Product Reviews

It may be the director who gets all the recognition for the look and feel of TV programmes or movies, but he would be nothing without a really good editor with a proper set of tools. To this end, Magic Bullet Editors for Final Cut Pro is an invaluable set of effects that give an instant stylised film look to any footage simply by dragging and dropping an effect on to the timeline.

Any number of 50 presets can turn a humble documentary into the green-tinted world of The Matrix, or give it the stylised look of Hollywood blockbusters such as Traffic. Indeed, it's simplicity itself to recreate the look of such films as Jackass or Vanilla Sky, as Magic Bullet was used in their production.

Source footage can be anything shot in the DV format, from consumer-level cameras to Digital Betacam, Betacam SP and HDCAM in both PAL and NTSC, and processed during or after the edit. Two versions of the suite are available: SD for standard definition and HD for high definition.

Central to the package is the Look Suite, an FCP effect panel that gives extensive keyframeable colour controls and presaved looks. You access the latter by loading the Look Suite Favorites into your project bins. It's a crude way to use the looks, but Final Cut Pro 4.1 doesn't let After Effects-derived effects store and recall presets. Unlike Boris plug-ins, Magic Bullet Editors don't have an effects browser to preview the style with an example or a frame from a clip - a handy chart with all 50 looks

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would have been really useful.

Some of the presets are based on real films or well-known genres, others give the general look of film, Basic, the closest you can get to the look of an actual film, has two categories: Warm or Cool. Two other presets are Diffusion, which affects highlights and shadows, and Black and White.

If you don't want to tweak your footage, just go for the straight Hollywood looks with the likes of Bistro (Amelie), Bleach Bypass (Saving Private Ryan), Mexicali (Traffic, Miami), Bad Boys and Neo from The Matrix trilogy. There are also genre themes such as Berlin for a distant and cold feeling, B&W Crunch for an instant film noir look, Epic, which gives a mock Technicolor, or maybe try Warm & Fuzzy, which is inspired by Jerry Maguire.

The best way to work with the presets is to make a backup master copy, use one of them, which can be adjusted later, and then use the Frame Viewer to preview the end result. This way, the presets can be applied, tweaked as needed and then undone to get a feel of how they affect the footage.

Also included in Magic Bullet Editor is a Misfire plug-in with 14 effects and a collection of presets that reproduce the characteristics of old film - always handy when faking alien autopsies. Retro looks include Fading, Funk, Splotches, Dust, Flicker, Vignette, Displacement and Grain, along with thee types of scratches. Projection artefacts, such as flicker and gate weave, are also included.

We have a few concerns with Magic Bullet Editor. The manual is skimpy and there are no examples of the various film looks. Finally, and this is perhaps to be expected with such a powerful application, rendering performance on older G4s is very slow.

Magic Bullet Editors is one of those must-have plug-in suites. Moreover, with Final Cut Pro dominating desktop editing on the Mac, it is another reason to migrate from Adobe's After Effects. Most people will stick to the tried-and-tested presets, but more creative users should get to grips with the Look Suite effects panel - they won't be disappointed.