Ease
of Use
Installation of the program is pretty straightforward,
with an installer that will automatically install itself
into your After Effects folder. Once installed,
you open After Effects, import an interlaced clip,
and get to work.
While
the basic installation is simple, getting the hang of
the different things you need to set up in After Effects
is a bit of a pain, as you must set up two different menus,
one for interpreting your footage and the other for your
composition attributes, before you can even the Magic
Bullet plug-in. While the program does have a quick-start
guide, it's buried 30 pages into the manual and is right
next to PAL information, which means that it's a bit easy
to mis-read things. Unfortunately, if you don't set everything
up perfectly, the Suite doesn't generate helpful
errors telling you what you did wrong…it just won't
work. Once I figured out that I had been clicking one
wrong thing in the footage interpretation menu, everything
worked fine. I think it would be helpful if the program
popped up a helpful message showing you that you had chosen
an improper setting in a particular menu, rather than
just not working. (There is an error message section of
the plug-in, but it is only related to the footage itself
and was not very helpful at all.)
Once
you get everything installed, MBS2 returns to being
a breeze. You simply drag your footage into your pre-set
composition and lay on the Magic Bullet filters.
When you do this, it shows an auto setup button with a
clever trigger decal. Click on this and it will interpret
your footage, decide how it best needs to de-interlace
it and convert it to 24fps. (Unless you haven't filled
out one of the earlier menus correctly, at which time
the Auto Setup button won't click.)
After
that, it's pretty easy to lay on any other MBS filters
you want, like the LookSuite filters or the MisFire film
damage filters.
