Magic Bullet Looks vs. Photoshop For Video

Okay, so just before I left for Photoshop World last week, I become incredibly enthusiastic about Magic Bullet Looks. Rather than try to describe to you what Magic Bullet does, here is how Red Giant Software (the developer) describes it:

“Traditionally achieved with filters, filming techniques or chemical processes, a "look" was any treatment applied to film stock to lend it a color, appearance, or mood. With digital editing, many more sophisticated effects are now possible. Often referred to as color correction, the process is similar to working in a virtual darkroom. Ordinary footage can be made to look like old films or TV, colors can be adjusted to turn a daytime shoot into film noir, and camera tricks can be simulated digitally.”

I can honestly say that Magic Bullets does a great job at helping you achieve that ‘filmic’ look. I was impressed with the designer’s interface and ease of use. I downloaded the demo version, which plugs in to After Effects. After playing around with it and spitting out some footage I decided that this would need to be an eventual ‘must buy’ for my future film endeavors. However, at a price tag of $399, I realized that this was something that would have to wait for a while. Its hard to justify an expenditure like that when its for just a plug-in (albeit a cool one). I resigned myself to saving up the money and waiting.

Then I went to Photoshop World and learned a lot about using Photoshop CS3’s new, powerful video editing capabilities. The skills and techniques I learned at some of the classes opened my eyes to a few new possibilities.

I began to realize that, while Magic Bullet Looks is indeed a fantastic program, I could achieve the same effects for free using Photoshop CS3 Extended (let me re-emphasize this: this will only work in CS3 Extended, not standard) by importing the footage and editing it. Furthermore, I could create my own personalized ‘looks’ (much like Magic Bullet) and make them reusable by recording actions in Photoshop that would ‘process’ the footage the same way every time. I was thrilled to discover this because, not only does it save me $399, but it also allows me to be more precise in the way I process my footage. I can now dial in my edits using the interface that I’ve come to know and love over the past 10 years.

Don’t get me wrong, Magic Bullet Looks has a wonderful interface for editing and it is extremely customizable. If you are a beginner to intermediate user of Photoshop, you may still want to stick with Magic Bullet. However, if you are further a long in your Photoshop knowledge, I’d suggest you check this alternative method out. Smart Filters, masking, adjustment layers, advanced color adjustment, etc. all make this a very enticing option for editing the look of your footage. The great part about this? If you set up your workflow properly, you can nondestructively edit your footage, so that you can go back and re-edit the look of it at any given time. For the advanced Photoshop users out there: just think about what you could do with actions and batching files. Imagine shooting all of your footage, editing it down in your editor of choice, and then running a batch command in Photoshop to apply your customized film effect to your footage. With a click of a button, Photoshop would apply the same effect to all of the designated pieces of film and you could walk away while it renders. Pretty cool.

I am posting a video below for your reference. Please forgive the poor quality- the upload utility in blogger severely degrades quality. This video contains 1) the stock, unaltered footage, 2) a customized look I created using Magic Bullet (notice the lovely, red ‘x’ that stripes the footage due to the fact that I’m using the demo version for this), and 3) a custom setting I created using Photoshop (I tried to somewhat match this look to the MB one, though it is not a perfect copy). Anyway, these are rough, but hopefully they give you a better idea of what the new Video capabilities can do in Photoshop.