Magic bullet worth it?

R

Rob333

Active member
I notice alot of you using Magic Bullet and a lot of you Color Grading your own looks.
I reciently finished a 90min Feature I colored myself in Premiere Pro 1.5, w/my DVX100A in 24pa. I Colored many different sceens all within my NLE. I got free Magic bullet plugins and even paid the extra $50.00 for an extra 50 MGPlugs.
I also tried the same scenes using Magic Bullet.

I have to say I'm not that impressed with rendering time. (20hrs w/Magic B. compared to my own color grading= 2hrs for the 90min Movie)

And the Magic Bullet look was extremly simular to my own; by just experimenting w/color correctors/contrast and levels.

Have any of you had better luck doing your own Color Grading?
:undecided
 
If you're happy with the results you're getting on your own, why deal with the render time that MB brings with it?
 
I was just curious what the spread was.
I see so many posts about MB that it appears the way to go.

Then I have seen some GREAT posts on getting the same looks (and better) from DVXUSERS.



Maybe it was good I tried it at least to learn how to color grade on my own.
Experience is still the best Mentor, I guess.:thumbsup:
 
Whatever works dude. Magic Bullet is useful if you need the 60i-24p conversion or if you really know what look you want (ie. You're doing a Matrix spoof and you want that green/blue look and you have no idea how to get it perfect through color correcting). Besides that, that's about it. It saves work time but with a trade off for the rendering time. Don't worry about it dude, if you figured out how to get your look and save a lot of time, then you're most likely better off on your own color correcting talents. =)
 
Thanx :) makes me feel better.

My first Feature length project.

First time I tried to get a "Movie Look" in any project.
 
depends, if you good at it. i sometimes cc then do it for a type of look but i dont over kill like some people do.
 
Awhile back I bought Barry Green's "The DVX book: " He also showed how to get some of MB's looks right out of the DVX CAM!:thumbsup:
 
Magic Bullet has become such overkill and most people are using it just to use it without considering any artistic approaches. There is 1 preset I like in MB currently:

Buffalo

I enjoy Bleach Bypass and Color Reversal and even would consider Currahee but the rest are too 'XL1 Wedding' looking for me.

20 Hours? That hurts. But then again, so what? What are you in a hurry to do that 1 day is making and breaking the production? Let it render and take a break.
 
That's the thing I mean; I waited: 20 hours for "BISTRO" or "FILMIC/warm/cool" look, etc.
And for it to look like what I already could do with filters in the the NLE.

I wanted to use MB "Because "EVERYONE WAS DOING IT":)lol


The way people rave about it, it is like you HAVE to have it to make it look good.

Like Hudson says: Artistic Approach!:) Experiment.

Like I said in the begining...At least it taught me to "Experiment on my own."
 
LloydC said:
You can easily do it all your NLE...
Click to expand...

Completely disagree. When you want to talk about ease of use MB is money. I'm not crazy about presets in general, but when you just need something quickly, MB is completely worth it.

Personally, I try to avoid it, but saying that it is just as easy to do in your NLE I don't think is right.
 
this is also what i heard , they heard the issues of the last one and fixed it or improved it also more settings etc....
 
I have the 'Movie Looks' plugin that came with Premiere Pro and even bought the package of additional 'looks' for $50. I like and use it occasionally; particularly for the diffusion looks. Personally, I can't match the same diffusion look with the Premiere effects. Don't like the render times though.

When Magic Bullet Editors V2 came out promising performance improvements, I jumped on the upgrade offer. Frankly, I'm dissapointed so far. I see no serious improvement in render times. I have an ATI graphics card on my PC and apparently the performance improvements are dependent on having a high-end Nvidia card. The curious thing is that on Macs, they primarily support ATI cards for the performance improvement. Sorry but I'm not about to go drop another $250 or more on a new graphics card just for this.

To be fair to Red Giant, they don't actually claim a performance improvement in Version 2 without the graphics card acceleration. Wishful thinking on my part to assume otherwise, I guess. I've rendered the same 'look' using the 'Movie Looks' plugin versus Magic Bullet Editors V2 and see negligable difference in render times.

So don't make my mistake. If you don't have the graphics hardware, don't upgrade if you're primarily looking for improved render times.
 
I use it on smaller projects. I usually just use "Basic" "Max contrast" or "Sharp" which all look pretty similar. On something longer I would definitely try to get the look I wanted with regular CC. MB is handy to have. If nothing else it gives you different looks you can try to achieve through CC so you dont have the long render times.
 
Last night, after trying to bust my cherry with lighting a night shoot and completely screwing it up and having to reschedule everything, I sat down to edit some of the other scenes. Because of this thread I decided to turn to good 'ol trusty magic bullet and see what I could come up with.

One scene: 43 seconds. Eight cuts: 1/2 corrected with Curahee preset modified to my liking and 1/2 corrected with No. 85 (office interior scene).

43 seconds, 8 clips = 41 minutes render time with quality set to good, exporting a AVI.

MB is slow, resource intensive, but the worst part is that you can't preview the effect in real time... Maybe Vegas just has spoiled me.
 
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