PRODUCT: Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite V.2
WEB SITE: www.redgiant.com
PRICE: $795; upgrades are $149
· DV compression correction
· SD, HD & HDV support
· True 24p conversion tools
Magic Bullet is an all-digital pipeline for finishing digital movies. Developed at The Orphanage, a digital film production and post company in San Francisco, it was designed to allow ultimate creative control over digital projects while maintaining the highest possible quality, with a particular eye toward mimicking the characteristics of motion picture film.
The first Orphanage original production, a short film called The Last Birthday Card, would become the proving ground for a new way of making movies. Director Stu Maschwitz was confident the quality of the images he was getting from his slick new Sony DCR-VX1000 (ahhh, the golden years of DV) were superb, but there was no question that the hyper-detailed, “big brother” video look of it had to go. Eventually Stu hoped to transfer the project to film, but he didn’t want this to be the first time he would see his project with the 24 frames per second look he desired. In fact, he felt it was crucial to be able to create a high-quality video version of the piece that looked like film. A desktop 24p mastering solution seemed like the only way to go, but no such thing existed. Thus Magic Bullet was born.
WHAT’S INSIDE?
The Magic Bullet Suite consists of five plug-ins. The two most sought after from the suite are the “title track” Magic Bullet component, which takes care of the frame rate conversion and de-interlacing; and the Look Suite, which creatively treats the colors and tones of the video to mimic different film stocks, specific feature films or lab processes. I was pleasantly surprised to find “looks” from some of my favorite films, like Amelie and Saving Private Ryan. (Check out: www.redgiantsoftware.com/lookguide.html.) Surprisingly absent were aesthetic references to such classics as Ben Affleck’s Gigli and Paris Hilton’s earlier “independent” film,” which I consider to be her most sincere work, truly demonstrating the extent of her talent.
Then there’s the Opticals plug-in, which simulates the look of optical cross-dissolves and fades to black, like they come out of the film lab. The Letterboxer adds black bars on top of your footage, nothing you couldn’t do on your own in AE, but it’s a quick and convenient way to get the aspect ratio’s right for different film formats. The Broadcast Spec plug-in provides different ways to keep your video within broadcast legal range. Personally, I prefer to keep my footage barely legal.
You may not have known it, but you’re probably already a fan of Bulleted Footage. The MB Suite has been used on Vanilla Sky, ABC’s Superfire, MTV’s Jackass the Movie, Cher’s music video A Song for the Lonely and in the Nike commercial Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Magic Bullet Suite V.2.0 delivers a proven set of tools for creating film-like motion and looks. Magic Bullet offers a unique de-interlacing and de-artifacting solution for converting interlaced material to progressive as well as converting 29.97 and 25fps material to 24p — the native frame rate of film. Other products seem to lack the sophisticated frame rate conformance tools, looks creation and broadcast output capabilities that guys like me dig. Other film look systems blend frames or merge fields to create 24p frames. This technique results in unnatural motion blur in the footage, as the combination of the two fields simulates a 360-degree shutter in a film camera — something that is not physically possible. Other systems that try to address the shutter speed issue de-interlace in a destructive fashion, resorting to half resolution information in motion areas of the frame. Magic Bullet is not only a way to create a true 24p master from your video source, it is also a first step toward actually transferring your video to film. Whether you are doing a video-to-video or video-to-film project, this is one of the key reasons I found Magic Bullet to be a big step above the competing products.
ANY DOWNSIDES?
OK — so it’s not a perfect world. To achieve this level of quality, it takes time. Specifically, render time. I found most of my comps with the basic Magic Bullet package applied (Bullet, Looks and Broadcast safe) take about one hour to render one minute. (This on an HP xw8200 dual-Xeon 3.2GHz w/2GB RAM) So for short format stuff, music videos, commercials, interstitials… Great! For indie features…Yikes! In the Jolly Red Giant’s defense, they do allow for network rendering over several computers to diversify the render hit. But, not all of us have a full post facility at our disposal capable of such a processing train. So I default to the Christmas morning surprise, where I [CTRL M] my AE comp at night, and admire it’s splendor in the morning.
Another problem: I had to load all the looks each time I wanted to sample one on my project. Why not have these immediately viewable in the effect controls window?
FINAL THOUGHTS
When it’s all said and done, I like the quality of what I see in the rendered file. It’s a rare thing to be able to take standard footage in, and actually spit something out that looks better. This is all very contradictory to the S-in S-out theory. Some will undoubtedly complain about the price tag — but the justification is simple when you think of the literal production value you gain. Shooting 35mm or even 16mm in the field will end up being way more of an expense than a single software purchase from Red Giant. And the bonus is: now you get both the SD and HD software in the same package — not too long ago, they were separate products. And if that wasn’t enough, HDV is even supported now. So there. Let me just close with this simple thought. Interlacing: BAD. Magic Bullet: GOOD.