Magic Bullet and Color Finesse
 

I'd downloaded the Magic Bullet plug ins for Vegas.
Is this for real? I found the effect rather exaggerated and cheap? Is it me, my monitor or both?

I also downloaded the trial for Color Finesse, but the plug ins do not appear in Vegas 7 along the other plugs in. Does anybody know if by any chance Color Finesse can be used with Vegas 7 and if it's better than Magic Bullet?
Thanks
Larry

it all depends what camera you are using. If you use lower quality digital footage, then Magic Bullet sucks. You need really good picture quality to even start using Magic Bullet......then it is good.

what about those cams
 

Would you consider footage out of the Sony DXC50C good?
What about the DVX100B?
Thanks

Hi Larry

I've been using Magic Bullet on HDV footage from my Z1. While sometimes the effects from the Look Suite can be a bit violent... it is fairly easy to go in and adjust the settings in After Effects to get a more subtle look. They give a good basis to start on...

With the HDV footage you're best not doing too long a sequence or the render times become very long... 5 mins of effects takes over an hour to render to uncompressed HD avi on my pc. The Magic bullet deinterlace take five times this.
I'm very pleased with the looks I get from the software.

cheers
Gareth

Gareth,
What do you think of the MB deinterlace feature? Is it decent to get the cadence look on video at least?
Thanks

I use Magic Bullet all the time. If you take the time and tune it properly. It produces good result.

The deinterlacer is great for most situations. However, if there are natural patterns, such as trees, grass, or even things like stone walls, etc., with random shapes, it will try to standardize them if your camera is moving. This produces terrible wavy patterns.
So, it's good in shots where that isn't a problem; it's good if you want to take the time to mask those parts out of the shot to separate them and use another deinterlacer for those; it's not good if you have a shot like that and just run it by itself. In that case, you should use another deinterlacer. But it won't be as crisp as magic bullet.

The difference between magic bullet and other deinterlacers is that it tries to interpolate what should be there, rather than just blending the fields with a certain algorithm. This makes more detail, but the downside is that sometimes this interpolated detail is just wrong (as I said, in situations with organic textures-- even an extreme closeup on someone's skin with some wrinkles).

OK, thanks for your answer

Did you use the Warmish preset?
I use that one most of the time, I'm VERY happy with the results too.
People immediately notice how warm and filmic the footage looks.

Your screenshots are very nice too, especially the one of the guy in the library and the two students on the train. What did you use to shoot these?

Gareth, you said you used MB with your Z1... I tried this once, I was pretty happy with the results, but do you need a special HD version of Magic Bullet, or does it work on DV AND HDV?

MB should work with HD... just takes forever to render.

As it works within AE, it works with whatever footage is being used. Just as noted, rendering HD footage of any kind takes a LOT of CPU speed. Xeon class duo or preferably quad processors, with 4gb of RAM is a good start.

Those are nice stills. Looks like the Warm Diffusion look of MB.

DVX100b + Magic Bullet "Basic look" + Levels (my first newb attempt)

Wow. Those stills are phenomenal!

Carl

These are fantastic pics, what did you shoot them with? Do you have any before and after shots?

thanks
Sam