Looking at Magic Bullet Suite 2008
By S Simmons. Filed in Avid editing, Final Cut Pro, Mac software, Useful tools for editors |
While 2009 isn’t that far away I’m happy to report that I have recently gotten my hands on the Magic Bullet Suite 2008 from Red Giant Software. It’s a comprehensive suite of software that would go well in most any editors toolbox, especially if he/she does finishing out of the edit suite. There’s really a lot of things that this package can do and you might not use everything on one job. But then if you put them all together and use them to complement each other you just might find Magic Bullet Suite 2008 cab help put a polish on your edit that isn’t possible with the stock Final Cut Pro tools alone.
The biggie in the suite would probably be Magic Bullet Looks. There’s been a lot written about Looks and its innovative approach of simulating different parts of the filmmaking process in order to achieve a desired look. It shows that someone was thinking outside the box when they designed the interface and the results can be stunning. Presets or custom looks, you can do things in Magic Bullet Looks you can’t do anywhere else.
Magic Bullet Colorista is color correction tool similar to the Final Cut Pro three way color corrector but only in the color-wheels they both share. While you can do nice work with the stock FCP 3-way corrector Colorista comes much closer to what a higher end color grading suite could achieve. Use it once and you won’t want to color correct with the FCP’s built-in tool again.
Magic Bullet Frames is for giving interlaced video the 24P look of film. And everyone who has interlaced video these days wants the film-look right?
Magic Bullet Steady is an image stabilization tool. Wobbly, shaky, jittery … Steady will attempt to smooth it out and give you a few options for the smoothness level, all the way to a lock down. It’s goes head-to-head with Smoothcam and claims much faster time when analyzing footage.
Finally there is Magic Bullet Instant HD. Designed to convert standard definition DV to high definition Instant HD uses sharpening and anti-aliasing to up-rez to any number of HD formats.
I’ve begun kicking the tires on the Suite and so far it’s a nice package. Stay tuned for an upcoming review of the different parts and pieces.
Tags: magic bullet, software
Monday, September 29th 2008 at 1:07 pm
Please take a look if there is anything new in Looks till end of 2006…
George
Monday, September 29th 2008 at 2:05 pm
??? not sure I understand that question George.
Tuesday, September 30th 2008 at 8:46 am
In my experience Colorista has some kind of interface problems when adjusting the lift, gamma, gain (or however the level adjustments on the outer wheels are called) when clicking and dragging. I drag the mouse either vertically, horizontally or in circles, but whenever the cursor reaches the 45degrees corners of the circle it gets stuck or turns back. The only solution is to click once on the target but then it’s a click-error proccess and you loose the interactivity and feedback.
Am I doing anything worng or is this a known problem?
Tuesday, September 30th 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’ve kind of seen the same thing DaNni. I have a track ball that has a hold function for dragging so I usually use then when dragging those sliders but it does seem that it has a few problems at some point in certain drags. I’ll look at this more specifically when I review it.
Wednesday, October 1st 2008 at 9:30 am
Hey guys I don’t think we have a report of this issue in our bug database for the color wheel issue. I will take a look at the wheel luminance controls and see if I can replicate.
Sean Safreed, Product Director, Red Giant Software
Wednesday, October 1st 2008 at 9:35 am
Hey guys, just noticed this question. I’m engineering manager at Red Giant and was hoping I could help out. We actually designed the luminance sliders on the outsides of the color wheels to respond to dragging to the right and left. Right should make it brighter (towards white) and left should make it darker (towards black). Up and down might occasionally jump from left to right and visa versa, so maybe this is the problem you are experiencing? If not, please let me know so we can figure out if there is a bug.
Thanks, and if you like you are welcome to e-mail me directly at micah@redgiantsoftware.com, or of course I can post any help here too for others to see.
Micah Sharp
Red Giant Software
Wednesday, October 1st 2008 at 3:04 pm
hay Micah Sharp i have a question to you:in “MB looks” why is not the option to key frame a look?
i mean u can only give a look to a “cut” on the time line and cant change the look in a certien point in the cut ( i am useing MB looks in Avid)
is there another option?
THANKS
(sorry for the bad english)
Wednesday, October 1st 2008 at 7:45 pm
Thanks guy from Red Giant for chiming in …. I’ll look at the left / right dragging thing more specifically when I fire it up again in a few days.
Thursday, October 2nd 2008 at 1:41 pm
Hi, good question. The main reason is that our “look” is really a blob of data as far as Avid is concerned, and all the separate tools and parameters are our own. This is a common request to allow keyframing of some type inside LooksBuilder. We are looking at doing something to hopefully allow this in the future. in the meantime I’m afraid only single Looks on cuts.
Thanks for the question.
Micah Sharp