Depth
of Options
To explain Magic Bullet Suite 2, we will
partially be duplicating things found in it's little brother,
Magic Bullet Editors. After that, we'll
get into a few of the differences.
For
the cross-over elements of the Suite and Editors,
it primarily comes down to ways to destroy your movie
and ways to tint your movies.
The
majority of the destruction comes from the Misfire Film
Damage setting, which allows you to damage your footage
in ways that most resemble actual film damage, from Micro
Scratches and Gate Weave to Flicker and Vignette. You
can tweak nearly every aspect of Misfire, from the radius
of the vignette to the number of micro scratches to the
amount of emulsion grain. While this is pretty cool and
will provide hours of pleasure, I didn't find it as useful
as the Look Suite, even though it can be very useful in
historical recreations and pseudo-documentaries for artificially-aged
footage. (So long as you don't get carried away! A little
goes a long way with this filter!!)
The
tinting and touch-up effects found Look Suite is what
most people look into Magic Bullet for. Snappy
shots that show how they've replicated the appearance
of movies like the Matrix,Three Kings, Traffic
and a host of others tend to intrigue filmmakers to no
end!
New
additions to this edition's Look Suite include Crime Scene
(designed to replicate CSI), Echo Blue (designed
to mimic The Island), King of Pain (designed to
mimic Lord of War), and seven more presets to go
along with the previous 55 presets.
Each
of these presets is able to be placed on your footage
and then tweaked in four different areas: Subject, Lens,
Camera, and Post. The subject is your actual footage and
how bright, saturated, or contrasty it is. The Lens deals
with filters that would usually be applied to the lens
of a camera, like Black and White Tiffen Pro-Mist filters.
Next is the actual camera and it replicates things that
would occur during the actual film recording process,
like the old 3-Strip Process and a film tint. The final
area that can be tweaked is the Post area which allows
for touch ups on the warmth or coolness of the picture,
post saturation, post brightness, and post contrast. Because
these layers of effects are designed to work in the same
order as they would actually work in the real world with
a real camera setup, you come up with a pretty convincing
replica of reality. It's not perfect, but it ends up looking
pretty good for the most part.
Now
we get into the areas that separate Magic Bullet
Suite from Editors. Basically, they come down to five
things: widescreen, film-like fade-to-black/burn-to-white,
Color Safe for Broadcast conversion, de-interlacing, and
true 24P conversion. While the widescreen, film-like fade-to-black/burn-to-white,
and ColorSafe for Broadcast conversion are clean, they
are not superior enough to what is provided by nearly
every non-linear editor on the market to justify exporting
your footage into After Effects to deal with them.
This leads us to the real reason why you will plop down
nearly $800 for this program: extremely clean de-interlacing
and very believable true 24 P conversion. And, unlike
some 24P conversion programs, the final footage is in
true 24 fps, which can be transferred to film, should
you so desire. While most of us are not going to be footing
the bill for a film transfer ourselves, the clean 24P
conversion is really quite impressive.
