Just like those two plug-ins, digital stocks are based on real film and the colour grading experience of an industry expert. It’s a cross between FilmConvert without the colour adjustment controls and Koji Color Advanced. The Film module includes 22 negative stocks and four print stocks, giving you 88 possible cinematic combinations.
Film emulates the photochemical process, allowing you to convert digital footage into negative film, with a positive print as the end-result. It has more presets and parameters to control the looks of your footage, including temperature/tint and exposure settings.īoth these modules can be used with great results in cinematic projects, but if you can’t get enough of that, Magic Bullet Suite 13 has another updated module that will give you exactly the cinematic effect you’re after: Film 1.2. you can now tell Mojo your footage has been shot in Flat, Log or Video mode and it will pre-adjust accordingly. Mojo 2 has been updated with modern cinema styles and support for different footage types - i.e. Finally, scopes in Looks 4 can be resized - very handy! Film and Mojo 2 Still, once you’ve done that, you can compare your grading with reference stills from other clips too, which allows you to synchronise complete looks across the timeline and actually see how all of it works out.įurthermore, Magic Bullet Looks 4 comes with 51 new presets and the ability to save your carefully tuned tool settings as presets.
Instead, you’ll first have to export stills from frames in Final Cut Pro X before loading Magic Bullet Looks 4 and then import these into the app. The way you load them isn’t as efficient as with Da Vinci Resolve, where you can create them in the app itself. The new version of Magic Bullet Looks has another improvement that was much needed: the ability to load multiple reference stills.
The support already existed in updated versions of Looks 3. In Looks, you’ll find support for Apple’s Trackpads to control parameters. Proper support for control surfaces is still lacking, although there is a compromise, but not in Colorista. In some departments, Colorista plays catch up with it only now fully supporting Log footage and LUTs. If you’re somewhat experienced, though, you’ll want to do it all by yourself and in that case Colorista IV is as good as the previous version.
It’s quite accurate and if you’re new to colour grading it might be one of the best “tutorials” on the subject you can find.
With this tool inexperienced colourists answer a series of questions, after which the plug-in figures out the best colour settings itself. Even pros will have to admit Colorista IV 4.0 is efficient to work with, while occasional colour grading users will love the “Guided Color Correction” workflow tool. I think nobody will deny Color Finale Pro is in a league of its own, with its support for ACES, X-Rite calibration feature and control surface capabilities, but Colorista IV 4.0 is nothing to sneeze at either.
It offers full control over the look and feel of the noise you add and has extended controls for sharpening, texture and types of grain you want to add. What the Renoiser plug-in is good at, however, is to give digital footage a grainy film look. If you don’t like the plastic look you inevitably get with a heavily denoised image, I wouldn’t recommend using the brand new Renoiser 1 to add noise again. Rendering noise reduction results remains a slow affair, though. Denoiser III 3.0 gives splendid results out of the box.
In Final Cut Pro X I used Photon Pro, which did a good job but required a lot of repeated small adjustments to get it right, taking an awful lot of time. Denoiser used to work only with Adobe products. Here’s a plug-in that has been entirely rewritten, resulting in a slimmed down set of controls. Perhaps the least spectacular, but most important new module in Magic Bullet Suite 13 is Denoiser III 3.0. Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro users will be happy to know that Looks 4 and Denoiser III now enjoy Mercury support - which means they now have real-time playback of the effects in their favourite composition and editing applications. Version 13 includes new versions of Colorista, Looks, Denoiser, Film, Mojo and Cosmo. Final Cut Pro X users rejoice: all of Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite modules now work as plug-in to your beloved NLE.