Magic Bullet- How Does The Filmlook Work?

[Michael Pappas]

I was wondering if anyone has used Magic Bullet for filmlooking 60i dv. The people who make MB say they take the 60i field video and make it 24fps by deinterlacing. I know MB does other stuff to get the look too, Color etc.

But how do they adjust the temporal frame rate in AE fro 60i to 24fps. I'm very curious in the what and how they work the 60 fields into 24fps in AE. Anyone have any theories or understand this process.

Michael Pappas
arrfilms@hotmail.com

[Rob Lohman]

I haven't used this process, but it will probably remove frames
or re-interpolate to the correct number of frames. De-interlacing
just makes it 30 fps progressive...

[ChrisPayne]

Vanilla de-interlacing isn't great. The usual method is to duplicate each line of one field to fill the gaps, then dump the other field. This avoids the 'comb' effect on fast movement within a frame, but reduces the vertical resolution by half.

I don't know much about Magic Bullet, but there are a bunch of tricks they COULD be using. For a start, they could analyse each field pair for movement. Where there is no movement, they can safely interleave the two fields without comb artefacts (preserving the vertical res), and where there IS movement they can duplicate BOTH fields on BOTH scanlines, blended together - giving a crude motion-blur effect. I imagine they do other stuff to smooth it out and improve the look as well.

Regarding turning 60 fields into 24 frames: 60/24 = 2.5 fields per frame, so for frame 1 they might use fields 1 and 2, plus field 3 with a 50% bias. Frame 2 would use fields 4 and 5, plus field 3 with the same 50% bias again.

[Martin Munthe]

I'm not sure the video inserts in Vanilla Sky (deinterlaced in MB) is supposed to look great. It seems to be a lot of 1" stock footage. I guess they focused mainly on using MB Look Suite for color matching the shots.

It is not recommended to deinterlace 30i to 24p using Magic Bullet. I use it on PAL footage in 25i and go to 25p. The result is the best method I've seen so far. I did a match comparison between Sony IMX wich is shot true progressive and actually thought the MB footage looked better (believe it or not!) - more film like.

I think the method they are using is combining the information of both fields and then (using a fuzzy logic algoritm) combining the information into a single frame "clone". Not sure about this though.