Tour The Bullet

Studio Daily has an exclusive demo of the new Magic Bullet Looks by some muppet-sounding dude.

Magic Bullet Looks

For those who missed the demos at NAB, here's a little taste.

First things first—these are pre-alpha screenshots, so everything's subject to change.

When you apply the effect (in AE, PPro, FCP, Motion or Avid), you see this gray box in the host. It defaults to empty, but after you apply a look, the box shows you the "tool chain" of that look.

Click Edit and the LooksBuilder app launches. Beneath the image is the tool chain, which is processed left-to-right. It's actually a model of a camera, starting with the light that enters the lens and ending with post-production. More on that later.

Mouse over to the left and a drawer opens with thumbnails of the look presets. The thumbnails show your image, not a canned one—rendered in realtime. Pick from any of the presets, or view a slideshow of the presets in the Look Theater.

On the right is a drawer full of tools. You use these to build looks from scratch, or edit the presets. The tabs at the top of the drawer switch between the various categories (matte box, lens, camera, etc.).

The controls for the selected tool shows up in the right pane. Whenever possible, controls are in real-world units, like t-stops or filter grades. Below I'm using an Edge Softness tool to create an artificial shallow depth-of-field look.

When you drag tools out from the drawer, an image of a camera appears. Some tools, such as lens filters like Diffusion and Gradient, only operate in one category of the camera. Others, like Exposure, work anywhere in the chain. The camera diagram reminds you that you're building a simulation of how light travels through a camera and is modified by film stocks and post-processes such as Bleach Bypass (neg or print), custom film stocks, and color correction. Here I'm adding a Telecine Net tool to the Post category.

Of course you can save out your own look presets, but if you design some tool settings that you want to re-use or share, you can save those as well by simply giving the tool a name. Custom tools appear at the bottom of the tool drawer. Looks will ship with preset custom tools for common lens filter and film stocks.

Whichever host application you use, you work with the same interface and presets. And you don't even need a host application—you can launch LooksBuilder as a standalone app and load a still frame on which to develop a look. So you could design a look on set based on a grab from your Panavision Genesis camera, and hand that look file on down through the post process so that it can be used in the FCP edit and even in the final conform.

Looks is color-space agnostic, with input/output tools for video, Cineon scans, and Panavision's Genesis camera. More to come. This means you can design a look on an offline telecine transfer and then apply it later to scanned 35mm film!

All processing is floating point color, GPU accelerated. Since you can take video in and output log, you can actually prep video for a filmout all inside of Looks. By boosting the contrast in Looks you'll create overexposed areas that will map into the upper ranges of the filmout, eliminating that flatenened-out highlight look that many video-to-film transfers have.

Once you've placed your tools in the chain you can hit a key and enter "trackball mode," which allows users of trackballs or laptop trackpads to edit tool controls in an almost control-surface type of way. The keyboard navigates you from one control to the next and the trackball edits the values. Not quite the same thing as using a JL Cooper rig, but costs a ton less.

My goal with Looks is that it's fun and easy for a hobbyist, but powerful enough for the pros. But mainly I designed it to be my partner in crime for all my digital filmmaking endeavors.

Questions/comments/suggestions welcome!

Gold Rims on the Hoopty

Is this what the DV Rebel Rig of the future looks like?

It's hard to dis the HV20. It may not have the control that more expensive cameras offer, but the subset of controls it does offer might be OK for most DV Rebels. I knew we wouldn't have to wait long to see someone put an M2 on one, but Taylor Wigton has posted the first full-res before after stills that really sell this as a viable option.

It's hard to look at these images (the full-res originals are here) and not start doing some simple math—the HV20 plus the M2 and a couple used lenses comes in well under the cost of a stock HVX200 with two P2 cards.

I couldn't help but run Taylor's stills through Colorista. And while I was doing that, I thought of another fun thing I could do. See, as much as I dig shallow DOF and adapters like the M2 and my own Go-35 Pro, I know they're not for everyone. They reduce the DV Rebel's agility considerably, and that's unacceptable to some. So I ran the "naked" HV20 image through the new Magic Bullet Looks, with an eye toward roughly matching the M2 image.

Not a replacement for the M2 by any means, but something to think about. See you at NAB!

New Look

It's been over five years since I designed Look Suite, the look creation tool that has become the most important feature of Magic Bullet. The "magic" of the Bullet used to be its ability to convert interlaced video to 24p, but as 24p cameras hit the scene the Bullet stayed relevant and, in some peoples' eyes, necessary, because of Look Suite.

So what have I been doing in the years since the original Look Suite design? I've been using Magic Bullet of course, on my own video and on professional projects. I've been talking to users and staying active on forums. All the time pondering and experimenting with better ways of making video look more cinematic. Meanwhile, Red Giant updated Look Suite to run in hardware, for a massive speed boost.

At NAB, we'll reveal the result of combining Red Giant's work with hardware-acceleration and my new design for a look creation tool. It will be called Magic Bullet Looks, and it will be available both as a part of an all-new Magic Bullet Suite or on its own.

Rather than a regular plug-in with a ton of sliders, Magic Bullet Looks features a standalone application with its own UI. Called Looks Builder, this application is launched when you apply the Look Suite 3 plug-in in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Avid, or Motion. Within Looks Builder, you build and edit looks using Look Tools; modular mini-effects for things like bleach bypass, gradient filters, and film stock simulation. All of these tools work in realtime and can be tweaked and edited in context. All processing is done in floating-point color. With over 30 Look Tools to assemble however you like, you can create an infinite variety of Looks.

Or choose a preset. Pop open the Looks Theater to see 100 different preset looks applied to your image (not a canned thumbnail) in realtime.

Magic Bullet Looks was designed to be easy and fun to use, but it's powerful enough for pros too. Filters and exposure adjustments work in real-world units. Color corrections obey industry standards. Cineon film scans and digital cinema images, such as those from the Panavision Genesis camera, are interpreted correctly and can be converted to video or left in their native color spaces. The same look that you develop on an Avid rough cut in video color space can later be applied to a 35mm scan.

That's a lot of talk, but this is obviously something that must be seen to be appreciated. Magic Bullet Looks will be unveiled for the first time at NAB on Tuesday morning. I can't wait to show y'all what we've been up to.