For
our review of Magic Bullet Editors 2, we tested
it on both Final Cut HD and Vegas 6.0, so
that we could get a nice feel for how the plug-in suite
worked on different platforms and dichotomously different
editing programs. (Additionally, for less platform-sensitive
programs, MBE2 will work on Avid Xpress/Media
Composer and Premiere Pro 1.5. It will also
work in Apple's Motion 2.)
For
those of you who didn't read our preview in last issue,
Magic Bullet Editors 2.0 is the sequel to the best
selling Magic Bullet Editors that came out last
year. Whereas the Magic Bullet Suite only works
with Adobe After Effects, Magic Bullet Editors
works with most of the common editing suites, specifically
the four that we mentioned in the first paragraph. It's
designed to color, tint, and give post-production filtering
effects that have been popular in past films and to give
you the ability to change the look of your footage in
drastic ways.
Ideally,
Magic Bullet Editors is designed to work with DV
or HD footage that was shot at 24 fps, which is why it
doesn't feature the special abilities found in the Magic
Bullet Suite to convert NTSC footage to 24 fps. (This
is also why it costs about half as much.)
With
that said, let's break the program down.
Ease
of Use For
both Vegas and Final Cut Pro, installation
was a breeze. The PC installation was actually a bit
easier, but bother were simple.
When
it came to actually seeing all the options in the Look
Suite, the version for Vegas looked excellent, as it
actually allowed you to scroll through all the Look
Suite options in alphabetical order and see small animatics
of what the effect will do to your footage before you
apply it.
The
Final Cut Pro version, on the other hand, required
that you download a special template timeline that you
could wade through to test each of the effects. While
you could import the template into your Favorites folders,
it was nowhere near as easy to see what you were doing
before you applied your filters, which was annoying
on filters that you had no frame of reference for.
Other
than that minor issue in the FCP translation, MBE2
was wonderfully easy to use all around.
Depth
of Options
To put the main purpose of Magic Bullet Editors 2 into
a nutshell, it could best be described as a set of plug-ins
designed to destroy your footage or to tint your footage.
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.
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! (And that's not even including films that have actually
used only post-effects, like Tony Scott's Domino.)
