Software Review: Magic Bullet Suite 2, Pg. 2

Depth of Options
To explain Magic Bullet Suite 2, we will partially be duplicating things found in it's little brother, Magic Bullet Editors. After that, we'll get into a few of the differences.

For the cross-over elements of the Suite and Editors, it primarily comes down to ways to destroy your movie and ways to tint your movies.

The majority of the destruction comes from the Misfire Film Damage setting, which allows you to damage your footage in ways that most resemble actual film damage, from Micro Scratches and Gate Weave to Flicker and Vignette. You can tweak nearly every aspect of Misfire, from the radius of the vignette to the number of micro scratches to the amount of emulsion grain. While this is pretty cool and will provide hours of pleasure, I didn't find it as useful as the Look Suite, even though it can be very useful in historical recreations and pseudo-documentaries for artificially-aged footage. (So long as you don't get carried away! A little goes a long way with this filter!!)

The tinting and touch-up effects found Look Suite is what most people look into Magic Bullet for. Snappy shots that show how they've replicated the appearance of movies like the Matrix, Three Kings, Traffic and a host of others tend to intrigue filmmakers to no end!

New additions to this edition's Look Suite include Crime Scene (designed to replicate CSI), Echo Blue (designed to mimic The Island), King of Pain (designed to mimic Lord of War), and seven more presets to go along with the previous 55 presets.

Each of these presets is able to be placed on your footage and then tweaked in four different areas: Subject, Lens, Camera, and Post. The subject is your actual footage and how bright, saturated, or contrasty it is. The Lens deals with filters that would usually be applied to the lens of a camera, like Black and White Tiffen Pro-Mist filters. Next is the actual camera and it replicates things that would occur during the actual film recording process, like the old 3-Strip Process and a film tint. The final area that can be tweaked is the Post area which allows for touch ups on the warmth or coolness of the picture, post saturation, post brightness, and post contrast. Because these layers of effects are designed to work in the same order as they would actually work in the real world with a real camera setup, you come up with a pretty convincing replica of reality. It's not perfect, but it ends up looking pretty good for the most part.

Now we get into the areas that separate Magic Bullet Suite from Editors. Basically, they come down to five things: widescreen, film-like fade-to-black/burn-to-white, Color Safe for Broadcast conversion, de-interlacing, and true 24P conversion. While the widescreen, film-like fade-to-black/burn-to-white, and ColorSafe for Broadcast conversion are clean, they are not superior enough to what is provided by nearly every non-linear editor on the market to justify exporting your footage into After Effects to deal with them. This leads us to the real reason why you will plop down nearly $800 for this program: extremely clean de-interlacing and very believable true 24 P conversion. And, unlike some 24P conversion programs, the final footage is in true 24 fps, which can be transferred to film, should you so desire. While most of us are not going to be footing the bill for a film transfer ourselves, the clean 24P conversion is really quite impressive.

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