Quick question,

I'll soon have a mini35 for my XL2 and have spent close to a year perfecting my colour grading skills in After Effects and Sony Vegas... you all know what I mean, I think. Anyway, after all that, I find my self asking if my images are even close to what I could be doing with Magic Bullet.

The money has been the issue, so when it comes right down to it, I want to know how necessary people consider magic bullet to be? With everything that can be done in After Effects, when all is said and done, is magic bullet still worth it?

it isnt totally necessary, just produces rather nice (and in my opinion the best) results when deinterlacing footage. im sure their are many cheaper ways of doing it reasonably well.

I wouldn't say it's necessary at all - you can do most of the stuff yourself in colour correction if you know how. The advantage of a tool is that it automates the process and means you don't have to learn the tricks, assuming you have enough quality basic tools at your image processing disposal.

Graeme

Ok, that's nice to hear.

So would anyone say it's possible to get footage in A/FX to look just as good as with magic bullet?

Tim, if you would consider its deinterlacing ability to be a main point, than having a progressive scan camera definately makes me feel better about not owning bullet.

You can get deinterlace quality elsewhere. With MB, the main thing you're paying for are the recipes, especially if you're a keen AE user and know how to layer up video to get the effects you want.

Graeme

Yeah, you are paying for 'recipes'. But I thought the one advantage with MB was that it processed everything at a much higher bit count than the host application?

Perhaps - depends on host application, and also depends on whether that makes a visual difference or not. If you're in AE, you can work in very high bit depths anyway these days.

Graeme

But I thought the one advantage with MB was that it processed everything at a much higher bit count than the host application?
In Vegas, that doesn't exactly happen because MBE doesn't take into account studioRGB versus computerRGB.

In AE, not all the filters there work in 32-bit (or even 16-bit) bit depth, so if you want to split hairs then MBE could have a slight advantage. However, you'd be really hard pressed to spot the difference.

What's more noticeable is subtle differences between the algorithms used in MBE and in AE. So things will look slightly different (i.e. in the tinting, and in the black/white diffusion).

2- In any case, I would just play to the strengths of Vegas / AE or whatever you're using.
AE- Powerful at specific tasks like motion tracking, so you can draw masks on adjustment layers to isolate corrections to specific areas. Like power windows on a da vinci, except more powerful (and not real-time).
Vegas - Fast; perfect conforms if you started your edit here.
Magic Bullet - Easy to get interesting looks. Not the tool for detailed color correction/enhancement, although you can combine it with other tools.

3- Some ideas for Vegas:
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/usm/usm.html

yeah but it is really nice to be able to have those presets that can replicate with out having to play around for hours. and the ability to be able to tweak those presets also is great

MB is a pain wihout the right hardware (=fast hardware). It produces quite nice results fast, but it's not magic. You still have to tune the presets from clip to clip. I personally believe that learning manual advanced color correction is better, and there's plenty of other softening/diffusion/gradient plugins.

The deinterlacing doesn't impress me too much though, I wouldn't buy MB just for the deinterlacing.

With a half decent graphics card MB is now very fast (almost realtime on my Geforce).

The main culprit now is the Misfire plugin which doesn't use the GPU.

Isn't Magic Bullet especially fast when using it with an nVidia GeForce 7-series videocard? I heard it uses specific GPU-related commands to speed up your rendering and with one of those cards most rendering can be done in nearly real-time.