Magic Bullet-Looks at DVinfo.net
DV Info Net

Go Back   DV Info Net > Special Interest Areas > Techniques for Independent Production

Techniques for Independent Production
The challenges of creating Digital Cinema and other narrative forms.

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old October 29th, 2007, 04:28 PM   #1
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
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
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 12:28 AM   #2
Major Player
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Goleta, CA
Posts: 299
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?
James Brill is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 02:31 AM   #3
Major Player
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: France
Posts: 578
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
Gareth Watkins is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 09:39 AM   #4
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
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
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 10:13 AM   #5
Inner Circle
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: switzerland
Posts: 2,133
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.
Giroud Francois is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 10:42 AM   #6
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
I have an Nvidia 6600 series card.
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 30th, 2007, 06:52 PM   #7
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
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. ????
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 31st, 2007, 12:25 AM   #8
DV Rebel
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 19
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
__________________
theorphanage.com
prolost.com
Stu Maschwitz is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 31st, 2007, 03:29 AM   #9
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
I contacted Red Giant a few days ago and no word yet from them.
Thanks,
John
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 31st, 2007, 08:20 AM   #10
Major Player
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Toronto
Posts: 539
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.
Craig Irving is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 31st, 2007, 11:42 AM   #11
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
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.
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old October 31st, 2007, 05:36 PM   #12
Major Player
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Posts: 446
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
__________________
John J. Moon
www.northernlightfilmworks.com - Event DV Top 25 Recipient
John Moon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old February 23rd, 2008, 11:49 PM   #13
New Boot
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Buffalo, NY
Posts: 10
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).
Jack Cook is offline   Reply With Quote
Old March 17th, 2008, 08:43 AM   #14
Regular Crew
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: USA
Posts: 95
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?
Nathan Petersen is offline   Reply With Quote
Old April 9th, 2008, 05:10 PM   #15
Regular Crew
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Glen Allen, VA
Posts: 59
Magic bullet takes a long time yes, but try Andrew Kramers Film Magic Pro, its like magic bullet but renders way faster
Cameron Naghibi is offline   Reply
Reply

DV Info Net refers all where-to-buy and where-to-rent questions exclusively to these trusted full line dealers and rental houses...

B&H Photo Video
(866) 521-7381
New York, NY USA

Scan Computers Int. Ltd.
+44 0871-472-4747
Bolton, Lancashire UK


DV Info Net also encourages you to support local businesses and buy from an authorized dealer in your neighborhood.
  You are here: DV Info Net > Special Interest Areas > Techniques for Independent Production

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

 



All times are GMT -6. The time now is 05:03 AM.


DV Info Net -- Real Names, Real People, Real Info!
1998-2024 The Digital Video Information Network