins that Adobe provided with Premiere itself.
To this day I do not understand the logic that steered Adobe into this strange agreement. Media 100 was a strong competitor. I can only say that the licensed effects were so bad that Adobe may have benefited by being not the only one. Kind of a Trojan Horse maneuver.
Like I said, amazing.
He made an effort to go well past this, and succeeded. For YEARS, Boris was the only way to do a soft drop shadow in an NLE!! I almost can't believe that as I type it, but it's absolutely true. Boris also had what was for years the *only* decent page peel, and it was really outstanding. To this day, among the top 2 or 3.
And while some of the effects haven't aged especially well, they were considered screaming cutting edge at the time.
A lesson there kids: if it looks screaming cutting edge today, it won't age well. Period.
Anyway, transitions played among the very most important roles in establishing the viability of making a "transition" to nonlinear editing. They also helped create the very first visual vocabulary for the computer age of video editing.
Old school reperesenting. Respect.
