Product Reviews

Colour grading is an essential part of the movie-making process in the world of big-budget dramas, but it's almost always overlooked at the prosumer level. Despite the wealth of colour-correction tools offered by editing programs such as Final Cut Pro, it can be difficult for even experienced editors to know how to get the right feel for their movies. Enter Magic Bullet Editors 2, a plug-in that promises to be the most indispensable effects plug-in you can add to an editing system.

The original version of the software was a slimmed-down version of Red Giant's Magic Bullet Suite - an expensive professional plug-in for Adobe After Effects that made colour grading easy, with templates designed to emulate common movie-look processes - and Magic Bullet Editors 2 is a massive step forward for an already-impressive program.

For a start, it's now available for Motion 2 as well as Final Cut Pro. It also features artifact-correction filters that were previously exclusive to the Magic Bullet Suite plug-in for After Effects, which removes blockiness and jaggies from footage in preparation for compositing and keying effects.

Version 2 also makes good use of the system's graphics chipset to provide fluid previewing of effects and accelerated rendering times, which is a relief, as rendering times were often painfully long. What Editors still lacks, however, is frame-rate conversion tools for creating uncompressed 24p movies for transfer to celluloid. Red Giant is probably right, though, in thinking that anyone who can afford to go that far with their videos can afford the more pricey suite for After Effects.

Software installation is a breeze, but finding your way around the various tools for the first time can be a little confusing once they've been added to the host application. For Final Cut Pro, for example, general Magic Bullet controls for fine tuning effects from scratch are located in the program's Effects palette - just as you would expect. The ready-made Looks, however,

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are saved to the system's hard drive as a project file, which you must specifically open before you can access its contents. For Motion 2 users, all of Magic Bullet's elements are connected to the host program from the start, but are scattered across different areas. The full hands-on controls are in Effects, and the ready-made Looks are found under Favourites.

Movie Look presets are easily applied: just drag and drop them onto the relevant clips. Video preview is immediately updated to show the result, and it's easy to spend the best part of an afternoon removing effects and trying new ones until you've been through the entire range. They're divided into categories such as Basic (for straightforward softening and film-like tones), and Diffusion (for softening and blooming around shadows and highlights).

Film Looks specifically emulate the colour grading of movies such as The Matrix, Amelie and Traffic, while Stock Emulation filters recreate the tones of colour reversal film, bleach bypass processing or no.85 filters. Most work well immediately on evenly lit video, but on high-contrast material with extreme lighting, such as concert footage, the effects can darken things too much. Fortunately, the level of control on offer is immense, allowing hands-on adjustment of image properties before, during and after colour-filter applications.

Deartifactor did an impressive job of smoothing out greenscreen material for keying, and once we had finished making a pristine digital video production, Magic Bullet's Misfire effects helped make it look like beaten up old film, with dust, scratches, flicker and fading. All effects can be customised to an immense degree, too.

On a dual 2.3GHz G5 system with an ATI Radeon 9650 graphics card and 2.5GB of RAM, playback in Motion 2 and Final Cut Pro was immediate, subject to a slight but noticeably reduced frame rate prior to rendering. Playback would be smoother with a more lavish graphics card, but all things considered, real-time performance is first-rate considering the amount of work being done.

In all but a few areas of video production, filters and effects packages are by far the most over-hyped part of the editor's toolkit. While they don't get used as much as the straight cutting tools, they're easier to demonstrate and easier to sell. The Magic Bullet Editors are a refreshing change from the norm of effects software. They stand out because of their subtlety and their genuine ability to enhance almost any production. This plug-in should be considered an essential part of every video maker's toolkit.