C100: Magic Bullet looks for grading C-Log: Worth it?

M

Mervin

Member
I took the plunge and shot a wedding in c-log. Is magic bullet looks a good investment for creating a great look with c-log? I'd appreciate opinions. I use Vegas Pro. I've previously always used Wide DR.
 
I like filmconvert a lot better it just quicker and faster results. I feel like with looks you get so hung up on all the things you can add which actually sometimes may make things worse. Just give it a try youll see what I mean.
 
I'm shooting c-log on my C100 and using Magic Bullet Looks and it works great. Powerful tool. Having too many options is never a bad thing. I tend to start with a few of their pre-set film stock looks that consistently work for me and refine my highlights, mids and shadows from there as needed.

I also recommend the Magic Bullets denoiser tool. It's saved my butt a few times.

I was able to upgrade from an old version of Looks I bought 7 years ago to the most recent version for only 99 bucks.
 
Yes. I like the prebuilt film looks alot better than film convert. Plus with MBL you can adjust the look at any stage which is really nice.

They do offer a trial so download it and give it a spin
 
I've simplified what I'm doing and find FCPX + Magic Bullet Looks v3 does everything I need.

The new version includes Colorista and a LUT importer so is a lot more useful than v2, so it's now my only colour plugin.

jthabel said:
Magic Bullets denoiser
Click to expand...

Denoiser unfortunately is not available for FCPX, for those that use it (I use Neat Video for FCPX).
 
I use FCP X and C log. I have neat video for those rare occasions. I have never tried filmconvert or magic bullet etc.
 
Shot C-log and graded also in Vegas. It turned much simpler than I though. I just added a color/luma curve to regain contrast (colour curves in the plug-in menu) then after specifically adjusting pleasing contrast, added a Three way Colour Correction plug-in in the menu, increased saturation, and already just using these two simple steps I got a pretty natural looking image for viewing, then I get creative with the colour wheels and make a look manually.

Vegas is easy, simple, intuitive and I don't see why one needs a complicated ''workflow'' and LUTs and Looks when it can be done this easily with more control over finer parameters. It's just my style though.
 
I use only C-log (with one exception - shooting with green screen). For most of the projects I use FCPX and standard tools available in it for color correcting. In most cases it's a very simple thing to do. Once in while there are difficult shots to correct (mostly because of bad quality of light and other shooting conditions which cannot be taken care of while shooting).

Resolve is what comes to rescue - mostly because it has features that unfortunately are not in FCPX. For example, dual viewer - dual viewer in FCPX doesn't allow to display two clips form the timeline - one is for clips from events and the second is for the timeline. So it requires an additional step to compare two clips from the timeline. Plus, Resolve has much, much better masking and keyframing capabilities.

I actually have filmconvert but after trying found that for my workflow, it's much easier just to use FCP X. I hope that in near future with the release of Resolve 12 (and hopefully improved editing), Resolve will become my default editing platform. Also, I want to mention that I'm not a professional digital colorist. For projects that require high quality, I wouldn't dare to do it myself.
 
silyn said:
with the release of Resolve 12 (and hopefully improved editing), Resolve will become my default editing platform.
Click to expand...
Definitely one to check out when it's released.

I think going forward Black Magic will be much more aggressive in improving Resolve than Apple will be in improving FCPX.
 
I like MB. It was the in thing a couple of years ago before the sheeple jumped on the Filmconvert bandwagon which is an OK tool but not that great......................
 
Looks works great, but I've never used it in Vegas. You can also go with Davinci Resolve Lite, which would do everything you need. Resolve renders much faster in my experience.
 
Doesn't FilmConvert just add grain? I've never thought of it as the same as MB "Looks". In fact many times I'll add a MB look, get rid of the existing grain with
"Neat" then add grain with FilmConvert. That's how I won my last academy award.
 
When I shoot on 35mm film I add film grain in post to make it look more like film since the film stocks I film with are too clean and thus look like video.


I use Magic Bullet Colorista 2 most of the time, and will use Looks 2 when I want to create a more stylized look. I haven't used Film Convert but I've heard pretty good things about it. The film grain options in Looks 2 are too basic and thus are lacking, but I'm curious about the new film grain in Looks 3. I'd guess it rivals Film Convert with the added benefit of having a lot of stock looks to get started from.
 
Last edited:
New version of MB Looks is crazy good. I like it a lot and hardly use Colorista as a stand alone color grading tool since it's built into Looks now. All the filters and I'm not talking about presets here are better too. Also runs much better too. Try it.

The new Premiere Pro CC 2015 Lumetri has been blowing my mind. The tools are very powerful and on my Mac Pro are real time. I can loop a clip and color grade it while it's playing. Love it!
 
I bought Coloristra, last fall when Magic Bullet had there annual blow out sale for a day or two. Unfortunately, I found out after I bought it, it didn't work in FCPX. So I got a refund. I'm interested in "Color Finale" anyone have experience with this?
 
Colorista III also seems to be able to use your GPU for rendering, and it does seem A LOT faster to me now. I loved using Colorista II for white balancing troublesome C100 footage, but it would take AGES to encode the final file. The upgrade cost for Colorista III is really going to pay for itself in vastly shorter rendering times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top