Should I buy Magic Bullet or go for a Grade?

Tom Jenkins · February 10, 2005

Hi,

I'm shooting my first short on Digi-Beta and am planning to do some post-production finishing but I'm not sure which route to go down.

I'm looking to film-effect the film and I understand that the lighting has A LOT to do with the final look, but as far as final master grade and film-like fx, I think I have a couple of options...

I could buy Magic Bullet Suite for After Effects for about 500GBP or I could spend the same on a 2 hour grading session in a Pogle suite. I need to know which would be the best option and why?

Also, does anybody know when Magic Bullet Editor will be released for Avid Xpress (which I own and am planning to use for the edit).

Thanks very much,

Tom

Phil Rhodes · February 11, 2005

Hi,

Go for the grade. It has similar technical abilities, but the people will be much better - and unless you've got thirty-grand digibeta decks at home your FCP edit will be off DV anyway - ick.

Phil

David Cox · February 11, 2005

Yes - I agree with phil.

Grading takes a lot of skill. Just because you can buy the software doesn't mean you get that skill in the box. If that was the case, all DOPs would be out of a job cos to make a movie, you just point the shiny end of the camera at something and press the red button, don't you? Same argument.

nchopp · February 11, 2005

Yet another agreement on the grading. You'll get MUCH better results.

Phil Rhodes · February 11, 2005

Hi,

Okay, let's be fair. You might instantly turn out to be a prodigial colourist, or you might at least have the innate talent required to make a half-reasonable job of it out of the box. You might be willing to work on it long enough to get good enough at it for whatever you're doing.

Or not.

Phil

Joshua Provost · February 11, 2005

Magic Bullet does a number of things, but it is not specifically a color grading tool. You are going to want to do a whole lot of correction using other AE tools before you get to the things MB does.

nchopp · February 11, 2005

I would suggest Avid (Even Avid XPress\DV\whatever) over AE for color grading...

Allen Achterberg · February 12, 2005

sounds like you are new to this, Magic Bullet isnt that great, It can leave artifacts and has really long render times. get it graded by someone who knows what they are doing. unless you think you will be doing this a lot, learn to use your tools to their best advantage.

and to the guy talking about the shiny part of the camera..the lens shouldnt be shiny, it should be dark unless you like flare...

David Cox · February 13, 2005

and to the guy talking about the shiny part of the camera..the lens shouldnt be shiny, it should be dark unless you like flare...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

oh yeah I forgot - lens flare is added in post!!!! :rolleyes:

Riku Naskali · February 16, 2005

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm always shooting something that doesn't get graded, so I would appreciate any tips for grading.

I realise there is no such thing as basic procedure, but how does the grading session go? Is it common practise to adjust the black level first, contrast, etc?

I can access a good color grading software with nice features, secondaries, geometries, etc. and would like to start tinkering with it.

Phil Rhodes · February 16, 2005

Hi,

Usually you start off by doing primary lift and gain adjustments to get the image to "somewhere reasonable", usually with reference to a vectorscope and waveform monitor. This will tend to look a bit flat and lifeless; it's what you're aiming to get out of the camera when shooting video which you know will be graded.

After that it depends what you want to do, but most often in a telecine suite there will be two layers of primary (whole-image) grading, one of which will be part of the telecine and the second being an external module, the first stage of the Da Vinci or whatever you're using. Normally the first stage of that will be left to do the technical "somewhere reasonable" bit and you'll start to get creative with the second stage, or on a software colour corrector like Baselight (sorry to keep mentioning it, but it's what I know) you can have any number of consecutive primaries. On more primitive or more general software like After Effects you may find it saves render time to do both the basic consistency setup and the first stage of creative work on the same filter, but that can make it harder to keep things consistent.

Beyond that point it's down to how the equipment works, but in general terms secondary grading is that which only affects part of the image, whether you select that using an HSV vector or an explicit shape, and applying whatever effects the thing will do within that.

But it's really down to the individual.

Phil