If you do any video editing chances are you've heard of Red Giant. They're the makers of several popular video editing tools, plugins and associated software. They released Magic Bullet Suite 12not that long ago. I had the opportunity to work with and test the application. This review is the results of those efforts.
Magic Bullet Suite 12 includes 7 separate tools:
- Magic Bullet Film
- Magic Bullet Looks 3.0
- Magic Bullet Colorista III
- Magic Bullet Mojo 2.0
- Magic Bullet Cosmo 2.0
- Denoiser II
- LUT Buddy
Magic Bullet Suite 12 is basically a rich set of video color grading plugins for popular editors including Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere among others. (See the Red Giant website for compatibility details.) In fact, Magic Bullet used to be called "Color Suite" - and before that it was called Magic Bullet. That's right, it's now back to the original name.
The basic premise of Magic Bullet is to make digital video look more like film. Magic Bullet includes everything from mimicking the look of a wide range of film stock, to de-graining tools, to vignetting, to correcting blemishes and skin tones, to mimicking the look of a wide variety of television and film color gradings. It provides a sizable number of tools and presets as well as controls to extensively tweak those presets.
Magic Bullet Film
Magic Bullet Film - a completely new, never-before-seen product. Naturally I had to check it out! Magic Bullet Film makes your digital footage look like it was shot on the film stock of your choosing. Red Giant claims it mimics the entire photochemical process from negative to print stock. While I have no way of verifying that claim, what I can verify it's that it's a pretty cool plugin and very useful.
Image courtesy Red Giant.
The claim that Magic Bullet Film makes your project look like it was printed on print stock is, as far as I can tell, true. Taking this a step further it's not just any film stock, it's the film stock of your choosing - any one of 22, plus 4 print stocks to choose from. It's pretty crazy. There's also a lot of tinkering controls to nail down the precise look your project is going for. This goes beyond just color grading, it's accurately mimicking a given film and print stock right down to the grain.
Image courtesy Kurt Foster.
I ran Magic Bullet Film in Adobe Premiere CS6. It was quite responsive, providing real-time or very near real-time performance. It was nice to be able to tweak the settings while my video played. At times the frame rate dropped while doing this but for only around a second, possibly less. Thereafter my clip played real time to the end with all the changes I applied. Very snappy performance overall. Lots of detailed control over the look and feel of a given stock.
Image courtesy Red Giant.
Magic Bullet Film not only provides a lot of different film and print stock to choose from, but the coolest part is that they're pretty accurate representations of the film and print stock they are trying to mimic. After using the plugin it became apparent there was a lot of research put into developing Magic Bullet Film. Hats off to Red Giant for this one.
Image courtesy Red Giant.
The plugin was certainly useful. It could save you what would otherwise be hours - perhaps days of trying to nail down a given look by using more traditional approaches. Retailing for around $200 it is certainly worth a look. What is your time worth?
Does it disappoint or was it impressive?
Mostly impressive. The results looked convincing. It was easy to use. Easy to control. It was fast, stable. It could be useful on every project you ever make. Overall a solid product. It's true you could achieve similar results by pounding away at a compositor all day but why torture yourself? It's all about using the right tool for the job.
Magic Bullet Looks 3.0
It's basically a color grading Swiss army knife. It's akin to almost having a lightweight version of a node-based compositor at your disposal but without the complexity or the cost. Users can build up their own custom look by placing different operators or nodes, called "tools" in Magic Bullet Looks, in different slots and even alter the order of said tools. Examples of tools would be things like different lenses, curve editors, lens vignette, color corrections, diffuse glows, etc.
It's akin to a psudo-node based editor. Image courtesy Red Giant.
While Magic Bullet Looks is certainly not as flexible as a lower level node-based compositor like NUKE, (it also doesn't cost $8k) it does provide a surprising degree of flexibility. Magic Bullet Looks is also very easy to use. New users can be up and running, customizing new looks in 2 minutes flat. That said, it was very intuitive. There's also a lot of useful presets already in the library, and each one can be completely customized. There's 198 new preset looks, courtesy Stu Maschwitz.
Lots of presets to get you started. Image courtesy Red Giant.
Just as a side note, for those not familiar with Stu, he was one of three co-founders of The Orphanage, and before that he worked at Industrial Light and Magic; The guy knows his stuff. This is cool because I can apply a given look to my video at the click of a button and basically have Stu Maschwitz at the helm - almost. Of course users can take these presets a step further and customize the crap out of them.
Colorista III is included. Image courtesy me.
The only down side to Magic Bullet Looks is that a given look is edited on a single frame of video in its own window - which would be fine, but there's no scrubbing of the time slider allowed while editing a given look. Only after you click apply do the changes get applied to the entire clip and the rest of the UI again permits focus. Fortunately, at any time you can go back and edit an applied look: The whole process is all non-destructive.
Does it disapoint or was it impressive?
Again, mostly impressive. Granted, I didn't like the fact that I couldn't scrub the time slider while editing a given look, but it certainly wasn't a deal-breaker. Reason being: we're talking about essentially a filter that will be applied to the entire video, regardless. The Magic Bullet Looks UI was intuitive. Once applied, the look was very fast to compute for the rest of the footage. (Instant as far as I could tell.)
Magic Bullet Colorista III
Colorista III is a color correction Swiss army chainsaw and keyer. It provides a multitude of controls over every nuance of the color correction process, including a decent multi-point, per channel curve editor. Which is pretty much the meat and potatoes of color correction.
Colorista III boasts similar functionality to the heavy weight color correction nodes found in high end compositors. Because it's available to editors like Priemere Pro, you don't have to leave the editing environment to pull some pretty dramatic color corrections. It was also quite responsive. Red Giant claims Colorista III is capable of real time results on modern hardware. I can indeed attest to that. Overall it was very snappy.
Colorista III keyer. Image courtesy Red Giant.
Does it disappoint or was it impressive?
Leaning toward impressive. Colorista III basically gives you similar color correction tools that you find in a high end compositing program. For this level of control available to an editing program is pretty cool. You don't have to leave the editing environment to pull some pretty dramatic keys and corrections. For that reason alone I hereby dub thee, Colorista III, close to impressive.
That said, it's nothing you couldn't achieve in any compositing program worth its salt, all by itself. However getting there may take a bit longer. There's also performance considerations to worry about. Does your compositor offer real-time results? Colorista III was very fast, often real time and directly in the editing environment. I ran it in Premiere Pro. Is it a good tool? Yes. It was an excellent tool. Is it mission-critical software? Your call. Was it wonderfully convenient? Yes. Yes, it certainly was.
Final Thoughts
Retailing for around $800 Magic Bullet Suite 12 is certainly no toy. There's a lot of very powerful, professional tools included - more than were covered in this review. If you need to acquire color correcting ninja skills and fast, you should definitely consider looking at Magic Bullet Suite 12. If you're not up for the whole suite, then certainly check out the individual components you can purchase separately.
My thanks to Red Giant for providing Magici Bullet Suite 12 for review. LINKS:
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