Convince me I NEED Magic Bullet

Jeremy Ordan said:
What I would suggest would be to take a picture into photoshop with a plan of how you want it to look and play with levels, curves, hue, saturation, and color balance... Create the look you are looking for and then try to do the same in Avid, Vegas, FCP, or whatever you are using.
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What a GREAT idea! Thanks!
 
MalcolmOng said:
Color finesse doesn't have the crazy render times - thats the primary reason why i prefer it over magic bullet. In fact its virtually lag free on my rig (amd 3200+ 64 bit with 6600gt graphics card from nvidia). You should check their site for a full feature list, but stuff i really like is the fact that you can split the source with the cc'd picture so you can tell whether you're going overboard, and you can import reference looks into your programme and split it with your cc'd picture.
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Yeah, I really love color finesse. I got a little while ago and find everything else that I use to just be very...eh. The scopes and all the pieces of reference that you can have are very nice and it just makes color correcting a much more enjoyable experience.

I really want to check out some of the books reccomended earlier though, I've only read one book "Color Correction for Digital Video" Which was great, but obviously not the only step to really getting an idea of what I'm doing when CC'ing.
 
Guys, make up your own minds about whether MB is a tool you need or not (I'm a bit biased :)), but rendering times are quite a bit faster now, like near-real-time in some cases, since the Bullet renders on your GPU. So if you have a good video card, you can actually edit looks in realtime Vegas while your SD clip is playing live.

As someone who likes to "roll my own," I sympathise with those who suspect that MB is simply a bunch of candy-coated presets that people use instead of designing their own looks. But it doesn't have to be that way. It was desgned to give you extra control over your CC, beyond what your NLE offers. Diffusions, gradients, soft contrast curves, floating-point processing. Start with a preset then tweak to taste, I'm the king of DIY, and if I thought it was practical or effective to layer up all that stuff myself in my NLE then obviously I wouldn't have created the plug-in! Remember, I used it myself at The O as a proprietry service for years before releasing it as a product.

Clearly Red Giant needs to do a better job of getting the word out about the new hardware rendering feature. Sorry about that!

-Stu
 
I downloaded some before-after pictures of magic bullet. Then I tried to recreate a couple of filmic effects, and to be honest it can be done within a minute. It just need some tweaking, but it's also fun to do. And my render times were very fast.
 
Shaw said:
I'm gonna say 'screw it' - buy a book on color theory instead :)
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hell no! you will fall asleep in .30seconds reading about color theory
Get MB and getting to work right away!!!
 
My advice is to us MB just for specific things - not in general. For the cool looks and quick picture "feels". As you progress you will need more detailed color manipulation. You won't get all the Photoshop features in NLE's, because their primary purpose is editing. That's why there is post production.
As far as NLE's go,
i prefer FCP.
 
Duffdaddy said:
Give Nattress Film Effects a visit. Basically the same as MB, but a bus load less expensive and just as good. www.nattress.com
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Duff great call for mac users. $100 bucks gets you Natress film effects which just kicks ass. If your a mac user its a must have IMO.

If your grading examples in PS though, why not just create a droplet export your shot as an image sequence and drop on the droplet. Takes awhile to do them all especially if its a large file.
 
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