Of course, to give you this sort of control in a speed that is close enough to Real Time to not drive you mad, Colorista makes heavy use of both system ram and the GPU on your graphics card. This means that, if you’re going to want to use this software, you will need at least 2 Gigs of RAM and a decent 128 MB video card, though a 256 MB card is recommended. (Because the graphics card is so heavily used, this program won’t even run if you don’t have a standalone graphics card that’s at least 128 MB.) The program will make great use of either the nVidia or ATI cards, though the nVidia cards seem to be more optimized for the software. (Additionally, the nVidia cards are often somewhat cheaper, at least for the consumer versions.) While many less expensive configurations can be arranged to run this package, we tested this on a Dell 2.3 Ghz CentrinoDuo laptop with 3 Gigs of RAM and a professional-grade nVidia Quadro FX 3500M. With the firepower in this setup, of course, the rendering was close enough to real-time to not be an issue.
While this package will work with most editing programs both PC and Mac, Adobe Production Suite Premium users have a bit of an extra advantage. The performance on Premiere Pro 2 is closer to Real Time than it is in FCP or Avid Xpress and the Production Suite simplifies export to After Effects to get a higher quality final render of your color corrected footage. (FCP and Avid Xpress users need to use something like Automatic Duck’s Pro Import After Effects program to import their EDL into After Effects if they want the superior final rendering AE offers.)
Value
Last October, Andrew Little from Red Giant contacted me and asked me what my readers would like to see in upcoming versions of Magic BulletSuite and Magic BulletEditors. Pricing was one of the big things I mentioned, explaining how our audience could make serious use of most of Red Giant’s products but had a pretty hard time swallowing costs like $800 for a single plug-in package. He gleefully told me to watch what they were about to do, not just with future versions of Magic Bullet, but for their upcoming product line in general. He promised that additional features would be in store, but that pricing would start becoming much more accessible to our readers. I took what he said with a grain of salt and chose a “wait-and-see” attitude.
However, when I heard that the first of their new product line, Colorista—which looks to give Final Touch and DaVinci some serious competition—was being sold for only $200, my eyes nearly bugged out! Then, when I got my hands on the software and saw how cleanly it performed, I was even more amazed. Even more astounding is that, Red Giant has chosen to further keep it in the hands of the low-budget filmmaker, by permitting a single seat purchase of this product to be used by the filmmaker in any program he has access to, on both Mac AND PC platforms. What an amazingly refreshing concept!
If this is just the first of a whole line of micro-budget-friendly software packages that Red Giant is releasing, then they’re going to have to seriously increase their bandwidth just to keep up with all the orders and downloads!
Final Comments
Not since the original Henry Ford company has a company so changed the dynamic of accessible technology for the common man—or, in this case, filmmaker. With Red Giant’s new emphasis on the low-budget filmmaker, professional quality filmmaking results are now far more possible on no-budget than they’ve ever been. If you are going to make a film, you owe it to yourself to get Magic Bullet Colorista to make it look as good as it possibly can!
Ease
of Use
8.5
Depth
of Options
9.0
Performance
9.5
Value
10.0
Overall
Score
9.3
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
