Product Reviews

The Orphanage has finally released a Mac version of its award-winning Magic Bullet film mastering system. The program is responsible for outstanding results on film projects, including Vanilla Sky and Things Behind The Sun, as well as numerous music videos and TV commercials.

Previously sold as a service, Magic Bullet is a one-stop desktop solution for finishing digital movies. It comes as a suite of plug-ins for After Effects 5.5, and is a powerful 24P mastering system that has been designed to allow creative control over digital projects by providing a simple environment in which to emulate the look of film.

This first release is Mac only (a Windows version is in development) and supports Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X. The Eve3 Carbonized Suite comprises five elements, which work on all standard definition format video (NTSC and up to 720 x 486 pixels PAL). There is also a high definition version available that has no resolution limit.

Magic Bullet is also the name of The Orphanage's celebrated, patent-pending technology responsible for converting interlaced footage to 24P and reducing artefacts in digital footage. It is designed to require the minimum of user intervention. Although there's an innovative Auto Setup facility that can be configured to the specifications of your footage for one-click operation, you can also use these elements separately. This enables you to deartefact progressive scan footage or to deinterlace without otherwise affecting it.

Best foot forward

Once footage is imported into After Effects, you may have to change one or two settings in the Interpret Footage Window. While this window will automatically detect the type of footage, its frame rate, source (PAL or NTSC) and Pixel Aspect Ratio, these settings should be checked before proceeding. You'll need to select off from the Separate Fields pop-up menu as Magic Bullet does its own deinterlacing, and it will do a better job than After Effects.

Then

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place the footage into a composition of the same pixel size and aspect ratio and select Magic Bullet from the Effect Control window. Click on Auto Setup and you'll see a dialog that explains the configuration and shows what Magic Bullet will do. Once these simple steps have been taken, Magic Bullet will configure itself.

This kind of communication between user and application is excellent. Not only is it informative, but it helps you keep track of where you are. With the Effects Controls still open you can now apply the other components of Magic Bullet (LookSuite, Opticals, Broadcast Spec and Letterboxer) before sending the footage off to render.

Magic Bullet is set apart from rivals in the way it works. It deinterlaces video by examining it for the type of interlacing artefacts that are easy to spot by eye, but hard to isolate for a computer algorithm. To do this it uses a fuzzy-logic approach to account for pixels, which may move a whole frame or a half frame, potentially skipping fields as they go. Magic Bullet then examines those areas of motion and creates new pixels where the secondary field has to be discarded. New pixels are created based on pattern-matching, so that instead of a simple interpolation, you get smooth contours and clean diagonals.

LookSuite is a powerhouse of a plug-in and is the creative element to Magic Bullet. It comes with 16 preset looks (more will be posted online), which can be sampled on a built-in browser. Simple-to-use controls allow you to create your own bespoke look. Each preset look has been meticulously configured to match a common look found in TV and film, and they do suggest a very high-quality cinematic output.

Opticals facilitates good-quality fades to black, burns to white and cross dissolves, while Broadcast Spec filters images to create broadcast-safe colour and luminance values.

Bullet time

Magic Bullet is a substantial move towards the Holy Grail of making digital video slook like film, and will no doubt become the tool of choice for many digital film-makers. Unfortunately, it's only available for After Effects 5.5 and render times slow quite noticeably when you apply a couple of filter effects over your footage, although there are ways around this.

In use, it looks and feels like a natural extension to After Effects. While other packages make similar claims, we often find they don't do what they say on the box. But given Magic Bullet's price of $995, its range of capabilities and its ease of use, there is, quite simply, nothing to touch it.