Magic Bullet Colorista

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Tue 02 September 2008

Introducing the Brain Friendly Knowledge Library

Learn software with zero effort. Get to know the ins and outs of publishing software and technologies. Quickly learn about the true benefits of a solution.
Wherever you are, whenever you want.

When Apple released Final Cut Studio 2, it included a high-end professional colour-correction tool with the system: Color. Color is everything you're going to need in terms of colour-correction when working with Final Cut Pro, but if you want a plug-in that works across multiple vendor's applications, Magic Bullet Colorista is your best bet.

Magic Bullet Colorista is one of Red Giant’s plug-in applications. It is a primary colour-correction plug-in based on a new colour engine. Apple’s Color does both primary and secondary colour-correction, but it only plays nice with Apple software. Colorista works with Adobe After Effects 6.5 and 7, Premiere Pro 2, Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, Motion 2.1, Avid Xpress Pro 5.5 and Media Composer 2.x.

It’s a plug-in designed to make colour-correction easy and fast. It uses the colour wheel paradigm for ease-of-use and sliders alongside the wheel for selection of Gamma, Lift and Gain. The plug-in comes with a 34-pages manual—Apple’s Color needs half an encyclopedia to explain its functionality and workflow, entirely due to the fact Color is to colour-correction what Shake is to compositing. Nevertheless, Colorista is a good system to have for colour-correction, and it can also help with some special colour effects.

Nowhere in the manual it is mentioned how you should calibrate and profile your screen to get production-quality correction results, and the plug-in does lack a way to hook it up with a specific calibration system for video and motion picture like Rising Sun Research’s CineSpace. Do you need that support? It depends: if you’re going to use Final Cut Pro for broadcast, you probably do.

I ran the Colorista plug-in on my trusted Power Mac G5, and it ran smoothly. Colorista is not supported on Mac Mini or MacBook, though, so I feared for the worst in terms of performance, but that proved to be quite up to standards. In Final Cut Pro and Motion, the Magic Bullet Colorista plug-in has a limitation due to the way Apple plug-ins work. In Adobe and Avid products it is stated that you can set white balance by simply clicking with the eye-dropper in a white area of a clip.

Running inside Apple Motion: quirks

In Apple’s host products, you need to first bring up the Apple colour picker and then use the picker’s magnifying glass to do the same. It’s an extra step, but not one that will cost much time unless you spend your whole day colour-correcting with Colorista.

Another limitation when used together with Apple’s software is that the Lift, Gamma, and Gain sliders that are incorporated into the wheels cannot be used for animated colour correction. Instead, the Final Cut Pro and Motion versions of Colorista have separate sliders to compensate for this.

I tested Magic Bullet Colorista with Motion and Final Cut Pro. When Motion was used as the host, the application would refuse to launch, the second time I tried opening Motion with Colorista installed. Consulting the forums on Apple revealed that I’m not the only one having these problems with plug-ins installed in Motion. Whether the Colorista plug-in is to be blamed or the plug-in architecture of Motion is unclear to me. However, the end-result is that you stand a good chance of running into difficulties when you try to use Colorista under Motion.

I had more luck with Final Cut Pro. Colorista worked flawlessly. I ran the plug-in through a number of clips, each time comparing it to the built-in colour-correction capability of Final Cut, and with a Color-driven correction round without prior calibration of my screen for this purpose.

To be quite honest, I couldn’t notice a difference between the output of a Colorista correction and a built-in Final Cut Pro colour correction. Both are equally good. There is also little difference in the complexity of the workflow and the time it takes to get to the end-result. That’s entirely different from the workflow with Color. Color is much more demanding in terms of what you should know and the choices you can make before going in and starting your correction round.

Color does integrate with a calibration system like CineSpace, and having tested that before, I keep wondering why I should “correct” colours when I’m never 100% certain that what I’m seeing on my LCD screen will be the same and correct colour value on the broadcast monitor—unless your output is to a computer monitor or something totally different.

My conclusion after working with Colorista is that you can benefit from using this Magic Bullet plug-in if you’re running several different applications. If you’re running in a Final Cut Studio 2 environment only, I don’t believe you will need it, as Apple has provided for the ultimate in colour correction tools available.