Broadcast Spec is another simple, but effective program. Apply it to an adjustment layer, or add it to a pre-comp in AE, and it’ll ramp down any extremes in the chroma signal. This gets rid of over-saturated colors such as those horrible reds that are so hot they start causing static distortion on your TV. There are presets here for both component and composite video, although you can still go in and manually adjust the maximum saturation and saturation rolloff.
Deartifacter only has one control, which allows you to select the color space of your source footage. On the surface, this plugin doesn’t appear to do a whole lot and you might not notice any difference in your output if you’re just watching your footage on a computer monitor or TV. However, it does fix some of the problems inherent in miniDV’s 4:1:1 color space and it is designed to produce better-looking footage when upconverting to a format with a higher color space.
Although Opticals doesn’t have a whole lot of parameters, it provides plenty of creative opportunities. I love the fade-outs it creates; just like in a film fade, the darkest parts of the image disappear first, while the brightest parts stay bright until almost the very end of the fade. Compare this to a regular digital fade, where everything starts going dark at once, and the brights immediately start turning gray. After using Opticals, normal fades will look very “blah”. It also allows you to do burns to white in the same way. Finally, by using the A and B layer selections, you can perform great film-like cross-fades.
Frames and Frames Plus both de-interlace your footage to create a more filmic motion, with Frames being faster and easier to setup, albeit at the expense of quality. Neither one has a ton of options, although Frames Plus is a little more flexible in allowing you to choose your output frame rate, giving you the ability to output to straight 24p instead of the 24p with pulldown created by Frames. However, Frames includes the added option of a cropping tool which lets you set a letterbox ratio and then move your footage up and down within the letterbox to reframe it. This is especially helpful in Premiere Pro, where the lack of adjustment layers really doesn’t allow you to do this with the standalone Letterboxer plugin. Finally, the biggest difference in options between the two is that Frames Plus can only be used in After Effects, whereas Frames can be used in Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Broadcast Spec ramps down any colors that are out of bounds for TV broadcast.
A zebra pattern shows you exactly which portions of your footage are illegal.
Performance
Magic Bullet has always been known for its long render times, and this release really isn’t much different. However, the addition of the Frames plugin gives you the option to significantly cut down on your render times. For example, converting a 38 minute project to 24p with Frames Plus took 54 hours (!) whereas converting the same project to 24p with Frames only took 7.5 hours. That’s quite a difference, as always, you can’t have it good, fast, and cheap. You get to pick two, and with Frames you get cheap and fast, at the expense of quality. Set at Blend with Field Smoothing at 75, the 24p output of Frames was acceptable. It was significantly softer and fuzzier than the original footage, but with minimal interlacing artifacts (i.e., jaggies on diagonal lines) and a pleasant motion signature. I would definitely use this for any project that I knew wouldn’t be blown up on the big screen, because at that size the softness would be too distracting.
However, the Motion field interpolation setting in Frames was pretty much useless for 24p output. Looking at the still frames, the sharpness of the picture was much higher with this setting, requiring less Field Smoothing to get rid of the jaggies. But on playback the footage stuttered so much that I almost had a seizure! This setting fared much better on 30p output, though, so I’m assuming that’s how it was meant to be used. Red Giant might want to consider taking away the Field Interpolation setting altogether, making Motion the default for 30p and Blend the default for 24p output.
