Magic Bullet Looks By Red Giant

[Jule Watkinson]

EthicsStatement: Red Giant Software are an affiliate of PhilipBloom.net, but like all my affiliates their products are top notch. There are not many affiliates on PB.net for that reason. I only partner with companies who make the best stuff!

I just watched this really clever, funny and fantastically made short film by Seth Worley and Aharon Rabinowitz. All effects done within the new Magic Bullet Suite 11 which I have not got yet. There is loads of new software including a new version of Magic Bullet Looks! It also includes Magic bullet Cosmo which is like digital make up!

Hey Philip, I was asking myself today about old films and zooms. Recently I got my Canon t2i and I was asking my self what lenses can i use to have that zoom in style like tarantino, anderson, etc. Thank you.

That said, Magic Bullet Looks has some nice features for people who are not really knowing what to vision for when grading footage. The looks of this demo-movie, in my eyes was highly video and did not at all convince me to purchase version 2.

Been waiting for the right time to purchase this and so glad I did. Not only is it a wonderful tool, but I was surprised to discover that the Bloom20 code worked to save me 20% off the entire suite, not just Magic Bullet Looks. Thank you PB

If you still have problem just go on their website and get in touch with them. I was amazed at how fast they got back to me and kept me posted while they were trying to get it fixed. This is some of the best tech support I ever had. Thumbs up to them.

Denoiser III

In my opinion, Denoiser III is one of the standouts in the Magic Bullet Suite 13 plug-in package because of its magical ability to remove noise quickly and easily. Noise reduction is typically a very long render because of the sheer complexity that is involved in the process. Denoiser III has been rewritten and now adds near realtime playback in most cases; the better the discrete graphics card you have, the better your playback will be. You can check out graphics card compatibility here.

When removing noise from footage, remember that the more you crank up your noise reduction the longer your render time will be, and you will also start to lose detail in your image. Occasionally, you will remove and sharpen an image and think that it looks a little too cleaned up. This is when you will want to jump into Magic Bullet Renoiser or apply your own film grain or noise to the footage. Another tip is to always place Denoiser III first in your effects chain. You can even put Magic Bullet Looks 4 after Denoiser III, apply your look in Looks and jump back into Denoiser III to adjust your noise after corrected.

Renoiser

As you have read, I just pulled out a lot of noise with Denoiser III, but I definitely want to put back just a touch of texture and noise with Renoiser. A common problem when removing noise from footage is that you are left having an overly processed look from smoothing. Typically, you can somewhat fix that with a little sharpening and/or adding back in some sort of film grain.

For my tests, I liked the preset Big Kahuna for the sunset shot I had. This was shot on the Sony a6300 in S-Log3/S-Gamut3, but this time with a UHD 38402160 clip in a 19201080 timeline, lending itself to a good amount of noise in the shadows. First I added Denoiser III, then Colorista IV to do some balancing and add some saturation and then I finished it off with Renoiser.

To test my export speed, I used my handy YouTube-friendly preset: 19201080 50Mb/s H.264. Exporting a 30-second clip took 30 seconds without Mojo II and one minute and one second with Mojo II applied. So, like the other plug-ins, Mojo II took me about double realtime for the render. At $99, Mojo II is the fastest way to take your footage and give it that orange and blue Hollywood-style look. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the plug-in worked. Immediately, I thought of how someone not familiar with color correction could apply Magic Bullet Suite Mojo II and have a great color grade without the hassle of diving deep into color correction tools. Even if you need to do a little cleanup, there are options like the Skin Tone overlay to get your skin colors right.

With Cosmo II, you can select the skin tone of the subject you want to correct with the eyedropper and adjust how far outside of your color selection you want Cosmo to go with tolerance and offset. Further down the effects menu are two other categories of options: Skin Smoothing and Skin Color. Typically, in skin correction you might see someone go overboard with the softening (or blurring). One way that Red Giant is combatting bad skin correction is with adjustments like Preserve Detail, Preserve Contrast and even Restore Noise. When used in concert you can achieve some great wrinkle removal, but allow some of the authentic contours of the skin to stay intact with Preserving Detail.

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Stu Maschwitz has been in the industry for so long that the techniques you use on a daily basis probably only exist because of Stu's pioneering work. From Star Wars Episode 1, Iron Man and Pirates of the Caribbean, Stu has been working in VFX for a long time.

Today's podcast is pulled directly from VFX for Motion, a course hosted by Stu's former colleague, Mark Christiansen. When it comes to pulling knowledge directly from the source, this podcast is the holy grail.

Looking to get into the VFX Industry? This is the best podcast on the market to get you inspired and ready to go. Grab a pen, paper, and clear your schedule. It's time to get into VFX history 101 with Stu Maschwitz and Mark Christiansen.

Feeling inspired to take your VFX skills even further? Go check out VFX for Motion with Mark Christiansen. This in-depth course is the best way to learn the basics of compositing, match-moving, keying and more in After Effects. Mark is ready to share his extensive VFX knowledge with you.

Mark:The man, the myth, the six-foot-seven-inch-tall legend. If you're aren't already familiar with my guest today, I think as we chat you'll start to recognize who I'm talking to. I, Mark Christiansen, hello, have known Stu personally for over two decades at this point, starting back when he was just coming up, leading the fabled Rebel Mac Unit under John Knoll at ILM. I got to say, I work with some amazing people, but Stu is the closest to an actual mentor I've ever had in this business. Without him, and this is no exaggeration, I literally would not be here talking to you. His willingness to thoroughly answer my many questions allowed me to articulate strong opinions about best practices as a VFX compositor. That really helped my humble After Effects book stand out.

Mark:Nowadays, Stu is best known as the chief creative officer and force behind many of your favorite tools at Red Giant Software. Not long ago, he also made his animation debut with a project that truly has no exact precedent called Tank. In this conversation, we start with recent history, but quickly jump to the roots that allowed him to be doing what he does today. This was a really fun conversation that even fills in some blanks about the development of After Effects itself, and I hope you enjoy it.

Mark:All right, Stu. Well, it's tricky to know where to start, but I kind of actually, in your case, want to work backwards, if you will, and talk about what you're doing now, and we could start with Red Giant. We could start with Red Giant Software. I mean, there's so much you've offered to the community, but I think that's a great starting point.

Stu:Just to kind of clarify the facts in this situation, I am the chief creative officer of Red Giant. It is now my full-time gig, which is relatively recent, but it's been a very smooth, gradual transition getting there. I've been doing that for a couple years now, but up until that point, I was very, very actively involved in designing the Magic Bullet plugins for Red Giant, and the only reason that wasn't a full-time gig is that that was a product cycle for Red Giant that was folded in with the other stuff like Trapcode and Universe and all that, meaning that we would kind of pick-

Stu:... oh, this is the year where there's going to be a big Magic Bullet update, or this is the year where there's going to be a big Trapcode update or something like that. So, I would have... Yeah, yeah. Well, all the products-

Stu:... that give attention to Red Giant, they're all doing fine. Those were the big-ticket items, although there was a big focus on Universe, kind of bringing it up from something that a lot of people are using now. So, yeah.

Mark:Well, okay. Since we're going back like that, I'm really curious. Well, let's see. I have two different questions right now. So, you're chief creative officer, and you seem to have a knack for coming up with tools that bring things that might in one way or another be industry standard elsewhere. At least, they allow you to do things that people are already doing, but they're designed specifically for After Effects and to make it much easier, if not even just plain possible-

Stu:One is this kind of tinkering impulse that I have, which is that I can't do a thing without wanting to make tools to help me do the things easier, and the analogy I always make is a woodworker working in a wood shop. If they have to build one chair, they'll build the chair, but if they have to build three chairs, they will build a jig to make it easier so that they can cut multiple legs or whatever of the chair simultaneously.

Stu:So, at some point you kind of naturally go doing the work to trying to somehow automate the work, or in visual effects we want to think of it as a pipeline. If you have one visual effects shot to do for a short, then maybe you would just make the slate as the first frame by just opening up a text layer in After Effects. But if you have 20 visual effects shots to do for a short, maybe you would make a slate that could read text information from a comma-separated value text file, so you have only one place to update it, and it's all automated. Well, it might've been, but maybe I just couldn't justify it.

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