Burin user guide

Burin draws vector artwork in Resolume Arena and Avenue, as a pair of FFGL plugins, and the same thing again as an OpenFX plugin for Resolve, Nuke, Natron and Vegas. Point it at an SVG and it draws it at the resolution the frame actually needs, rebuilt whenever that changes, so going in close stays sharp instead of turning into a bitmap.

Both halves are the same drawing at the same 4.3× zoom. Left: a 900×900 export, magnified, which is what you get from a PNG. Right: the plugin, having re-rasterised at the size being shown.

Before you rely on this: the main claim, that zooming in stays sharp because the drawing is rebuilt at the size it’s being seen at, is measured rather than just asserted. A hard edge measures 1.0 px of alpha transition at 1×, 2×, 4×, 8×, 16× and 32×; the same raster left un-rebuilt measures 1, 3, 3, 7, 13 and 25 px across the same range. The GPU and CPU renderers agree bit-exactly, which is what keeps Resolume and Resolve honest with each other, and 37 parameters are swept end to end.

Both FFGL plugins load and render in Resolume Arena. The OpenFX build renders on Resolve’s Fusion page from v0.1.10, which fixed every render failing there. It has not been tried on Resolve’s other pages, or in Nuke or Natron. Still open even in Arena: whether the twice-an-octave rebuild during a continuous zoom is visible in a room.

This codebase was created with AI assistance, directed and reviewed by a human author.

Read this before anything else: text

Live <text> isn’t rendered at all. The SVG parser has no text support whatsoever: no font loading, no glyph outlines, not even a stub. An SVG whose content is live text parses without error and draws an empty frame.

Convert text to outlines before exporting. Illustrator: Type → Create Outlines. Inkscape: Path → Object to Path. Figma: Outline Stroke / Flatten. Affinity Designer: Layer → Convert to Curves.

Also ignored: <use>, <image>, <clipPath>, <mask>, <pattern> and <filter>. The plugin counts every one of these while loading and says so in its log, because “the plugin does nothing” and “your file is mostly live text” are otherwise the same picture.

.svgz isn’t offered at all, on purpose, rather than accepted and then failed: it’s gzipped SVG, and the parser has no inflate.

What it does draw: paths, rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polylines and polygons, with flat colours or linear and radial gradients, strokes with their joins, caps, miters and dash patterns, and grouped transforms.

Installing

macOS    ~/Documents/Resolume Arena/Extra Effects/
Windows  %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Resolume Arena\Extra Effects\

Then in Resolume: Sources → Generators → Burin, or drop Burin Over on a clip. Point Drawing at example-plate.svg from the repo’s docs/ folder to start with something.

The macOS builds are Developer ID-signed and notarised. The Windows builds are unsigned, but plugin files aren’t gated the way .exe files are, so only the installer trips SmartScreen, once.

OpenFX hosts

Copy Burin.ofx.bundle into /Library/OFX/Plugins (macOS), C:\Program Files\Common Files\OFX\Plugins (Windows) or /usr/OFX/Plugins (Linux).

Unusually for this kind of port, almost nothing is reimplemented: the picture is built by a CPU rasteriser in both builds (in Resolume the GPU only does the final transform and composite), so the document, the styling, the reveal, the motion and the scale ladder are the same code. A preset looks the same in Resolve as in Resolume because both read one table through one interpreter, rather than two implementations being kept in step.

Sync there offers Free and Manual only, because an OFX host carries no tempo. Manual is the mode for keyframing Phase against the edit.

Two plugins, and which to reach for

Burin is a source: the drawing on its own background, on its own layer.

Burin Over is an effect: the same drawing over the incoming clip, with a Mix control. It exists because the obvious way to get a logo over footage (source on its own layer plus a blend mode) costs a layer and puts the drawing’s controls somewhere other than the clip they belong to.

There’s no “use the incoming clip as the drawing” mode, on purpose. A clip is a raster, and this plugin exists because its source isn’t one.

Why it stays sharp, and what that costs

A bitmap zoomed eight times is eight times blurrier. A vector isn’t, but only if something re-rasterises it, and re-rasterising a thousand-path drawing every frame isn’t a budget any show has.

So the scale is snapped onto a ladder of half-octave rungs, and the drawing is rebuilt only when the rung changes. Between rebuilds the GPU scales what is already there, and never by more than half an octave. The ladder always rounds up, so the raster is always at least as fine as the screen needs and the hardware only ever shrinks it. Shrinking costs no sharpness, whereas enlarging by even 19% is clearly visible on a hard edge.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The raster covers what’s on screen, not the whole document. Zooming from 1× to 50× doesn’t grow it. A small mark in the corner of a large artboard costs the size of the mark.
• A still frame never rebuilds, and a pan mostly doesn’t. A six-octave zoom rebuilds thirteen times across six hundred frames; three hundred frames of pan cost four rebuilds.

The controls

Document: the file, whether it’s framed by its declared artboard (Viewport) or by its ink (Content), how it’s fitted, and Detail: how fine the raster is relative to the frame. Above 1× it’s rasterised finer and downsampled, which beats the parser’s own antialiasing on thin diagonals. Below 1× it’s the release valve on a heavy drawing.

Style: Draw picks fills, strokes or both, and it’s exact rather than approximated: the parser keeps the two as separate paint on the same shape, so Stroke Only on artwork composed entirely of solids gives you the wireframe of something whose author never drew one.

Stroke Width scales what the file declared. Min Stroke px holds a floor in device pixels, and matters more than it sounds: the rasteriser drops a stroke entirely below a hundredth of a pixel, so without it, hairlines on a drawing being zoomed out vanish one shape at a time rather than fading.

Recolour replaces fill, stroke or both while keeping each shape’s own alpha; Colour Spread walks the hue across the shapes.

Isolate: a first shape and a count, as proper integers, because they’re counting your file.

Reveal: the write-on. Draw On draws strokes in along their own length; Retract takes them back toward where the pen started; Hold puts the Progress slider in charge, so a reveal can be keyframed or cued by hand. Stagger offsets each shape against the next, and Order decides the sequence: document order, reversed, longest first, shortest first, or a stable scatter. Fill Fade brings each shape’s fill up behind its own line.

Longest first is the one to try on a technical drawing: the structure arrives before the detail.

Motion: Zoom, Position, Rotate, and an excursion for each: Zoom Move, Drift X/Y, Spin. They share one clock (free, per beat, per bar, or off the Phase slider) and one Wave. The two drift axes are a quarter cycle apart, so a drawing with both set wanders rather than sliding along a diagonal.

Colour: tint, opacity, a background, and Mix on the effect build.

Preset: eight named looks. A preset never touches your file, the Bounds control, or the Isolate range: those describe your material, not a look.

Cost

Measured on a 464-shape drawing with the write-on running, which is the worst case because its pixels change every frame:

Resolume only pays the rasterise column (the composite is a shader there), and only on a rebuild. Detail below 1× is the lever if a heavy drawing costs too much at 4K.

If it looks wrong

Every slider is at zero and nothing draws, on v0.1.5 or earlier. That’s a bug, fixed in v0.1.6. Those builds told the host that every control’s default was 0 (Opacity included), so the source came up black and the effect passed the clip through untouched, no matter what drawing you picked. Update, or drag Opacity up and carry on. The log looks perfectly healthy in this state, because as far as the plugin is concerned it was asked for nothing.

The layer is empty and nothing errored. Almost certainly live text. Check the log; it counts what it had to skip.

Nothing appears when I pick a file. If the previous drawing is still on screen, the new path didn’t resolve: the plugin keeps what it had rather than blanking, and says so only in the log.

Hairlines disappear as I zoom out. Raise Min Stroke px. Below a hundredth of a pixel the rasteriser drops a stroke entirely, so they go one at a time rather than fading.

Stroke Only shows nothing. The artwork has no strokes; it was composed as filled shapes. That’s the file, not the plugin.

It looks soft after a big zoom. It shouldn’t. If it does, note the zoom level and report it, because that’s the one thing this plugin exists to get right.

Diagnostics

One log, both builds. There’s no crash handler, since this runs inside somebody else’s process.

~/Library/Logs/burin/burin.YYYY-MM-DD.log          macOS
%LOCALAPPDATA%\burin\logs\burin.YYYY-MM-DD.log     Windows
~/.local/state/burin/logs/burin.YYYY-MM-DD.log     Linux

It covers the failures that look identical from outside: a file that wouldn’t open or parse, a file that parsed and contains nothing this renderer can draw (the important one: live text), a raster capped for size, and a shader that wouldn’t compile.