Introducing Movie Looks and Noir, Plus Plastic Bullet Free For a Limited Time

Today Red Giant Software has released two new iOS apps that I helped design and create, Movie Looks and Noir. To celebrate the launch, Plastic Bullet is free on the iTunes app store for just two days.

Ever since we released Plastic Bullet, folks have been asking for some kind of “Magic Bullet Looks for the iPhone.” It probably surprises no one to learn that we’ve been working on just that for a while now. Pick a video, trim it down to just the part you want, choose from a variety of preset Looks, and then adjust those Looks to taste using Strength and Brightness controls.

Noir converts photos to black and white and allows you to re-light them using an editable vignette. It’s like a Colorista Power Mask for your phone. Noir is a universal app—buy it once and install it on both iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad.

Noir started as a little passion project for me. I wanted a way to prep my iPhone shots for use with Cinemek’s powerful Storyboard Composer app, but I was frustrated with iPhone image editing apps that forced me to tap my way through byzantine mazes of menus and ugly sliders to adjust my images. I wanted to quickly give my images a storytelling quality, with all the necessary controls on one screen. Then a funny thing happened—we distributed an early beta of Noir within Red Giant, and people flipped for it. The images they were making were gorgeous, and they were having crazy fun making them. In case it’s not obvious, that’s pretty much all I ever hope for the tools I create.

Movie Looks has been an equally fun challenge. Getting a tiny little phone to render HD video effects is no easy task, especially when you don’t want to compromise on image quality. We’ve built a completely new rendering engine and worked hard to make it as seamless as possible on the phone.

Noir and Movie Looks are available now, each for $2.99. More information is available at Red Giant. Plastic Bullet is free for April 19–20.

Final Cut Pro X

Apple took over the Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet at NAB in Las Vegas last night to show a preview of the complete reboot of Final Cut Pro that Steve Jobs himself tersely teased a year ago.

Apple hasn’t realeased anything official for those who weren’t there, but these videos are OK. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, FreshDV has excellent condensed coverage. And there are worthwhile write-ups from Larry Jordan (who was one of the few who saw this six weeks ago at Apple), Scott Simmons, and Walter Biscardi. UPDATE: And a first-the-bad-news impression by Mike Jones.

Plastic Bullet 1.1

Photo by Diana Stock using iPhone 4 and Plastic Bullet

You asked, we listened.

Plastic Bullet 1.1 (US$1.99, free update for current users) is available now, featuring some big new features pulled directly from your requests.

• Full-res photo developing on every iPhone
• Share your photos using Flickr and Facebook
• Faster photo developing
• Optimized for iOS4 and the iPhone 4

Read more about the new features in iTunes. You can see some full-res iPhone 4 examples on my Flickr feed — the quality is amazing.

Enjoy!

Make Movies With Apple iPad

Today Apple announced the iPad, and what I like most about what we’ve seen so far is that Apple clearly thinks it’s important that we be able to make things with it. The redesigned iWork apps are impressive experiments in creating stuff using a multitouch display. I liked my iPhone enough when it was just a phone, but I love it now that I have Storyboard Composer (formerly Hitchcock), Screenplay, and Photoshop Mobile, to name just a few.

I also use an app called Air Mouse to control the Mac Mini in my home theater. That, and the many other apps that allow your iPhone or iPod Touch to act as control device for your computer, made me ponder the possibility of using the iPhone’s multitouch screen as a control surface for Magic Bullet Looks. But I never took the idea very far because of the small size of the screen.

Folks doing color correction either know first-hand the value of a dedicated control surface, or avoid finding out for fear of the can’t-live-without-it sensation. An understandable fear, given the cost of these peripherals. Back in 2008 when I wrote about gestural interfaces and hardware devices, I expected to spend a couple grand at the very least for any kind of multitouch control device. Video pros routinely spend much, much more for large, cumbersome, single-purpose color control surfaces. Read any review of them and you’ll see one common thread: once you work a three-way color corrector with a set of trackballs that allow you to adjust multiple parameters at once, you never want to go back.

Imagine the dude above is looking at a stripped-down version of the Magic Bullet Looks interface on his main display. The Tool Chain, Preset and Tool Drawers, and touch-friendly Tool Controls appear on his iPad.

The iPad may seem expensive to people with a laptop, a smartphone, and little room in their life for something in between, but for video and film professionals looking for a general-purpose way to get more touchy-feely with their creations, it’s beyond a bargain.

As long as the software shows up.

So what do you think? Is the image above something that interests you? It’s just a hasty concept—nothing more. But it’s got me thinking about all kinds of ways that an iPad could become a part of the way we make films—not just with dedicated apps, but with companion apps that give us new ways of interacting with our favorite desktop tools.

Update on Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 11:58AM by Stu

I wanted to thank Przemion in the comments and Vrijegeest on Twitter for bringing hexler.net’s TouchOSC iPhone app to my attention. They are doing this now for audio applications, and even have a free desktop application (Mac and Windows) that you can use to design your own control layouts.