Magic Bullet's "Movie Look"
 

Has anyone used this? I just picked up Premiere Pro 1.5 and it came with Magic Bullet's Movie Look plug in. I tried it out and it seems to pretty much just change the color balance.

Am I correct or does it add in motion blur and deinterlacing?

I downloaded the Vegas update and noticed the movie look thing as well. I tried a couple of things quickly and I think it changes colour response, brightness, contrast, gamma. I only saw a couple of the presets that seemed useful, but I 'll have to give it a bit more of a workout.

I think I'd much prefer a few colour curve presets that I could tweak to get the look I want because wow, people aren't joking when they say it increases render times out of sight...

This version and Magic Bullet Editors doesn't do the deinterlacing. Only the Suite does.

Bummer.. yeah, it's cool to have the filters, but I got all excited thinking I got a neat Magic Bullet plug-in. :)

It still has some useful features. Particularly White and Black Diffusion. It also has easy to use grads, tints, black tints, and warm/cool setting. Those could be achieved using other features, but it makes them easy. All that is in regard to Look Suite from the suite, I hope the plug-in has similar features.

The plugin doesn't give you all the sliders like 'Editors' or the 'Suite'. There are just ten presets selectable from a dropdown and you can elect to blend with the original by a certain percent.

How could you easily do white or black diffusion with, say, a built in NLE function?

One thing that most everyone forgets about Magic Bullet, either in the Editors form, or in it's full AE incarnation, is that it works internally in 32bit colour. One reason it takes so long is that it has to do the conversion up to that level, and then downconvert for the final image. What this means however is that it has far better colour control and results under analysis than performing similar effects in the editors standard controls.

I have seen countless alternative 'looks' plugins to MB, as well as how to recreate them using standard filters. But the fact is that they are not the same as MB.

I have yet to see anyone replicate the Bistro look for example. Or Gold Crunch. Gold Crunch normally makes your footage look horrible. However, feed that preset nice bright footage with a lot of dynamic range and it sings.

One last thing to remember regarding those render times. Use MB last! A second thing to remember is that on a P4 HT cpu you can render out a full res MB treated timeline, and open another instance of Vegas and edit away with barely any slowdown.

I once rendered out a MB timeline, whilst in another instance of Vegas upconverted footage to 720p for a laugh and played back from that timeline at the same time at full resolution with only a minor drop in speed!