Turning "Meh" into "My Goodness!" with Magic Bullet Looks
Posted by Corne Scheepers on Saturday, November 4, 2017
I first worked with Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks a few years ago. It was the demo version and I loved what it did to spice up some rather mediocre 1080i camcorder video. But I pretty much just dumped presets over my footage without really knowing what I was doing. Fast forward to the present where I now have a better understanding of what goes on in Media Composer's waveform and vector scopes and grading as a whole, and the Magic Bullet Looks suite takes on a whole new meaning.
If you're serious about getting that iconic orange-and-teal cine colour look into your videos, then you really should look at a grading tool like this. Keep in mind though that it comes with a serious disclaimer - the rule is stop BEFORE you think it is enough! A subtle glow or slightly saturated look will add to the beauty of a properly filmed shot. However if you just shovel funky colour, vignettes and edge glows into your footage you'll end up with cheesy-looking, horrible videos that won't wow anyone. Don't use this to fix your mistakes. Rather fix your camerawork first.
Looks can be render intensive so I had to change the way I normally stack effects in my Avid Media Composer timeline. Basically I now place my footage (along with any image stabilization) on V1, any colour correction in V2, and the Magic Bullet Looks effect on V3, rather than to nest everything on V1. The benefit of this is improved playback performance while you're editing, and it also makes it easier to change individual effects without having to re-render everything.
The Magic Bullet Looks interface is accessed from Media Composer's effect editor window. Once there you're provided with a range of presets and once you've selected a specific preset, you can start changing values of the components in it to create the look you're going for.
I still find that I have to go back and forth between Avid's colour corrector and Magic Bullet a lot before I get the colour and look for every shot perfectly dialed in, so on a longer project you would probably want to create bins for all your presets.
Check out Red Giant for this and many other Avid plugins.
If you're serious about getting that iconic orange-and-teal cine colour look into your videos, then you really should look at a grading tool like this. Keep in mind though that it comes with a serious disclaimer - the rule is stop BEFORE you think it is enough! A subtle glow or slightly saturated look will add to the beauty of a properly filmed shot. However if you just shovel funky colour, vignettes and edge glows into your footage you'll end up with cheesy-looking, horrible videos that won't wow anyone. Don't use this to fix your mistakes. Rather fix your camerawork first.
Looks can be render intensive so I had to change the way I normally stack effects in my Avid Media Composer timeline. Basically I now place my footage (along with any image stabilization) on V1, any colour correction in V2, and the Magic Bullet Looks effect on V3, rather than to nest everything on V1. The benefit of this is improved playback performance while you're editing, and it also makes it easier to change individual effects without having to re-render everything.
The Magic Bullet Looks interface is accessed from Media Composer's effect editor window. Once there you're provided with a range of presets and once you've selected a specific preset, you can start changing values of the components in it to create the look you're going for.
I still find that I have to go back and forth between Avid's colour corrector and Magic Bullet a lot before I get the colour and look for every shot perfectly dialed in, so on a longer project you would probably want to create bins for all your presets.
Check out Red Giant for this and many other Avid plugins.
Tags: "magic bullet" "avid media composer" "grading"
