MisFire can make your regular DV footage look like a very hip vintage Super8 film.
Depth of Options
This update certainly contains a ton of new options. As I mentioned previously, this is a complete ground-up redesign of the Look Suite, and it seems like Red Giant decided to put in everything but the kitchen sink! I counted forty different tools, all of which have their own parameters. Most of these tools can be placed in various orders, such as putting a three-way color corrector either before or after diffusion. This is important, as many of these tools respond very differently, depending on the amount of light or saturation they’re given to work with. Incidentally, this is also why you should color-correct your footage (possibly with a dedicated color correcting program like Colorista) before applying these film Looks. Some of the presets make overly dark or bright footage look even worse and will often make color imbalances much more noticeable.
There are 102 different Look presets included in this version, and they’re all unique and interesting. My favorites include Bleach Bypass Light, Bistrocity, Blockbuster, and Color Reversal Old-Style. Many of these Looks won’t be applicable to your footage, and often none of them provide exactly what you need, but it’s very easy to use them as jumping-off points to create your own Looks. You simply pick a preset that is close to what you’re going for, and then adjust the parameters on the various tools used to create a new preset. You can then save your new Look in the preset library, where it can be loaded easily from within any of the supported applications. For example, you can create a Look preset in After Effects, and then load it up in Premiere, or even in the stand-alone version of the program.
Power Masks can be used to select which portions of your video will be processed by the effect.
The new interface also provides a long-awaited feature, which is a preview of the various Looks on your footage, as opposed to a stock photo provided by Red Giant. This allows you to quickly scan through all of the presets to see which ones might work with your scene, instead of having to manually page through all of them, discarding most because they’re simply not anywhere in the ballpark of what you’re after. A “Look Theater” is also included, which will automatically page through each Look one by one, at a set interval.
Other new features include a Star Filter, Anamorphic Flare, and the very cool Swing-Tilt, which lets you mimic depth-of-field by putting certain areas of the picture out of focus. This version also includes a tool I’ve been looking forward to, which is a two-strip Technicolor emulation. It Looks as good as my homemade version, that took about a year to develop, and is a lot easier to setup!
Also included is Misfire, which adds “damage” to your video that mimics various issues that are inherent in film production. Examples include dust and scratches, gate weave, flicker, and grain. Used sparingly, Misfire can almost subliminally enhance the video-as-film process, and can really go a long way in fooling your audience into thinking you really did shoot on film. Of course, you can go way overboard for a Grindhouse or silent film look, both of which can be very accurately replicated with these tools.
Finally, Red Giant has added Power Masks, a feature usually only found on high-end color correcting packages. (You may recall that this was first introduced by Red Giant in their Colorista software.) Power Masks let you to apply your film look to just a portion of the picture using an ellipse or rectangle to choose your selection area. You can then feather the selection for a subtle drop off in the effect. This is very useful if there is only a part of your footage that you’d like to apply the film look to, as the mask is fully keyframeable, allowing you to map it to any object in your frame throughout the length of your shot.
The included tools are strung together at the bottom of the preview screen in the Look Builder section. They can be toggled on or off, and their order can be rearranged.
