The Editblog

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.