Magic Bullet Mojo

One of my fxphd shots with nothing more than Mojo applied

If you watched my tutorial on achieving the “Hollywood blockbuster look” using various color correction tools, you probably noticed the consistent theme among the very different example films I showed you how to match—the ubiquitous cool shadows, warm highlights look. Whether the film is bleached of all color (like Terminator Salvation) or super saturated (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), and whether it is overall warm or cool, modern films have zeroed in on a color correction style that tends to preserve skin tones and set them off against a cooler backdrop.

The same shot before Mojo

It’s more than possible to achieve this look with Colorista or Magic Bullet Looks (check out the Blockbuster preset—it’s been there since day one). But sometimes you just want to spruce up your footage quickly and easily, without a hundred presets to peruse or a powerful colorist’s interface to manipulate.

Sometimes you just want to take your footage that already looks pretty darn good, and give it a little bit of… Mojo.

Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software is the pocket-sized screwdriver to Magic Bullet Looks’s cordless driver drill. It does one thing, and does it quickly and easily. It gives you that Mojo thang with just a few simple sliders to adjust, and ships with presets for popular looks.

Unlike Looks and Colorista, Mojo is a bit of a one-trick pony. It’s simple and easy and priced to be an impulse-buy at $99 US. One license allows you to use it in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Avid, After Effects, and Apple Motion [UPDATE: Now Sony Vegas as well!]. Mojo is also now a part of the Magic Bullet Suite.

Mojo has some cool new features that you’ll recognize from the tutorial video. Since it’s all about skin tones, Mojo has simple sliders for emphasizing, cleaning up, and adjusting skin coloration. It even features a helpful overlay that gives you the same kind of skin-tone guidance for which expert colorists rely on their vectorscopes.

Here are some preemptive answers to questions you might have about Mojo:

Q: Isn’t this look just a cheap gimmick? Just a trend that could pass in a few days/weeks months?

A: Maybe, but in another way it’s an evolution of practices many years old in color correction suites around the world. Is it overused? Sure, but that’s because it works. Personally, I love the way it looks, when done tastefully. We provide the tools, you provide the taste. Try turning the Mojo slider down instead of up when you first apply it.

Q: I applied Mojo but my skin tones aren’t popping.

A: Your faces might be underexposed a bit. Try reducing Mojo Balance—it’s the control that determines what’s a shadow and what’s a highlight. Skin tones tend to fall right in between.

Q: I tried the demo and Mojo makes my footage look terrible.

A: Mojo is designed to work with footage that’s pretty solid to begin with. If what you need is color correction, then reach for Colorista. If you love the way your footage looks before Mojo, try the “Mojito” preset—it’s just a little bit of Mojo.

Q: Why do the sliders have more range in FCP than in After Effects?

A: Actually, they have the same ranges, but in After Effects we can have the slider min/max be different from the absolute min/max. I wish FCP would let us do that too, because the ranges we show in AE represent a “sweet spot,” and the values outside those ranges are kind of pushing things into the red a little.

Q: I already have Magic Bullet Looks, why do I need Mojo?

A: Because you don’t open a walnut with a jackhammer. In my own experience, Magic Bullet Looks is occasionally a bit to much overhead for a quick-turnaround project. Mojo is so quick and easy that I reach for it all the time, saving Looks for those occasions when I want to invest some time into my color grading.

Q: Will you tell my clients I’m using it?

A: No. It’ll be our little secret.

What is Mojo?

Before:

After:

Coming soon.

Got Me a Side Job

Red Giant Software today announced the addition of a new Creative Director for the Magic Bullet product line. Me!

“The Magic Bullet vision is to create software that gives any production, regardless of budget, the look of a high-end feature film. We are immensely pleased that Stu is dedicating his time and vision to enhance and grow the Magic Bullet tools in 2009 and beyond. He has already begun to work on new Magic Bullet products, and you will see many new and updated tools coming later this year,” said Sean Safreed, Co-Founder and Director of Products at Red Giant Software.

The full press release also goes into some detail about the history of Red Giant, Magic Bullet, and The Orphanage.

While the announcement is exciting, it doesn’t actually represent a big change for me. My relationship with Red Giant has always been strong, and has always been about sharing with the world the tools that I create out of necessity when making films. I promise you that my filmmaking will always come first, and that anything I design for Red Giant is a tool that I wanted or needed or found missing in my arsenal.

Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks are perfect examples of this, and to kick off the party with Red Giant I recorded a little tutorial on how to use them to match the looks of this summer’s big movies.

Red Giant TV Episode 22: Creating a Summer Blockbuster Film Look

Thanks very much to Aharon Rabinowitz, host of Red Giant TV, for tidying up my tut and wrapping it in pure (and embarrassing) pimp. Aharon does a great job with Red Giant TV—if you want to catch every episode, subscribe in iTunes.

Update on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 10:12AM by Stu

Shortly after this tutorial, Red Giant Software released Magic Bullet Mojo, which makes it dangerously easy to give your footage this look. Check out my guided tour of Mojo.

Chapter 12: After the Subway

As seen this morning on my NAB panel. My contribution to the emerging Subway Short genre of camera tests, with a twist—what happens after all the furtive subway hopping and phone dialing?

To see it in HD, you’ll have to go to YouTube (and please do). Why no HD on Vimeo? Vimeo only serves HD at 24p, and as lovely as that sounds, this short was shot on the Canon 5D Mark II, and therefore is at 30fps. Vimeo does a sloppy convesion to 24p, which is not cool.

Update on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 12:18AM by Stu

Thanks for all the comments below guys! Here’s a bit more about the short.

First of all, I knew going into this that the look would be that heartbreaking amalgamation of cinematic depth of field and video-like motion. But I didn’t want to send this camera back to Vincent without shooting something. I still consider this a “camera test” more than anything—but really, the best thing to come of the shoot was meeting The Stunt People, who are both the stars and co-creators of this peice. I can’t wait to work with Eric and the guys again.

I won’t shoot anything else at 30p, ever, unless I plan on slowing it down to 24 for a slight overcrank effect. I’ve seen entire TV commercials shot 30 for 24 though, so it could happen. I harassed the Canon reps at NAB today about 24p and manual control until they were afraid of me.

As devastating as the frame rate is, the lack of shutter control is worse. Most of the nasty video-like look is due to the camera’s frequent use of a shutter speed slower than 1/60. There’s plenty of 1/30 in there, which is the equivalent of a 360 degree shutter on a film camera—an impossibility, and a dead giveaway of video origination (even at 24p).

There are people out there enjoying some luck converting 5D Mark II footage to 24p using tools such as Twixtor and the built-in retiming in After Effects, but that only works on relatively sedate subjects (of which this short has very few), and even then, there are often nasty artifacts to contend with. Didn’t we choose this camera for image quality?

I had two big dropouts, which I fixed using that After Effects retiming feature. I immediately bought some Extreme IV CF cards to avoid that problem in the future.

I shot with only one lens, the slow-but-lovely 24–105mm f/4 L lens that comes with the camera. We were mostly at f/4.0, although I can’t be sure we always were. I stopped doing the half-twist trick after I realized how much I and the camera would be moving around. So as shallow as the DOF is, it’s nothing compared to what we could have had if I’d used primes. That’s a big leg up the 5D could have over the Panasonic GH1—even with slow glass, the Canon can make DOF that can be used as a storytelling aide, such as the moment where our guy sees the two adversaries in the distance. They appear as blurry blobs, just the way I like ‘em.

I had access to the full Redrock Micro DSLR bundle, but wound up stripping it way, way down to something I could be agile with and still pull focus as a solo operator. This stripped-down rig became the inspiration for the rig I blogged about recently.

I used my HV20 for one shot. Can you guess which one?

Editor Gregory Nussbaum (The Spirit) cut with Final Cut Pro, using half-res proxies that I rendered out of After Effects. When we locked the cut, I exported XML from Final Cut and imported that into Premiere Pro CS4. I then loaded that Premiere project into After Effects. From there, I could create precomps for each clip and swap in the full-res originals.

I color corrected entirely using Magic Bullet Colorista, sometimes several layers per shot. Many Power Masks to sculpt lighting and lift faces, as well as to unite the various colors of light present in the location. I used no lighting or bounce of any kind during the shoot.

I used the DV Rebel Tools to add new color correction layers and to preview my work using a configurable thumbnail view. The result is a deep, but very organized After Effects timeline.

And I will post more about most of these things!