Red Giant recently updated its Magic Bullet Suite, much to our excitement. Now in version 12, the suite’s latest facelift offers fresh interfaces, improved options, and better working tools. Seven different programs make up the suite – Looks, Colorista III, Film, Mojo, Cosmo, Denoiser II, and LUT Buddy – all for only $799.
If you’ve read our overview of Red Giant’s Shooter Suite, you’ll know how much we love using the company’s programs, but the Magic Bullet Suite is by far the one we use most often. Now don’t get us wrong, DaVinci Resolve is the complete color processing and finishing tool, and if someone asked us what program they should learn first for the industry, we would probably say DaVinci Resolve. Its ability to grade RAW files and track images, plus its added control surface, put it in a different league than Magic Bullet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t grade an entire film – small or big-budgeted – with Magic Bullet. You can, and very easily. Phillip Bloom even breaks down his own work with the suite in a tutorial.
We got our hands on the Magic Bullet Suite sooner than its competitors, so we’re more familiar with it, understand its workflow, and are just plan faster with it. Blackmagic Design does offer a free Lite version of DaVinci Resolve, and we do suggest grabbing it – heck, it’s free. But keep in mind we don’t use just Red Giant or Blackmagic Design in our workflows, we’ve also used tools from NewBlue FX, Boris FX, and many others as well. To us, it’s not about the programs you use to create a certain look (though companies will tell you otherwise), but about you as a storyteller and how you push past the limitations of your own creativity to champion something worth showing.
Looks
The backbone of the Magic Bullet Suite is Looks. If you’re new to color grading, Looks will make your life so much easier. The entire suite has been redesigned and optimized to make the most of your GPU, allowing for most effects to take place in real time. We’re running an i7 Windows 7 laptop with an older NVIDIA Quadro 2000M card, and after upgrading to version 12, we could tell the load difference. The program just runs smoother and faster. Looks comes packed with 198 different presets, which is great for any color grader looking for a starting point. As in previous releases, you can fine-tune any of the presets to your liking or build your own. Red Giant has even introduced various film looks. Twenty-two negative film stocks and four print stocks have been included, and again, all can be adjusted in the tool settings.
Colorista III
Colorista is a powerful color-grading tool that integrates into your editing process. Red Giant no longer includes Power Mask features within the plug-in, but since the redesign, Colorista works well with the masking features that are built in to your editor. The designers went ahead and added shadow and highlight controls, a vignette slider, and a robust Curves tool that gives individual editing points. Besides the standard settings for exposure, saturation, hue, pop, and a three-way color wheel, the program also includes an overall strength slider you can adjust.
Film
This is one of our favorites in the suite. The Film plug-in presets are arranged in a similar fashion to Looks, but provide different customizations that include color temp, tint, exposure, contrast, skin tone, grain, vignette, strength, and vintage/modern. As in Looks, you get twenty-two negative film stocks, ranging from Kodak 5218 Vision 2 500T to Prolostia P2050, and four print stocks – Kodak 2382, Kodak 2393, Fujifilm 3510, and Fujifilm 3521XD. Honestly, it’s just really cool to play with. Anyone who was ever limited in the amount of film stock they could shoot because of cost and availability will have fun messing around with various looks just to see what they can come up with.
Mojo
We don’t use Mojo too often because of the limited type of work we do, but it’s a very robust plug-in compatible with Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Apple Motion, and Sony Vegas Pro. The idea behind Mojo is to give your footage a stylized look that’s similar to the grade of a Hollywood blockbuster film – accentuated skin tones and cool backgrounds. There are options to dial in tint, warmth, punch, bleach, and skin tone. In its default settings, we think of Mojo as being Red Giant’s staple look, kind of like the work coming out of Company 3. Meaning, when you see a film graded by Company 3, you almost know immediately it’s by Company 3. The same could be said for Mojo; when you apply it, you know you’re seeing Red Giant’s Mojo. Every brand needs to have a personality and for Red Giant, we see it as Mojo.
Cosmo
Cosmo is your cosmetic cleanup for skin. The controls are very intuitive. Actually, the whole suite has controls that are intuitive, but we’ll be the first to admit getting skin tones to look natural and consistent is one of the hardest things. While we do wish there were more controls in this plug-in, it offers options for skin color, squeeze, softening, and fine-tuning. Its default settings are actually right in the ballpark of where you need to be, so if you’re new to fixing skin, this is extremely helpful.
We touched on both Denoiser II and LUT Buddy in our overview of the Shooter Suite, but if you didn’t read that, here they are again:
Denoiser II
As one might guess from the name, this program helps reduce and eliminate noise reduction in your video. This plug-in is especially good for when you find yourself shooting in lowlight or at high ISOs. Denoiser II v1.4 supports Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects CC 2014, CC, CS6, and Final Cut Pro 7. Version 1.3 supports CS4, CS5, CS5.5, and CS6, as well as Final Cut Pro 7. Applying the effect to your video clip is a quick drag and drop, and its default settings actually put you at a good starting point. Within the tool there are options to fine-tune and adjust the enhancement, as well as other advanced options like shadow and highlight offset. Thankfully cameras are vastly improving their lowlight shooting capabilities, but when we do run into a noticeable situation, Denoiser has never let us down – it fixes our images with a very natural look.
LUT Buddy
LUT Buddy is one of the newer releases from Red Giant, but it’s just as powerful as the company’s earlier products. To put it simply, LUT Buddy reads the image before any color correction is executed and then extracts any differences to an image as a LUT for future reference. Bing-bango-bongo – the “How did I stumble into this cool look?” query has been answered. The great thing about LUTs is their portability: with an easy export, they’ll go wherever you go.
With the upgrade to version 12, we really like the direction Red Giant is taking its software. Better tools and cleaner interfaces make for a fantastic combination. Thankfully, we’re still waiting for the day when Red Giant’s programs can’t task what we envision for an image.