Continuum 2023.5 ships
Originally posted on 31 October 2022. Scroll down for news of the Continuum 2023 update.
Boris FX has released Continuum 2023, the latest version of its set of effects plugins for compositing and editing software, adding a new BCC+ Atmospheric Glow effect, and updating the BCC+ Film Glow effect.
Particle Illusion, Continuum’s particle effects system, now calculates and renders “up to 50% faster”.
New and reworked effects for adding light glows to footage
Continuum 2023 adds one new effect, BCC+ Atmospheric Glow: a ‘mega filter’ that combines multiple light types into a single effect, which can be customised with lens textures, light rays and atmospheric smoke.
Updates to existing effects include a secondary glow option for the BCC+ Film Glow effect, and 50 new seamlessly tiling gobo presets for the BCC+ Light effect.
There are also 250 new presets for existing effects, and 10 new or newly GPU-accelerated transitions.
Performance improvements to Particle Illusion, plus new particle emission options
Particle Illusion, Continuum’s 2D and 3D particle generator, gets a “significant” performance boost, with combined calculation and rendering speed “up to 50% faster”, and a reworked user interface.
New features include the option to emit particles from the normals of 3D models, plus new controls for fluid swirling frequency and force falloff, and the option to make certain emitters unaffected by fluid forces.
Updated 14 June 2023: Boris FX has released Continuum 2023.5.
Particle Illusion gets another significant update, with new features including a trails option for generating motion trails from particles.
Other changes include the option to use other layers in the host software as masks to control particle emission, while 3D deflectors have been made full 3D planes.
There are also a lot of workflow improvements, particularly to the gradient editor and timeline, plus the option to solo nodes to make it easier to troubleshoot complex particle setups.
New effects, and updates to existing effects and Mocha planar tracking
Outside Particle Illusion, there are four new effects: BCC+ Super LED, for mimicking the look of billboard LED displays, plus the more self-descriptive BCC+ Smoke and Fog, BCC+ Light Flicker and BCC+ Orbs.
In addition, Beat Reactor, for generating keyframes from an audio track, is now available in over 40 BCC+ effects, and there are over 150 new presets for existing effects.
There is one new transition, BCC+ Flutter Cut.
The integrated version of the Mocha planar tracker gets the new features from Mocha Pro 2023, and Mocha planar tracking can be used to drive point parameter and corner pin control groups.
Pricing and system requirements
Continuum 2023.5 is compatible with a range of compositing and editing software, including After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Nuke, running on Windows 10+ or macOS 10.15.6+.
It is priced according to host application, with new licences costing from $695 to $1,995. Subscriptions cost from $195/year to $695/year. It is also possible to buy individual Continuum Units.
Read an overview of the new features in Continuum on Boris FX’s website
Read a full list of new features in Continuum 2023.5 in the online release notes (Adobe edition)