BorisFX adds CrumplePop Audio Suite

BorisFX didn’t have a dedicated booth at NAB 2023, but they did have an important NAB announcement – namely the acquisition of plug-in developer CrumplePop. Audio isn’t completely new for BorisFX (for instance, their Beat Reactor effect). However, this move adds a full-blown set of AI-based audio restoration tools targeted towards video editors as part of their creative suites.

CrumplePop has been developing video plug-ins, Motion templates, and more recently, audio plug-ins for about a dozen years. As part of the BorisFX brand, the developers will focus on the AI-based audio tools going forward. Legacy plug-ins will continue to work, but will no longer be sold, developed, or supported with updates.

The current CrumplePop bundle includes six restoration filters (AudioDenoise, WindRemover, PopRemover, RustleRemover, TrafficRemover, ClipRemover), two finishing filters (Levelmatic,  EchoRemover), and a standalone audio application (SoundApp). You get all of these when you install the bundle, along with a license management application.

These plug-ins are only sold as the complete bundle, much like BorisFX’s Continuum and Sapphire products. You can start with the free Starter plan, in which case SoundApp, PopRemover, and RustleRemover are fully licensed. The other filters also install, but run in a trial mode. They are fully functional, but have an audible watermark every few seconds. If you want the complete set, then purchase the Pro bundle as a subscription ($23/mo. billed annually) or as a perpetual license ($599).

Getting started

Once everything is authorized through the CrumplePop licensing application, all watermarks are removed. You do have to stay signed into this app in order for those plug-ins to remain authorized on that computer. However, you can operate offline without an internet connection after they have been activated. This activation process will likely change in the future to be in line with the other BorisFX products.

There are Windows and macOS installers, which add AU and/or VST plug-ins to your system. These plug-ins run natively on Apple Silicon Macs, but the SoundApp application will operate under Rosetta2. Nearly all of the usual NLEs and DAWs are supported, with the exception of Avid Media Composer and Pro Tools, since there are no AAX versions of these plug-ins, yet. However, according to BorisFX, Avid support is in the works.

SoundApp is an alternate way to process audio tracks in need of repair. It is also useful for Avid users who don’t have any other NLE or DAW software. This application’s window provides controls for each of the functions of the bundle. Import a file. Select one or more filters to use. Adjust the strength of restoration for each and then export a new, processed file.

A simplified interface design

The individual plug-ins use a “one knob” interface design. There’s a single knob in the center for the strength, plus an output level slider on the side. These plugins (except EchoRemover, Levelmatic, and ClipRemover) include low, mid, and high frequency range knobs so that you can dial in the amount of processing for each of these three bands. In the EchoRemover plug-in, these three knobs control dryness, body, and tone.

When you first apply a plug-in and open it, helpful information overlays appear for all of the controls. Click anywhere in the interface to clear them. Click the small information (“i”) icon just under the main control knob and they reappear. Unfortunately, the plug-in windows do not scale. When you resize the plug-in window, the interface boundaries enlarge, but the controls do not scale accordingly.

What about artificial intelligence?

Many developers are tossing around artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of their marketing. I asked BorisFX to enlighten me on the specifics of the AI-based processing used in these audio filters. They replied, “AI models are used by CrumplePop filters to generate clean versions of the audio signals. The original noisy samples of audio tracks are fed into the model and the clean version of the same audio is generated. We believe AI is uniquely suited to audio restoration where traditional DSP techniques require more audio engineering skills and editing efforts.”

In other words, modeling is used to identify unwanted sounds. Your tracks are compared and, based on this modeling, those sounds are removed. In actual practice, this explains why there are several specific filters to cover sounds like wind or traffic, rather than one, all-encompassing noise reduction tool. When you have several offending sounds in a track, you may need to apply several of these filters to catch all of the unwanted sounds.

How does it sound?

I’ve been testing these plug-ins on a range of real-world tracks and have been very impressed. I’m pleasantly surprised that they run very smoothly on my 2020 Intel iMac. The performance, especially in terms of latency, seems greatly improved over their legacy versions on the same iMac. The operation of each couldn’t be simpler. Apply the effect, open the interface, and dial in the percentage based on what you hear. No noise print to capture and everything works in real-time without rendering.

One interesting test was using the EchoRemover. I had a track recorded in a corporate conference room with a lot of reverberation, thanks to the hard walls in the room. I had used Resolve’s new Voice Isolation feature, which worked well. However, CrumplePop EchoRemover sounded better. It not only removed the bounce from the room, but it also seemed to enhance the voice quality and bring it more forward. That’s in part due to the three lower controls (dryness, body, tone), which enhance the sound of this filter.

Let me caution readers that there is no single set of audio repair/restoration plug-ins that is a universal panacea. Sometimes one brand will sound better on one clip and other times it will be a different brand. I used AudioDenoise on an outdoor clip with an on-camera boat reviewer. There were some slight wave, wind, and motor noises. The plug-in did an excellent job. However, on closer inspection, I noticed that soft sounds at the end of sentences (s, t, and sh sounds) were sometimes suppressed – often when a breath followed. For example, the word “lounge” became “loun” at the end of a sentence. These same sounds were fine when they appeared within the sentence. In any case, it was easy to fix by cutting back the original few frames. It’s possible this may not have happened had I used the WindRemover plug-in instead or if a different host had been talking.

The CrumplePop suite is a toolkit designed for video editors and most of the effects appear to be modeled around voice. If I apply WindRemover to a clip that only includes wind noise, it will not be completely removed. On the other hand, if the wind noise is behind someone speaking, then it will largely be eliminated.

Is this toolkit for you?

These tools cover a lot of bases, but I was surprised that there were no filters for certain common corrections, such as to de-ess (soften sibilance), de-breath (remove breaths), de-click (remove mouth clicks and sounds), or de-hum (remove constant-frequency electrical hum). And naturally, nothing that’s specific to music production, like removing the string squeaks from acoustic guitar tracks. Nevertheless, according to BorisFX, “We are working on a very aggressive roadmap for future filters. The current set is just the beginning. Again, similar to Continuum and Sapphire, more filters will be added to the CrumplePop set within the same price structure.”

Even if you already own or subscribe to other audio repair/restoration plug-ins, the BorisFX CrumplePop bundle is worth checking out. The potential for bad audio exists on every production an editor faces. So it never hurts to be able to offer multiple options to solve the problem. Test your clips in the trial mode and you just might be hooked.

This article was originally written for Pro Video Coalition.

©2023 Oliver Peters

Boris FX – Rockin’ with BCC6

Boris FX is one of the most prolific producers of plug-in filters and compositing applications. Factor in all the host applications covered by the Boris products – like Boris Continuum Complete, plus the hosted and standalone versions of Boris Red, Blue, FX and Graffiti – and you can easily see how so much video is touched by this talented team of developers.

 

With so many products to offer, the company tends to concentrate on updating all the versions of one product over the course of a year. 2009 has been the time to refresh many of the filters and all of the NLE host versions of Boris Continuum Complete, now at version 6. Continuum is probably the most wide-ranging set of filter packages available, consisting of keyers, effects, generators, color-correction, 3D text and more.

 

 

If you purchase the retail version of Avid Media Composer, this will include the BCC filters as a bundled third-party product in the suite. After Effects and Final Cut users don’t get such a bundling deal from Adobe or Apple, but if you are going to shell out cash for a single comprehensive set of filters, then BCC is one of the best choices.

 

Naturally many editors don’t use all of the filters on a regular basis, so Boris FX has started to break out some of the individual filters into Boris Continuum Units. These are smaller sets of complementary filters that focus on one task. At this point, these include the Chromakey Studio and the 3D Objects unit. BC Units don’t cost as much as the full BCC package and let users purchase only the one or two filter sets that they feel might be the most useful to their workflow.

 

Each host application uses a different plug-in API, so BCC6 comes in versions that are specific to individual NLE and compositing application. This lets Boris FX customize the features according to the API and allows them the ability to add some functions, like geometry controls and deep color rendering that might not be part of the host’s internal effects controls. I work with BCC6 is various flavors: AVX, FxPlug and After Effects. Each of these filter packs is generally the same, though there are variations particular to one host or the other. The big new features in BCC6 include 3D objects, like extruded splines and text, more chroma-keying tools, more real-time and OpenGL acceleration, support for After Effects’ camera and lighting system and keyframe animation exchange between the AE and AVX versions of BCC6.

 

Overall, BCC6 filters work well in all of these hosts (FCP, Media Composer, Motion and After Effects CS4). You can quickly see how certain filters, like 3D animated and shaded text, particles and layer deformation, can be used in very creative ways to greatly enhance your favorite application. This is especially true in Avid Media Composer, which has one of the weakest and oldest effects modules of any of these applications.

 

 

The most updated approach can be found in the FxPlug version. This API offers a number of options to the developer, but of course, it’s Mac only. For example, BCC6 FxPlug includes several filter categories labeled BCS filters for Boris Continuum Shaders. According to Boris Yamnitsky (yes, the Boris of Boris FX), “The name Shaders stems from the implementation method for all filters in that subset of Boris Continuum. The software algorithms have been re-written in a special shader language for the GPU under FxPlug architecture. For example, the Chroma Key algorithm is roughly the same, but the new filter is dramatically faster than the software counterpart. In addition, the choke and light-wrap stages are added at no render cost. The three software filters stacked up on a clip will certainly require longer rendering while the GPU version easily plays back in RT mode. Same for Film Look and all other BCS filters. What’s even more interesting is that multiple BCS filters can be stacked up without the multi-filter penalty so common with software based filters.”

 

These specific filters enable a new, interactive preset browser that previews your video clip – not a default dummy clip – with the presets applied. You can interactively select and refine the choices simply by clicking through the presets in the browser window. Right now this feels like a bit of a work-in-progress to me. For example, only the filters that apply a visual effect – like the Film Effect – actually have presets that show up on the browser. It won’t display any presets from the Chromakey or 3D Perspective filter. The browser’s custom UI also acted flakey inside Motion, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Motion can be very powerful, but often disappoints and acts like a toy and not a robust software tool.

 

 

BCS Chromakey Studio is an example of a BC Units pack that’s part of BCC6 FxPlug. This combines the Chromakey, Matte Choker and Light Wrap filters into one module. The quality of the key was pretty good, but I couldn’t get Matte Choker to work correctly in either FCP or Motion. No matter where I adjusted the Choke slider, it was simply at one extreme or the other. By comparison, when I applied each of these filters individually, things worked as I would expect.

 

Light wrap is interesting, as it uses a color or the background image and blends it into the edge of the foreground object. It’s trying to simulate how light in a real shot tends to diffuse edges and “bend around” an object in a camera lens. Boris FX’s chromakeying is on par with other better keyers and gives very good results on clips that are easy to key. I wasn’t as happy with it on a more difficult-to-key test clip that I use. In general, the BCC keying filters gave me results close to Avid’s Spectramatte, but not as good as Keylight, which is included with After Effects CS4.

 

 

3D text is a big deal in the BCC6 update and something that’s not often found in competing filter packages. You can import EPS files or generate text using the familiar Boris text tool. Next, apply presets for style and animation. This filter is built on the Boris Blue 3D engine, so text stays vector-based, complete with material and lighting attributes.

 

 

These same 3D object characteristics are also applied in the Layer Deformation tool. If you’re old enough to recall Sony’s VERY expensive System G hardware DVE that could ripple and warp video in real-time in 3D space, then you get some idea of the power this single filter is delivering to the desktop.

 

 

Another BCS filter offered in the FxPlug version is 3D Perspective. This filter combines a number of Boris’ 3D filters and Apple Core Image technology to composite several elements using a single filter. In this particular effect, live video – complete with lighting and reflections – is placed on a floor surface. Preset animation moves control the camera move towards the video. You can change many of the attributes including the floor surface. The default is a checkerboard pattern, but simply drop other moving video or a still image into an image well for two layers of moving video – all within the same filter.

 

 

I feel that the BCC6 filters typically behave best in After Effects. The application feels snappier than any of the others, especially when scrubbing through a clip once filters are applied to it. After Effects momentarily degrades the video during scrubbing and then pops back to full quality (or the setting you’ve selected) as you stop. This delivers a more responsive experience. After Effects simply blows away Motion, Final Cut or Media Composer for serious compositing. Equipped with BCC6, it’s one kicking desktop compositing tool!

 

 

Unfortunately the After Effects implementation lacks an FxPlug-style preset browser and the BCS effects. Nearly all of the filters are actually there in the various categories – just no interactive browser. Nevertheless, if you want to know how an effect works, simply click the “help” button to open a PDF user guide for instructions.

 

 

Since I’m wrapping up by talking about After Effects, lets not forget Final Effects Complete. This vintage filter set introduced advanced image effects, like 3D shatters, cylinders and spheres, to the desktop world during the early days of After Effects. It’s bounced around a bit, but has been firmly in the Boris FX product family for several years, who has kept it current. FEC works with a number of hosts, including Final Cut Pro and After Effects CS4. When you want to pull out some funky effects for the client, it’s hard to beat filters like Hair or Mr. Mercury! Modern desktop machines and even laptops plough through these effects with ease, so there isn’t the performance burden we’ve known in the past. If you’re interested in both BCC and FEC, remember that Boris offers a number of bundling deals that make this combo quite attractive.

 

© 2009 Oliver Peters