Integrate Review — Magic Bullet Suite HD

After Effects plug-in lends film look to video.

Trying to make your video look like film? Red Giant Software offersa plug-in solution for After Effects 5.5 or 6.0 users. We've been downthis road before, but Magic Bullet Suite has some really high-poweredprogramming behind it. The software was developed by The Orphanage,which consists of three principals who left George Lucas's IndustrialLight & Magic in 1999 to form their own company. The Orphange doesa lot of high-end work on major features, including AngerManagement and Spy Kids 3D. Magic Bullet Suite HD was borneof constant requests from industry people, blown away by their featurework, for an end-user product from The Orphanage. Red Giant has takenon the task of getting the program out there, and now we can allbenefit from some truly nice film-like effects in AE.

Look Suite, one of Magic Bullet's five included plug-ins, features awide range of preset film "looks." Here, Berlin lends a cold, blue tintto the video content.

It should be noted that there are actually two Magic Bullet Suitesavailable, a standard-definition version and a high-definition version.The SD package goes for $995 and handles typical NTSC and PAL formats.The HD package really has no resolution limits and works in allAE-supported resolutions, including 1280×720 and 1920×1080.The HD software goes for $1,995. The software is easy to install andconsists of five separate plug-ins: Magic Bullet, Look Suite, Opticals,LetterBox, and Broadcast Spec. Most projects will require several orall of the plug-ins to render on a specific clip, although each can beused just fine individually.

Magic Bullet is the plug-in that sets your video to the correctframe rate and resolution. It converts source video to 24p and workstoward eliminating artifacts in video footage. You can adjustprogressive-scan footage and also de-interlace footage. The plug-inadjusts the frame rate to 24fps to get the video running at film speedbefore you start applying any looks or colors.

Look Suite is the fun plug-in, the one you'll spend the most timeusing. Its many presets include different types of looks — fromthe green-tinted, Matrix-like style called Neo to the cold,pale-blue-tinted Berlin (shown below) to the Gone with the WindTechnicolor saturation of Epic. These all have been painstakinglycreated using the huge rack of sliding parameters, to get you startedwith the most popular cinematic looks right off the bat.

The preview screen, where you choose the presets, shows thenumerical details about parameter settings as well as an image thatdisplays a preview of the film-like effect. In the effect controlswindow of After Effects or via the timeline, you can adjust all sortsof parameters, including lens filters, tint, diffusion, gamma, andcontrast. Interestingly one option you won't find anywhere is grain.35mm film transferred to standard-definition video actually containsvery little grain, so The Orphanage has specifically chosen not toinclude this option, working under the theory that the effects offeredare best suited for mimicking looks without muddying things with graineffects. (Besides, you can actually add grain with several of AE'sbuilt-in filters.)

Once you adjust the parameters, you can save the settings as yourown preset, with its own name and description. Especially handy is thatyour new setting is applied to the preview image, so you'll have athumbnail of your effect right alongside your preset.

Opticals is the third of the five plug-ins. This one allows you toadd fades to black or white, and also cross dissolves. This plug-in wasspecifically designed to keep image degradation to a bare minimum.LetterBox is a plug-in that allows cropping to any standard format, orcreate your own. One good feature is that the plug-in does notanti-alias the edges of the black bars. It keeps them sharp. Finally,Broadcast Spec is a plug-in that keeps you locked into the parametersand limitations of NTSC broadcast specifications.

Magic Bullet Suite is easy to use and produces great results. Thepackage is speedier at rendering frames than similar packages (Iestimate a second or less per frame), but it is still as slow-going asmost After Effects plug-in filters. Rendering times lengthen a littleas you stack different effects, so prepare for some overnight renderingon full-length projects. All the plug-ins can work in 16-bit mode forAfter Effects Professional Suite users, and all images are alwaysinternally processed at greater than 16-bit quality when rendering outto 8-bit projects.

The manual is pretty good, although endlessly chatty, so you willhave to dig for info. It could use a good trimming. I'll cut Red Giantsome slack, because you can tell that people who are truly excited bythe program wrote the lengthy documentation. There are many sidestories and lots and lots of tips and tricks. And along with somereally interesting, educational material on video formats, there arereferences to movies (Vanilla Sky) and music videos (Cher's“A Song for the Lonely”) on which this software has beenused. The manual even lists DVDs (and chapter stops) that containexamples of the described effects.

An obvious competitor that springs to mind is Cinelook, a similarAfter Effects plug-in that produces film-like results. Red GiantSoftware has a head-to-head comparison on its website, as a matter offact. Having also reviewed Cinelook, I would briefly say that Cinelookis somewhat slower at rendering but includes grain for a wider varietyof special effects. Cinelook is really more of a special effectsplug-in. Magic Bullet, I feel, is speedier, less flashy, has a cleanercore engine, and is also more suited to high-end SD and HD projects.Explore the chart on the website and decide for yourself. The suite isa bit pricey, but you can start with the SD version and upgrade later.If you want amazingly clean results with some really fine presets toget you rolling, Magic Bullet Suite is a great plug-in for professionalprojects.

Company: Red Giant Software San Francisco; (415) 274-2000 www.redgiantsoftware.com

Product: Magic Bullet Suite HD

Assets: Easy to use and produces great results; speedy rendertimes; wide range of presets.

Caveats: No film grain effect.

Demographics: After Effects users (Mac and PC) who want tobring a film look to their video projects.

Price: $1,995