Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526086
www.postmagazine.com 47 POST JUNE 2015 ith Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite 12, you no longer need Adobe After Effects to get perfect skin color or to work with Colorista. Magic Bullet Suite apps are also faster and the interface fonts finally look perfect. Until recently, Red Giant's Magic Bullet Suite didn't run from within Final Cut Pro X. It preferred After Effects, Premiere Pro or FCP 7. That's the first big improve- ment that makes this release a necessary upgrade. The new suite also includes one completely-new application, Magic Bullet Film, and new versions of Looks, Colorista, Mojo and Cosmo (which also now runs within FCP X). I tried every one of them and had a lot of fun. This is the first truly professional color grading/ looks suite where I don't have to switch applications in order to work with it. MAGIC BULLET FILM Magic Bullet Film gives you a generous choice of negative films to choose from and four "print" films for output. The combination allows for endless varia- tions. The adjustments in terms of hue, tint, grain, etc., are slider based and with realtime visual feedback, are as simple as they get. Film also lets you protect skin tones, something other film emulation plug-ins won't. COSMO 2.0 Cosmo is, put simply, a skin enhancer. Just like other apps in Red Giant's port- folio, Cosmo 'sees' skin tones using a fairly intelligent algorithm that recogniz- es skin colors. With the Cosmo controls, you can see which areas Cosmo correct- ly recognized, then fine-tune the results using sliders and apply both tint and smoothing. The smoothing works well, but it takes a bit of exercise in order to not apply too much correction. Cosmo in FCP X works like a charm and really fast. In Adobe products it's faster than the previous version. Like other Magic Bullet modules, it uses your GPU to achieve the highest speed. MOJO 2.0 The stylizer that gives your footage a grunge or "Bayou" look has been updat- ed too. I found Mojo working a lot faster, and with the same set of controls as in the previous version. MAGIC BULLET LOOKS 3.0 Magic Bullet Looks 3.0 has an updated interface and better user experience. That's immediately reflected in the mouse-hover behavior of the drawers for Looks (presets) and Tools. It's also very clear from the finally clean and sharp fonts used throughout. The best way to admire the improve- ments is to open Preferences and take a good look at the font rendering. I'm sure I wasn't the only one put off by the ugly jaggies and blotchiness of the previous version's font rendition. All gone now, clean, sharp, as it should be. According to Red Giant, it added 198 new customizable presets. The ones I liked most were the grading setups and headstart looks. These allow you to color grade your footage without having to start from scratch. Very useful! What is also great about all of the presets is the realtime rendering of the effects — faster than the previous version — with a display of the tools used as you hover over them. Cool feature! Presets also include film stock, both negative and positive films, log looks and more. There are now more tools to use, too. COLORISTA III This takes advantage of Adobe CC 2014's new masking and tracking features (which I couldn't test at this time), but now also works in FCP X. I was curious to experience Colorista III in FCP X, as it's one of the outstanding color correction/ grading apps on the market. The color grading allows for subtle effects, but the real power comes from being able to create color keys. Creating this requires a specific workflow. First you perform your general color grading until you're satisfied with the overall looks. Then you turn off the Colorista layer and drag a new Colorista effect to the Inspector. Now you select the Keyer and only if the other layer has been deactivated, will your source, result and masking previews become visible in the keyer window. Now you can add your color areas and adjust the color. This enforced workflow in Final Cut is either a bug or done to make you return to the original footage colors, but either way it's not very intu- itive. I might want to create a key that changes my general color grading efforts on a distinct area. With this method, I have difficulties seeing what I should cor- rect. In Premiere Pro this feature works as I expected: the Keyer layer showed me the source clip regardless of whether I had done anything with Colorista III. CONCLUSION Magic Bullet Suite 12 is an important upgrade to an important suite for anyone involved with color grading. Pros will have a hard time finding anything that works within their NLE and offers the workflow efficiencies and the quality. RED GIANT SOFTWARE MAGIC BULLET SUITE 12 A NECESSARY UPGRADE FOR EDITORS VITAL STATS MANUFACTURER: Red Giant Software PRODUCT: Magic Bullet Suite 12 PRICE: $799.00 full, $199.00 upgrade WEBSITE: www.redgiant.com • Apps are faster • Interface fonts look perfect • Now runs within Final Cut Pro X W BY ERIK VLIETINCK ERIK@IT-ENQUIRER.COM SKYPE: ERIKVLIE HTTP://UK.LINKEDIN.COM/IN/ ITENQUIRER The latest release gives editors lots of options for treating their footage.