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Video processing plug-in for REVIEW Adobe After Effects, £825 Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite HD

Film-look filters can offer a lot more than just scratchy old-movie effects. Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite is aimed at producers who want their movies to look a lot better, not worse

V is great. It’s inexpensive, and editing haven’t changed much than enhancing a movie’s tonal versatile, reasonably high in a century, but film (even when qualities. And it’s the tonal Dquality, easy to use, and telecined and presented on a TV set) adjustments that are most crucial. there’s a solid, mature market out has a certain texture and feel that In reality, the reason blockbuster there with more exciting software video just can’t match. movies and big-budget TV dramas and hardware products than you It’s not just a matter of look so good is because great pains know what to do with. But, there’s resolution or grain, it’s the have been taken to grade the one problem – DV looks like video. sensitivity of the medium, too, and picture before a final print is made. More importantly, it doesn’t look the fact that film runs with 24 Grading is essentially a colour- like film. Having a good 90-year complete frames per second, while correction process, used to give advantage on video, film has set the the frames of video are separated movies a specific tone and feel. standard for what we want from into interlaced fields – further Colour-balance, saturation and movies. The processes of storytelling reducing resolution and smoothing contrast are all tweaked, and motion. So, it’s not surprising that chemical processes are sometimes SOFTWARE many DV enthusiasts are on the introduced in development, such as lookout for good film-look filters a bleach-bypass which results in How much? for their work. Realists might argue high contrast and crushed shadows. £1,650 inc VAT (£825 for Standard Definition that video makers should version) concentrate on making their Silver screen video Features movies look like good video rather Magic Bullet Suite does pretty De-interlacing; removal of DV artefacts; PAL/NTSC than sub-standard film, but that’s much the same job for video – video standard conversion; re-sampling to 24i no comfort to those of us that allowing film-grading techniques video; colour grading; transition effects; aspect- want a certain visual punch. to be emulated – but also provides ratio conversion; broadcast-spec output; Many programs and real-time tools for the creation high-definition video support hardware tools provide an old-film of high-quality progressive-scan filter, but this introduces grain, footage for transfer to a cine print Stated minimum requirements scratches, flicker and hair, rather (even to the point of re-sampling • Windows: 1.5GHz Pentium 4 CPU; Adobe After 25fps or 29.97fps interlaced media Effects 5.5; 256MByte RAM; Windows 2000(SP2)/XP; USB port for copy-protection dongle to 24fps progressive). There’s even • Mac: PowerPC CPU; Adobe After Effects 5.5; a tool to remove DV compression 256MByte RAM; Mac OS 9.2 or OS X; USB port for artefacts from source footage. The copy-protection dongle program comes as a plug-in for Adobe After Effects – available for Test system Mac and Windows PCs – and is Novatech Soprano laptop PC with Windows XP Pro offered in two versions, Standard (SP1); 3.06GHz Intel Pentium 4 HT CPU; 512MByte Definition, costing £825, and High PC2700 333MHz DDR RAM; 15in XGA TFT screen; Definition, at £1,650 – which 40GByte hard drive; CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive; supports resolutions of up to 64MByte Nvidia GeForce Go AGP graphics processor; SoundBlaster Pro-compatible sound 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. card; 2 x 1W speakers; mic-in socket; We tested the HD version on a headphone/speaker socket; 10/100 RJ45 Novatech laptop with a 3.06GHz networking; 4x USB 2.0 sockets; single four-pin Pentium 4 CPU, 512MByte DDR FireWire port RAM and Adobe After Effects 6.0. Installation was uneventful, but the Also used for this review: plug-in is dongle-protected by a 120GByte Western Digital hard drive in Manhattan small USB hardware key. So many USB 2.0 external enclosure; Canopus ProCoder 1.5 Magic Bullet recommends useful programs are protected encoding software starting out with the filter that these days, we strongly recommend deinterlaces and removes investing in a decent powered USB Red Giant Software, www.redgiantsoftware.com compression artefacts hub to manage them all!

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Ready-made Movie-Look filters make it possible to quickly choose film-grading options that emulate the look of popular films

Five filters Our source footage was a 30- minute DV movie, edited in Pinnacle Edition and saved to the system’s hard drive as a QuickTime DV file. On importing the file into After Effects, we set Separate Fields to off in AE6’s Interpret Footage command window, as Magic Bullet needs to do its own deinterlacing. The Magic Bullet plug-in is accessed within After Effects from a sub-folder in the Effects palette called Magic Bullet 1.5. This contains five filters – Broadcast Spec, Letterboxer, Looks Suite, Magic Bullet, and Opticals. The manual recommends starting with the Magic Bullet filter – used to remove compression artefacts and to resample the frame-rate. Target frame-rate is taken from composition settings, but resampling for a film transfer requires the composition’s frame-rate to be reset to 29.97 frames per second. In this case, we were changing footage from interlaced PAL to progressive footage, but retaining the same of 25fps. An Auto- Three preset movie looks – Neo, Black Diffusion, and Bleach Bypass – settings button causes Magic Bullet applied to the same footage to analyse the footage and the

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Video processing plug-in for REVIEW Adobe After Effects, £825

and crushes shadow detail), white diffusion, both of which through colour reversal (giving can be adjusted according to the look of slide film) to a No.85 grade, latitude and highlight filter effect (where tungsten film bias which affects the way is used outdoor with a blue- highlights are affected by the correction filter to give a warmer, filter. Gradient filters can also punchier appearance). On top of be created and applied to that, there are specially graded footage, helping create a more settings such as Neo, which dramatic separation between provides similar tonal qualities to sky and land, for example. the Matrix movies. In our project, Camera controls include a we chose Epic – designed to three-strip Technicolor look, as emulate the old three-strip well as two types of tint – a Technicolor process. It’s possible to general coloured tint, and one spend hours investigating the that is only applied to the shadow presets, but it’s important to detail. In both cases, users can choose the tint colour and Grading is essentially a colour- strength of the tint. Post filters allow saturation and correction process, used to give contrast to be corrected after the movies a specific tone and feel more creative filters have done their work on an even and remember that Red Giant didn’t balanced image. There’s also Control over film-look filters is develop them with your specific control over gamma, plus a extremely comprehensive footage in mind – so some fine warm/cool slider to alter the tuning might be required. And general colour tone, and a control you can get completely lost in over that control that alters the Magic Bullet’s manual controls! hues corresponding to the warm Settings are divided into four and cool sides of the slider. basic categories – Subject, Lens Filter, Camera, and Post. Opticals, letterboxer Subject settings include and broadcast saturation, gamma and contrast The Opticals filter provides controls, applied to the raw transition effects for video. Most source footage before any of movie makers will have done this the more complex effects are work in their main editing applied. Red Giant recommends programs, but there’s something giving the software an even image special about Magic Bullet’s Optical filters produce to work with and, as our footage transitions. Three basic types of attractive film-like dissolves, was shot under stage lighting, we effect are on offer – fade to black, burns and fades dipped the contrast by about 25 burn to white, or cross dissolve. For composition settings, giving a basic per cent with the intention of fades, burns and dissolves, a film- template for deinterlacing and lifting it again later. response slider allows users to resampling. As well as Next up are lens filters, which, decide whether shadows or deinterlacing, the filter provides funnily enough, simulate the highlights come through first, and motion-estimation for resampled effects of lens filters. There are there’s another slider to determine frame-rates, plus a filter for controls for black diffusion and the difference in dissolve speed removing compression artefacts that offers settings for DV, HDCAM and DigiBeta. DV artefacts caused by colour compression can create problems with chromakey effects, and so de-artefacting will be of interest to anyone making use of After Effects’ compositing tools.

Looks Suite The Looks Suite filter provides all the fun stuff. It’s a selection of video-grading tools, with a choice of 32 ready-made templates designed to simulate popular movie looks, from the bleach Letterboxer applies black bars to standard or customised aspect ratios bypass (which drops saturation

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Video processing plug-in for REVIEW Adobe After Effects, £825

from shadows to highlights. The effect can be eased in and out, too, giving a result markedly different to the ordinary flat, linear transitions produced by most editing programs. The Letterboxer filter simply applies black bars to the image, with presets for standard aspect ratios from 4:3 to ultra-wide 2.76:1, and a slider with which to select anything in between. If starting off with 16:9 footage, selecting 4:3 will add black masks to the sides of the image. Some careful thought has gone into this Broadcast Spec applies a limiter to colour channels and displays hot spots filter – simple as it is – in that it automatically recognises and compensates for the pixel shape was another four hours before we such as Premiere Pro, Edition of the source footage. could finally see the results. or Final Cut Pro but, as it stands, Broadcast Spec, the final filter, The colour grading looked the system works well. works as a limiter for the video’s great, and Magic Bullet’s Due to the slow rendering, colour channels, preventing them deinterlacing helped produce a the option to use Magic Bullet from becoming too hot for genuinely filmic motion to the on lengthy projects won’t be broadcast. Although it’s designed video. We didn’t notice any great taken lightly, but we’d have to limit for NTSC broadcast, it’s improvement from deinterlacing no hesitation in calling on it for still a useful tool – especially in in the final MPEG file, but then short-form productions such as our stage-lit video where the reds the recompression for DVD will music promos, adverts, DVD are very harsh indeed. The filter menus or title sequences. The controls come with a histogram, Magic Bullet could make the plug-in is said to support multiple- representing whichever frame processors but, hopefully, we’ll is selected in the composition, difference between a good also see rendering times fall and it becomes quite clear which video and a great production as the software architecture shots have unacceptably high matures further. saturation levels. Users can even have introduced new artefacts of The majority of DV enthusiasts call up a zebra pattern to show its own. Whether a new file is will only have need for the off the problem areas in real better or worse than the original Standard Definition version of terms on the video monitor. is very much a matter of taste, Magic Bullet, but even the cost of based on what the producer wants that, paired with the outlay for The long wait from a particular project. After Effects, puts this tool out of After the fun and creativity the reach of most students and comes the render – which is a Conclusion home-movie makers. For the drag. Our 30-minute movie took Magic Bullet is a very sober and freelance professional making 37 hours (yes, 74x real-time) to sensible effects package. Used money from video, however, export to an uncompressed AVI properly, it won’t dazzle anyone, the cost shouldn’t be an issue, as file. Admittedly, we were applying but it could make the difference this is one of the most useful multiple effects – deinterlace, between a good video and a effects tools available to them. deartefacting, a three-strip great production. All serious We’ve long believed that – in film-look and broadcast colour video makers should think movie-making – the best effects limiting – but we were using a P4 carefully about the aesthetic are the ones the audience 3.06GHz laptop. Although no look and feel of their movies, and doesn’t see. In that respect, longer state-of-the-art, this isn’t even those who don’t want to Magic Bullet really is magic. exactly a slow-coach. We’d also create an epic cinematic opted for , appearance should still consider Peter Wells as the next step would be to the ways in which subtle encode to MPEG-2 in Canopus adjustments to contrast, ProCoder. We were hoping the saturation and hue can newly graded, processed and significantly affect the atmosphere CVCV RATINGSRATINGS de-artefacted file would yield a and ambience created by what’s Features 5 better-quality MPEG-2 stream seen on screen. Magic Bullet Performance 4 than if it had been encoded tackles these issues masterfully Ease of use 4 directly from DV. The encoding and – for the most part – makes a tool used was Canopus’s ProCoder, good deal of sense. We’d be Value for money 4 with Mastering Quality settings, happier if it were available as a and this ran at 8x real-time, so it plug-in for editing applications Overall Rating 85%

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