Articles/Reviews

ARTICLES & REVIEWS FOR THE INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER

Red Giant Software Debuts Magic Bullet Colorista

By Glen Baisley

Sometimes it’s hard to get excited about NLE plug-ins. The market is flooded with them. The question was if Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Colorista would offer any advantages over my existing color correction tools in Adobe After Effects 7 or Premiere Pro 2.0? The answer is yes. It’s easier to use and produced better results. Colorista works like most professional grading systems that use the industry standard model of Lift, Gamma and Gain. Colorista ships as a native plug-in for all major host applications including Final Cut Pro (FX Plug), Motion, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Avid AVX compatible systems.

Mastering some of the tools in programs like After Effects requires time and dedication so it’s a real treat when you can pick up software and run with it. The software comes with a 15 minute tutorial done by Eric Escobar which covers the basics of color correction and how to use Colorista. Having previously watched Total Training DVDs on Premiere Pro’s color correction tools, I found that the included tutorial hit the bullet points well enough to get started.

On first glance, you will find that there are fewer controls than most built-in 3-way color correction tools but Colorista doesn’t sacrifice any functionality or performance. Consolidating the controls has made the tool more manageable. The learning curve is made easier because whatever host application you use the plug-in in the controls will be the same. There is no need to relearn the controls.

The real benefit is the ability to easily do Power Masks with adjustable ellipses and rectangles to isolate a portion of the frame. In After Effects 7, Colorista is a 32-bit floating-point plug-in which means you can stack as many of them on top of each other to make adjustments and the color will not degrade.

Plug-ins like Magic Bullet Colorista are making it that much easier for budding filmmakers who are forced to use lower end equipment to be able to make their films shine the way they should. I pulled out some older DV footage from one of my earlier films that I didn’t have the luxury of affording decent equipment on. The footage was from an outdoor scene that was shot on a very overcast day. The resulting footage had a blue colorcast on the actor’s skin tone. The results between After Effects 7’s color correction tools and Colorista were comparable at first but I was able to push the envelope further with Colorista using the Power Mask feature. Colorista allowed me to fully color correct the footage. Keep in mind that Colorista is no substitute for shooting footage and lighting it properly to begin with but it certainly can help to correct or enhance your footage.

The test was performed on a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. Colorista took full advantage of my EVGA 7800 GTO AGP card and ran at almost real-time in Premiere Pro 2.0. Not bad for a computer that is 4 years old. On the other hand, my Pentium 4 3.8 GHz with 2 GB RAM and an EVGA PCI Express 7900 card didn’t flinch.

Magic Bullet Colorista is just another in a line of great products from Red Giant Software. It’s well thought out and easy to use.

After Effects Goes Nuclear with GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro

By Glen Baisley

Anyone who has ever worked with an editing suite and rendered effects shares one major gripe. More down time is spent waiting for renders to complete. Render times can effectively cripple your work flow if you don’t happen to have another system to work on. Now with GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro for After Effects 7.0 the wait times just got better.

Nucleo Pro, for the Mac or PC, introduces the concept of rendering and working at the same time in Adobe After Effects 7.0 Standard or Professional - while still maximizing your computers performance. It is designed to work with a multi-processor or multi-core processor (e.g. Dual-Core AMD Opteron™, AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core processor, Intel® Pentium® D processor 840/830/820, Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition, Mac dual G4, or Mac dual or quad G5) and requires 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended).

The system that it was tested on was a Pentium 4 3 GHz Hyper-threading processor with 2 GB of RAM. While you can set render queues for Nucleo Pro just as you can in After Effects, the real advantage comes with its more advanced features. First off, the aforementioned render queue runs in the background. Second, Nucleo Pro introduces two of the greatest features yet. It has the ability to render while you work with Spec Preview and Spec Render. These features detect changes made while you work and update the frames as the render continues. Considering the system that the software was tested on was 3 years old (really old by market standards), the render time was surprisingly fast and my work flow wasn’t really interrupted much at all. The more sophisticated the edit was, the slower my computer started to run though. Again, I chalk this up to it not being the latest and greatest in computer technology that Nucleo Pro was running on. If you have a faster system you’ll certain see a far better return on your render times.

I put the software to a final test and decided not to touch it at all while it rendered from a queue. The results were comparable and in some cases marginally faster than After Effects’ built in render engine. I’m not sure if GridIron uses their own render engine separate from After Effects but the results were pleasing nonetheless leaving the user with no worries about Nucleo Pro’s rendering being inferior.

Priced at $495, Nucleo Pro is a must have for any After Effects user. It’s easy to use with enough choices for ways to render and output that it will easily accommodate most systems. Here’s hoping that GridIron comes out with a version for Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro.

Shedding Some Light on Knoll Light Factory Pro and Editors 2.5

By Glen Baisley

Knoll Light Factory Pro 2.5 and Knoll Light Factory Editors 2.5 are the latest products to come out from Red Giant Software featuring new host support for many popular applications. And, for the first time ever, they offer a 90 minute companion 2 DVD set called Knoll Light Factory Pro & Editors Training available separately for $79. The second DVD includes the training movies in the form of high-res Quicktime files that can be copied to your hard drive. I found this to be the best method of training especially if you have a dual monitor configuration. I watched the movies as I played along in Adobe After Effects. While the training is all performed on the Mac edition of After Effects, it was similar enough to my PC version that I was able to keep up with ease.

The Editors version is available for Apple Final Cut Pro 4.5 (or later), Apple Motion 2.0, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (or later), Avid Media Composer and Avid Xpress (both AVX 1.5 plug-in support), and Avid Xpress Pro 5.2 (or later). It retails for $179.

The Pro version works on all of the above including Adobe After Effects 6.0 (or later), Discreet Combustion 3.0 (or later), and Digital Fusion 5.0 (or later). It retails for as low as $349.

Both Pro and Editors come with 70 preset lens flares. One of the main differences between them is that Pro comes with an advanced flare. You can effectively create whole new lens flares by customizing the packaged presets and picking and choosing from 19 different effect elements. The editor allows for numerous adjustments to be made to each effect element. There is a workaround with Editors in that you can layer multiple flares one on top of the other on your timeline. This is not nearly as efficient as it is using the flare editor and does not allow the degree of fine tuning that the Pro edition offers. Editors seems to be really targeted at the user that does not have After Effects or simply wants to drop in a flare with little or no adjustments.

Light Factory Spectacular is another welcome addition to the Pro version. It can be used to track an unlimited number of points. This is a great way to add shimmering particle effects to your work. A number of examples and walkthroughs are shown on the training DVD.

Just like Red Giant Software’s recent upgrade to their Magic Bullet products, the Knoll Light Factory products now take advantage of newer graphic cards by using their onboard GPU. Higher end cards like the ATI 1900 XT or nVidia 7900 GTX are capable of playing back effects in real time at 30 frames per second or more.

Knoll Light Factory Pro 2.5 and Knoll Light Factory Editors 2.5’s lens flare effects make a bigger impact over the standard flares found in After Effects and most host applications. While the Pro version is more robust and the best choice, it’s nice to see that Red Giant Software is not overlooking support for editing software. And, Knoll Light Factory Pro & Editors Training DVD will add a twinkle to your eye and get you up and running in no time.

Adobe Takes Off the Gloves and Total Training is in their Corner

By Glen Baisley

The most pleasing thing about Adobe is that they really listen to what their customers want. Premiere Pro 2.0 is the long awaited answer to many budding filmmaker’s prayers. It offers native HDV support and takes full advantage of higher end ATI and NVIDIA based graphics cards that in many cases are more affordable than real time playback cards. And, it offers a slew of new features and a much friendlier user interface.

When you first launch Premiere Pro 2.0 you will not only be greeted to a new logo with a film reel which clearly shows that Adobe is aiming their sites at the film market but a new gunmetal gray interface. The new interface is perfect for any editor that is blessed with dual monitors. It’s composed of dockable panels that can easily be rearranged, rescaled or undocked to move anywhere on the screen or to another monitor.

Premiere Pro 2.0 offers the ability to edit in true Multi-cam fashion for the first time. You can convert your Source monitor to a Multi-cam monitor and easily make your cuts in real time. You don’t like that cut. No problem. With a few mouse clicks you can easily swap that cut out for another or use the Slip tool to change where the cut begins or ends.

Clip Notes is among some of the many new features in Premiere Pro 2.0. It allows the editor to add comments to video that can be exported and viewed by anyone using Adobe Acrobat Reader. Think of it as a PDF with video. They can add additional comments at specific time codes and once the clip notes are imported back in, Premiere will add their comments in the form of markers on the timeline.

Adobe’s Media Encoder interface has been completely redone. It now includes the ability to preview your encoded video so you can get an idea of what to expect from the final output. The newest addition is the ability to output to Flash video. Adobe Bridge, first introduced in the Adobe Creative Suite, adds greater flexibility with the ability to manage your media throughout the entire production bundle. Kudos to Adobe. Adobe’s seamless integration with its other programs and its acquisition of Macromedia is a milestone in the post production software arena making Adobe a much more powerful rival to Avid.

Stepping up the game, Premiere now includes more built in After Effects and even the ability to author a DVD with easy to use Photoshop based templates. Speaking of effects, Adobe added a new transparent video feature where you can overlay an effect across multiple clips at once. If you have a higher end video card with a fast GPU you can divert some or all of your CPU’s processing power to your graphics card resulting in smoother playback and faster render times.

Premiere 2.0 really adds a facelift in a number of places. Changes in the Titler seem awkward at first until you discover its new functionality. Titles are no longer saved as separate files. Their information is stored in the project file. They can be exported as separate files for use in other projects. The new design allows you to more easily save titles as presets and allows quicker access to them.

Hats off to Adobe for their improvements and additions to their color correction tools. The Fast Color Corrector allows quick and easy adjustments to color and white balance but the program really shines with the Three Way Color Corrector Tool. It not only allows you to make more detailed adjustments to the highlights, mid-tones and shadows but it also allows you to do secondary color correction to specific objects.

Premiere 2.0 wouldn’t be complete without its advancements in HDV capabilities. The program now features full 10 bit support. 8 bit DV video that is mixed in with HDV on the timeline can be rendered in 10 bit.

There are many more features in Adobe Premiere 2.0, too many to discuss in this review. This is where Total Training comes in. Total Training is the foremost authority on Adobe. I first learned Premiere 5.0 after having watched a free training sample that was included with the program. That’s just how good they are. Over the past few years, Total Training has expanded their courses to include Advance tutorials and more recently included Adobe’s competition, Final Cut Pro.

The Premiere Pro 2.0 series is hosted by author and filmmaker, Jacob Rosenberg who leads you through the extensive capabilities of the program. The training sessions are now in high definition and only playable back in a QuickTime interface on your computer. The series spans 5 DVDs and nearly 17 hours of tutorials. Rosenberg’s training is excellent. He fleshes out areas of the program more so than previous Total Training DVDs making it very understandable. The Three Way Color Corrector had me on the ropes at first but after a few viewings of Rosenberg’s walkthrough with the tool, I was up and running. For previous Premier owners, you can skip right to the “What’s New for Premiere Pro 2” DVD. This DVD is also available separately for purchase.

Total Training is a must have series for any Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 owner. Its in-depth training will allow you to enter the post production ring no holds barred. And, with such great enhancements, one can only wonder what Adobe has planned for their next round with Premiere.

Low Budget Filmmaking in a High Cost World

A look at Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet and Primatte Keyer

By Glen Baisley

For the better part of my life I have dreamed about being a filmmaker. I wanted to go to film school but couldn’t afford it. Instead of choosing another career, I took courses on television production and concentrated on my writing. I even interned at a local cable studio. I think it was a smart decision. With the advent of the digital revolution my dreams have become possible. I worked long hours and odd jobs pulling together whatever savings I could to buy the necessary tools of the trade – a video camera and an editing computer. My first movie, Fear of the Dark was self-distributed but the second time was a charm. Brain Damage Films distributed my second movie, The Tenement, nationally and internationally last year. Both were shot digitally and edited on a home computer.

With the popularity of the digital medium, equipment and software has become far more affordable than when I began several years ago allowing a flood of fresh new filmmakers to enter onto the scene. The arrival of all of this new technology has also put a dent into the profits of production houses. Sure, a production house can do a fine job in postproduction on your movie but with a little knowledge you can do it yourself.

If your movie looks and sounds good technically, one of the biggest setbacks you’ll often face is the bias towards digital video. What can you do about that? One answer is to “film look” your video. It’s a digital process where the digital video is made to look more like film by adjusting frame rates and in some cases actually reducing the quality of the image with subtleties like grain and scratches – things that we have come to expect to see associated with film. If done correctly, your video can fool some people into thinking your masterpiece was shot on film.

My biggest complaint about most software programs is that they are far from being user friendly. It seems like more time is spent learning how to use the software than the actual process of working on your project. Red Giant Software has really seemed to address this problem with their Magic Bullet Suite 2.0 and Magic Bullet Editors. I found them much easier to use compared to DigiEffects’ Cinelook. The latter seems to rely more on the knowledge of film stocks. If you have never picked up a film camera then you are in trouble before you have begun.

Magic Bullet is more geared toward creating and promoting the beauty and artistic qualities of the cinematic experience rather than simply duplicating a certain type of color transfer. Don’t get me wrong, it was developed in 1999 by the people at The Orphanage, a high-end digital film production and post house in LA, so it certainly meets if not surpasses the needs of a good film look software.

Magic Bullet comes in two formats. Magic Bullet Suite 2.0 works in Adobe After Effects. Magic Bullet Editors is a plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas and Avid. As such, it is stripped of some of Suite’s more advanced features like 24p motion and mastering for film an video output, tools for removing DV compression artifacts, the Letterboxer toolkit, the Broadcast safe color test and correct tool, film-like optical dissolve transitions and the Orphanage’s DeepColor technology.

The most important factor in getting your video to look like film has to do with the amount of preparation you put into it. As stated in the manual, you should look at Magic Bullet only as s helper. If you start with well lit, composed, and detailed shots then you will end up with a much more polished project once you use Magic Bullet. And that’s really the essence of Magic Bullet – to polish your projects and give them more flair.

The most impressive part of Magic Bullet is its Look suite. Compared to most standard filters like those included with Adobe, Magic Bullet doesn’t really degrade the image. I ran several of the Looks on a short film of mine that had a lot of predominantly dark scenes and the end result was surprisingly good. In places where I thought additional contrast would darken the image too much it actually made the image crisper while hiding some if not all of the digital artifacts that often appear in under lit video.

If you shoot in a NTSC, PAL, HD or HDV interlaced format (60i or 50i) and wish to achieve the 24p filmic look plus soften your video and add a unique look Magic Bullet Suite is your best choice. If you shoot in a NTSC, PAL, HD or HDV 24p or another progressive format, frame mode, use your own deinterlacing techniques, or do not wish to use After Effects and want to soften your video and add a unique look Magic Bullet Editors is your best choice.

Suite’s Opticals is the one of its best features. It really allows you to mimic film look by performing transitions and fades much in the way film does. It’s the little touches like this that bring you much closer to a filmic experience.

Despite some of Magic Bullet Editors missing features, it is a solid user-friendly program that will give your project a more polished look. Priced at $299 it will certainly save you a huge chunk of change over what a post house will charge. If you have After Effects then it’s well worth springing for Magic Bullet Suite 2.0 which adds more than enough ingredients to refine the look and feel of your movie.

Nothing says low budget more than horrible lighting. Poor or uneven lighting combined with a blue or green screen is a recipe for trouble. Thankfully Red Giant Software hits another home run with Primatte Keyer. It lets you extract keys from any color background by simply sampling the background color and clicking. Primatte Keyer overcomes matte extraction challenges including uneven lighting, subtle shadows, and edge light contamination (spill) even prior to compositing.

Recently it was used on Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. But in this case, I decided to put it to the test with a makeshift green screen in a friend’s garage. You’ll need After Effects to use the software. Now I am by no means an After Effects guru so Primatte Keyer’s saving grace for me was it’s simple user interface. On our well lit material it produced excellent results and on material that we intentionally under lit, it still produced very pleasing results. At $495, it’s a steal.

For the amount of functionality these softwares have and time that they save, you will find yourself well on your way to creating a very effective professional look for your projects. And with the money you save from not having to go to a third party production house, you can invest in even better equipment for your next project

For More Information Contact:

The Mid-Hudson Film and Artists Group
PO Box 21
Lake Peekskill, NY 10537 845-526-6118
Telephone: (845) 526-6118
Internet: glen@midhudsonfilm.com