Magic Bullet-Looks
 

We have tried unsuccessfully to write an 8 min video. Used MB Looks for large portion of the video. Batch monitor indicates about 5 hours to write, which seem like alot of time for an 8 min SD video. We are trying to write a web video at 800kbs. We are operating a Mac G5 Power PC with a total of 2.5 GB Ram. The card is a GeForce 6600 and the VRAM is 256MB. The host application is FCP 5.1.4. Is this a RAM issue? FCP stalls out at about 45% of the write.

Appreciate any help...need to get this video out.
Thanks,
John

I know, MB takes forever to render. I do it with uncompressed hdv and it takes awhile and I have a mac pro. Why your computer stalls though could maybe due to it wanting to go to sleep or something. How long did you wait till you decided it had stopped?

Hi there

Yes I've found that as with all rendering and encoding you must deactivate any form of screen saver or sleep function, or you'll just end up having to start the render again.

Also you need enough hard drive space for the render to take place... I've had renders stall when it's used up all the available hard drive space for the temp rendering files... After Effects and especially MB seems to use huge amounts of HD space. I find the 'Looks' render out much faster than the Deinterlace that does take for ever.

Finally to make the projects more manageable I tend to add the effects to small sequences at a time. For an 8 minute clip I'd usually divide it up into 30 second chunks. Once all the MB effects have been applied I usually reimport the sequences into PPro and render out the project for encoding. For DVD's etc I usually downscale the HDV footage in After Effects at the same time as I apply the 'Look'.

Regards
Gareth

I will try turning off the sleep mode to see if that works. It would process for a couple hours and then stop responding. It just seems like over 4 hours for SD footage is a lot of time. Maybe I need to beef up the RAM.

Thanks,
John

MB benefits of a good graphic card. If you take a look at their recommendation, you will see that realtime is possible with some Nvidia or ATI cards.

I have an Nvidia 6600 series card.

Compressor still stalls out at about 48%....we ran it through as a quicktime movie and it took about 15 min but the file size is huge...too big for web delivery. Not sure why compressor cant complete the task. ????

That 15 min render time seems a lot more reasonable—seems like maybe your problem lies more with compressor than with MB Looks, or maybe there's some weird way that they don't play nice together that we didn't discover during the beta. Have you contacted Red Giant about this problem?

-Stu

I contacted Red Giant a few days ago and no word yet from them.
Thanks,
John

I'd love to read an instruction manual on the new Magic Bullet Looks application. Is one available to download online, or can someone post it? I couldn't find anything on the Red Giant website.

The manual comes with the software purchase as part of the installation software. I can't figure out a way to copy and post it. It is in html format.

Thanks to John K at Redgiant Software for his quick response today. Here is what he suggested and it worked. Exporting the project from FCP into Compressor created the issue. We created an external project file and closed FCP and imported the external project file directly into Compressor. It took about 20-30min to compress the 8 min video but it was very heavy with MB use, primarily some film effects.

Thanks John for your attention to this today.

John

I just rendered an 8 minute video, it took roughly 4 hours.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-gk__0-xptU

Anyone want to take a look.

It was shot on a really crappy JVC Everio (to get a documentary look).

Yeah, it does take forever when rendering any video with MB looks applied. Anyway I like to render as I go, as I get done with a days work, (few min) I just render that, then I'm ready for the next day. If time is really a problem just do it over night, should be ready in the morning for you. Just my two cents... Nice video "the cellar" by the way, how did you achieve the film look?

Magic bullet takes a long time yes, but try Andrew Kramers Film Magic Pro, its like magic bullet but renders way faster