We’ve recently switched back to BorisFX Title Studio from doing most of our GFX in AfterEffects. It provides significant speed upsides for being able to edit inline.
However, we work on Avid MediaComposer in a shared workspace that includes Mac and PC. We’re finding some severe limitations in the BorisFX suite in those circumstances. The issue is lack of path consistency that is unavoidable. Not a new problems, other platforms like Resolve have sorted this with path mapping features. I don’t think it exists in BorisFX though?
Use case 1: I built a call-out graphic yesterday in Title Studio that relies on an animated border. We tried to copy our original AE design, and got close with border start/end keyframes, but not quite due to some quirks on how these parameters work when the size of the shape changes as well. Having watched @Ben_Brownlee tutorial on TitleStudio I thought, fine let me make some assets in Illustrator for those border. Import those as image textures into Title Studio. Worked fine. Until our other editor opened the sequence and all the images were offline.
Mind you, they’re coming from the same file location both systems have mapped. But on the PC the folder is at J:\AvidMedia\Project\xxx while on the Mac the same folder reads as /Volumes/AvidMedia/Project/xxx - since that path is stored as an absolute (not relative) path in the title effect, anytime we switch OS, all the links break. That’s not workable. And we need to be able to hand the project back and forth.
Use case 2: I actually posted that over on the Sapphire channel. Same issue exists in the Pan & Zoom effect of Sapphire. It stores the absolute path name and breaks when passing between operating systems.
Surely we can’t be the only people who use Avid and BorisFX in a multi-OS environment. What’s the solve for that?
For the time being we’re living with Title Studio without importing image assets that introduce path names. But that limits our designs. It would be ok if we had to go in once per project and set a root path for assets. But going in an re-loading all file assets for every title in the sequence ever time the project is opened on another system is not practical.