Performance
Magic Bullet Suite 2 does an amazing job
of making DV and HD footage look like film. While they
do recommend that you shoot your DV like film, with proper
lighting and exposure, the program did an amazing job
even with less than stellar footage that hadn't been lit
very well. With properly lit footage, it's pretty darn
impressive.
While
the end result is pretty amazing, the performance to get
there is a little draining. To begin with, this program
is very, very slow. The more RAM and CPU power you can
roll with this, the better! To give you an idea of what
we're talking about, we decided to test a version on a
system that would be similar to what many of our readers
would still have, so we put it on a 1.8Ghz P4 with 512
MB of RAM and looked at how fast it rendered. It took
about one hour for 30 seconds of footage to render. (That's
180 hours of rendering for a 90 minute movie.) So, if
you have access to a Pentium-D dual-core with a gig or
two of RAM, you'll be much happier!
The
other issue results from a rather confusing rendering
queue that has a tendency to bloat your file size if you're
not on the ball. When you put your Bullet-ed footage into
your render queue, you are most likely going to be tempted
to choose 'Lossless' compression. However, if you do that,
you will find that your file size will jump up a staggering
6.25 times larger than it started. While this might not
be a bad idea in certain situations, it's not a good idea
if you're trying to not over-fill your hard drive. (To
give you an idea, a 90 minute film weighing in at 18 Gigs
will end up at 112 Gigs if you render it in lossless compression.)
Instead, choose 'DV Compression' and you'll get the correct
size file. (Thanks to Ryan Graham for helping me realize
the fix for this issue!)
Despite
these issues, Magic Bullet delivers an amazing
product. You just have to make sure that you have a fast
enough computer (that, or expect to be waiting for over
a week for the render to take place, praying that your
computer doesn't crash!) and that you remember to switch
it to 'DV Compression.'
