Red Giant released Magic Bullet Suite 12 in February. Popular tools have been streamlined along with the addition of a brand new film emulation tool. The suite now includes Magic Bullet Looks 3.0, Magic Bullet Colorista III, Magic Bullet Film 1.0, Magic Bullet Mojo 2.0, Magic Bullet Cosmo 2.0, Denoiser II, and LUT Buddy. The new update adds OpenFX compatibility.
Along with feature and interface changes, Red Giant has also focused on performance improvements across the board, as well as bringing more of the tools into new hosts like Apple Final Cut Pro X. A single installation of the suite will install the plug-ins into as many application hosts as you have on your system. However, check the compatibility list for your particular NLE. For example, everything installs into Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC, but Final Cut Pro X only gets Colorista, Looks, Cosmo, Film, and Mojo. Avid Media Composer is only compatible with Looks and Resolve gets Mojo, Film, Looks, and Cosmo. Depending on your toolkit, you might opt for one or two of the individual plug-ins rather than the entire suite. If you already installed version 12.0, you’ll need to download and reinstall 12.1 in order to add the plug-ins into new hosts, like Resolve 12.
Magic Bullet Looks (v3.1)
Magic Bullet Looks is a popular go-to plug-in for sophisticated stylization of an image. It includes tool modules for color correction, lens effects, relighting, and a lot more. The interface design has been flattened and streamlined. As before, it runs as a separate application that opens whenever you launch the interface from the clip on the timeline. The frame that you are parked on becomes the reference frame to which you apply your looks. In 3.0 and 3.1, you can now hover the mouse over the various preset looks and the larger Looks viewer will be updated to preview that look on your frame. In addition, this will also preview the various tool modules used to create the look. Red Giant has created many new preset looks based on popular film and TV show treatments. All are customizable. The 3.1 update added a Trackpad Mode, enabling you to use a laptop or standalone trackpad like a control surface.
New tool modules have been added, such as a LUT tool and a 4-way color corrector. The latter adds a very intuitive luma range graph to easily change the crossover points between lo/mid and mid/hi. Importing LUTs into Looks doesn’t seem to work perfectly. It’s pretty solid in the Adobe applications, but color management with FCP X is quirky. When I imported LUTs into Looks with FCP X, the result was a lot more extreme than in the Adobe applications. This is likely an issue with FCP X’s color pipeline when an external program is involved.
Magic Bullet Colorista III (v1.1)
The earlier version of Colorista was a feature-packed plug-in that functioned like a mini-grading application. It had master, primary, and secondary grading, plus curves, a power mask, and keyer. With Colorista III, Red Giant decided to simplify the plug-in by including one level of primary grading, curves, a keyer, and HSL secondary adjustments. The power mask is gone, because the developers decided to rely on the new built-in masking that’s part of Premiere Pro CC and Final Cut Pro X. Adobe added bezier masks with built-in tracking to all effects, so if you are using Colorista III in Premiere Pro CC, you now have a better masking capability than in the past. Apple added shape masks to all effects with the introduction of FCP X 10.2.
With FCP X, the developers were able to integrate the color grading wheels into the inspector pane, but in a vertical configuration. The response of the wheels is weighted, so that you move the mouse farther in relationship to the puck’s travel on-screen. This results in better granularity to the adjustment, but might require a bit of time for new users to get accustomed to the feel. Although it includes curves, these are not true multi-point curves, as you are limited to five control points along the line. Typically these work best when you want an s-curve correction.
A big addition to Colorista III are Lightroom-style shadow and highlight controls. Adjusting the shadows slider acts like you are adding or removing fill light from an image. There’s also a new vignette slider, so you can quickly dial in the size and darkness of an edge vignette. Most of the Magic Bullet products include a strength slider, while enables you to dial back on the amount of the color treatment. This lets you make a more extreme correction and then tone it down for the final look. One welcomed addition is an overall white balance control with a color picker to select what you determine as white in the image. This is very good news for FCP X editors in particular.
New 1.1 features, which are applicable to Adobe hosts, include support for OpenCL and Cuda. This allows for real time color correction during video playback via Adobe Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine. The Skin Overlay is back and there’s a keyer “cut out” mode to create transparency for layered color corrections.
Magic Bullet Film
Film style LUTs (color look-up tables) are all the rage and this one is particularly well thought-out. Red Giant has reverse-engineering the LUTs from actual film and includes 22 negative stocks and four print stocks. These include the typical Kodak and Fuji variations as well as settings for some imaginary custom stocks designed by Red Giant. The key to this plug-in is that it is intended to pair a film negative LUT with a film print LUT, in order to more accurately mimic a real-world film pipeline.
In addition to the LUTs, you have a number of control sliders for tint, exposure, contrast, saturation, and skin tone. There’s a slider for the amount of built-in grain to be added, as well as an instant vignette and a strength slider. A particularly interesting control is the vintage/modern slider. Shift it all the way to modern and you get a very strong orange/teal effect, whereas going fully in the vintage direction leaves the image more reddish and faded.
Magic Bullet Mojo 2.0
Mojo is for the folks who want the extreme orange/teal coloration that many blockbuster films use. This is my least favorite filter in the suite, because few films that I see actually look like the results you get here – blockbuster or not. It’s a color treatment whose purpose is to cool off the background independent of skin tones. Depending on the shot and the art direction used in production, sometimes you get great results and other times not so much. 
Fortunately there are plenty of adjustments to derive a decent, albeit stylized, color correction. As part of the Looks refresh, there is now a set of Mojo tools built into Looks, as well. Mojo has also been GPU-accelerated. Red Giant claims it’s 20% faster in Adobe products and 80% faster in FCP X. In the testing that I’ve done, the results have been in line with these numbers.
Magic Bullet Cosmo 2.0
Cosmo is a skin smoothing filter. It’s effectively the “vaseline on the lens” trick. If you have an actress with more textured skin and you need to soften it, then Cosmo does one of the better jobs I’ve seen. It isolates skin from the background, so that you end up softening only skin without hurting background detail.
The new version has good performance, so you can keep on working with the filter applied without having to render to continue. Cosmo is GPU-accelerated with a 20% bump in Adobe products. In addition to FCP X, it is also available in Sony Vegas Pro.
Denoiser II and LUT Buddy
Denoiser II is general solution for reducing video noise and works well with most footage. LUT Buddy is a tool included with a number of Red Giant products. It is designed to import and export LUTs, although in my testing behavior was inconsistent. I could get it to generate a LUT, but not import all LUTs that should have been compatible.
LUT Buddy is very useful for turning the grade you create in one application into a LUT that can be used in another. For example, you can use a number of different color correction filters in After Effects to grade a shot and then use LUT Buddy to turn that grade into a LUT. Then in Premiere Pro, apply the LUT that you created, without the need for using the same filters as were used in After Effects. Here’s where LUT Buddy should have worked to read its own grade, but it didn’t. When I applied the grade and played the clip, the color correction would flicker on and off. However, I was still able to import that LUT using Premiere Pro’s Lumetri filter, so the process is still functional. My initial testing was done with Adobe CC2014, but in retesting in Adobe CC2015, unfortunately I could no longer get LUT Buddy to export a LUT.
Overall, this a solid update. Better performance and new tools. In most hosts you can stack several instances of these filters and still get real-time playback, which is a significant step forward. Magic Bullet Suite 12 is the perfect package for editors that want to have plenty of control over the look of their image, yet stay inside the editing application.
To usher in Magic Bullet Suite 12, Red Giant produced another of its innovative short films, called “Old/New”. It’s directed by Seth Worley and narrated by Patton Oswalt. Along with a clever storyline, the film was produced using a wide range of Red Giant products. Make sure that you check out the behind-the-scenes video to see how they did it.
Originally written for Digital Video magazine / CreativePlanetNetwork.
©2015 Oliver Peters
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