Magic Bullet Looks

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Wed 27 August 2008

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Magic Bullet Looks is a plug-in for a large number of host applications, including specific versions of After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Avid systems. It allows you to create stylised moods for any type of moving media and for JPEG or TIFF images.

Magic Bullet Looks can dramatically change the look of video footage, and make it more film-like or having a specific mood that you could not achieve when shooting (like horror or sunset). Looks uses the same new colour engine as Colorista. It works in 32-bit floating point mode, which implies that projects are up-converted automatically and transparently for performing the calculations. At output time, the project is down-converted again to its original bit depth.

Magic Bullet Looks is a demanding application in terms of minimum system requirements—at least, where the graphics subsystem is concerned. The application needs a video card with at least 128 MB of VRAM It also doesn’t hurt to have a fast card, although Looks ran great on my Power Mac G5 with ATI Radeon 9800 SE.

Even then, there’s a catch that isn’t immediately visible: the maximum render size in Looks is 8192 x 8192 pixels, but in order to achieve this size at all, you’ll need far more than 128 MB VRAM. Only the nVidia 8800 series cards and the nVidia Quadro 4600/5600 currently support this output. Most cards will support 2048 x 1536 pixels render output. My old card is one of them, as it has 256 MB of VRAM on-board, but it was kind of sobering to read that even a 512 MB ATI card inside a Mac Pro wouldn’t be able to handle Looks’ largest possible render size.

Clear and visual-clues rich workflow

Magic Bullet Looks also takes some time at rendering, but I’ll refrain from commenting on performance as my G5 is nowhere near fast enough to do much anything heavy in graphics or video these days. Looks may be a plug-in, but it does come with a stand-alone application, called LooksBuilder. LooksBuilder has a unique interface with “looks” in a fancy slide-out drawer at left and the all of the controls to achieve specific looks in a drawer at right.

Some controls will only work in specific parts of the workflow, i.e. only on the subject, matte, lens, camera or post-processing. When dragging a control (or effect if you wish) to the video clip or image in the LooksBuilder’s main window, you will see which step in the workflow the control applies to. You can override the default setting by holding down the Option/Alt key if you wish (and know what you’re doing). Some controls will have on-screen overlays to show you what (and where) you’re working with. To make the LooksBuilder application a complete editing environment, there are RGB parade graphs for visual control over your edits.

The LooksBuilder application is launched when you select “Edit” in the Magic Bullet Looks filter in a host application. If you’re in a hurry or just want to get a default mood like “Grad Sunset” (which stands for gradient sunset), you can slide out the left-hand Looks drawer and select that mood from the list with presets. If you haven’t made up your mind yet, you can also have the LooksBuilder application show you the different standard looks in a slideshow—very handy, indeed!

As soon as you’ve selected a look, the relevant controls pop up underneath your image or clip, with the settings that were applied. You can then further adjust those settings if you need to. In my tests, I found this workflow very comfortable, but the most appealing was the fact that you can always break out of the preset looks, even without adding any more controls, simply by changing the ones that are already there.

The most difficult part of Magic Bullet Looks is to learn anticipate what a control change will look like, although the changes are shown to you in real-time. The only criticism that I have is that the control settings are a bit difficult to see; they’re simply too dark on a dark background.

LooksBuilder also supports Advanced I/O processing, meaning that you can activate a tabbed interface. The Advanced I/O interface is better suited for workflows in which you regularly or continuously edit images and motion material in LooksBuilder. It’s also the best interface option for Cineon edits.

Except for the LooksBuilder capabilities, Magic Bullet Looks comes with a couple of effects that are accessed from within the host application with no visit to LooksBuilder. Misfire is one set of effects that you can apply inside the host application directly. The objective of Misfire is to turn a perfect video into a scratched, damaged film. There are many damages to chose from, including scratches, fading, splotches, etc.

Each effect is applied by itself, so that a whole range of damages can be applied to a clip, and not necessarily all of them simultaneously. Misfire is a lot of fun, and will certainly have its place when it comes to fiction, but to enhance a documentary or an “infovideo”, I’m sure you won’t use it that often.

That’s in stark contrast with the LooksBuilder driven effects of Magic Bullet Looks, which I am pretty convinced you will find a use for often enough to justify the price of less than 300.00 Euros.