Section: Mac Software, Audio / Video, Reviews
Provides: Color correction and camera effects for Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Premiere and others
Format: Download
Developer: Red Giant Software
Minimum System Requirements: Mac OSX 10.5.8, 1GB of RAM, 30MB of hard drive space, compatible host application
Review Computer: iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Final Cut Pro 7
Processor Compatibility: Universal Binary (Intel or PPC), recommended for Intel.
Price: $399
Availability: Out now
If you’re starting out as an indie filmmaker, one of the big challenges in post-production is taking your footage shot in high definition 1080p through a prosumer lens and trying to make it look like it came through the lens of a 35mm camera. But if you have a set of tools like Magic Bullet Looks, your job just became a lot easier.
Magic Bullet Looks (MBL) is a plug-in and standalone application that gives you the ability to color correct and do lens effects to digital video. It works like an effect: you drop your footage into the timeline, apply MBL from the Effects menu, then click “edit” to go into the MBL app.
MBL presents you with a still (taken from the playhead). From here you have two options to alter your footage. Most likely you’ll start with the Gallery drawer (on the left), which presents you with over 100 different Looks that are a combination of effects, sorted by style. Each look gives you a tumbnail preview of how it will alter the footage, and you can simply drag and drop it onto the screeenshot to apply it. Below the screenshot you’ll see a breakdown of all the effects that have been applied to the footage, and by clicking on the icon for the effect, you can alter its strength, color balance, and other statistics using a simple set of slider to the right.
Certain effects, like applying vignettes or altering the focus, use a set of crosshairs. If you want to change the area or center point, it’s a simple matter of clicking the icon, dragging the center point, and in the case of blurring, doing a click-drag on the circle to control the radius.
The Looks Gallery is an excellent starting point (though some of the presets are a little garish), but its real value is in showing you what can be done by combining different Tools, all of which can be found in a drawer on the right hand side as individual components. Starting with the Looks, you can add and delete Tools to the effect until you get the desired effect. You can also turn effects on and off to see how they affect the shot.
Magic Bullet Looks did an amazing job of taking an ordinary shot taken in a coffee shop using only the overhead fluorescent lights and adding some very dramatic lighting. One problem with it is that since it works with your footage as a still frame (in the external application), you can’t keyframe the values of the effects, like say by changing the area of the focus or altering the colors in a single shot. You can only treat your Look like a finished filter, keyframing it with masks.
But Magic Bullet Looks more than makes up for this in the breadth of its abilities and its ease of use. Within minutes I had taken blah footage and added a more cinematic feel. At $399, it’s not cheap, but it gives you an amazing set of fully customizable tools that might just fool your audience into thinking you shot it through the lens of a film camera.
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Full Story » | Written by Bill Stiteler for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »
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