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MillimeterMark In
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM
Magic Bullet Looks, from Red Giant Software, employs a node-style interface. The effect of each filter can be seen as it is applied, with different results according to where in the stack one filter sits in relation to others.
High-end Tools for a Tight Budget
By Dan Ochiva
What if you could color control your video project to get just about any result you desire — even while pulling off specialized work such as tracking, which would allow you to replace parts of an image with something entirely different just like a Hollywood feature? What if that capability would cost you less than $1,000?
For many producers, that future has arrived. Now, with apps such as Imagineer mocha-AE ($299) and Red Giant Software Magic Bullet Looks ($399), which were both released within the last six months, you can do much of the work that up until recently required top facilities with big expensive iron systems. The packages run ably under Windows and Mac OS using mid-range workstations. While mocha-AE exports only to Adobe After Effects, Magic Bullet Looks integrates with many popular editing and effects packages.
Of course, you still need talent. Danny Princz, of New York-based Exposed, is a well-known motion graphics and visual effects artist who was among the first to apply mocha-AE in his work for the HGTV network, as well as the Live Earth “Change the World” campaign for Nth Degree. “The software is fairly painless, and I was able to get a quick, accurate track with material that I couldn't do using After Effects,” says Princz, who got got his start early on using the high-end gear at PrinczCo, his father's well-known New York-based commercials facility.
Unlike After Effects' pixel-based tracker, mocha-AE employs 2D planar tracking. That's a key benefit when tracking points become distorted, say by motion blur, grain, or moving out of the frame. “When part of an object moves off screen, After Effects acquires keyframing every frame,” says Princz, who posts examples of his work at www.exposedideas.com. “That doesn't matter with mocha-AE, which uses all the pixels in a [2D] plane, so you get a clean track and not tedious work.”
While mocha-AE delivers new capabilities for effects production, what if you could control the look of a whole film by a few simple clicks? That's the premise behind Magic Bullet Looks (MBL), which enables the user to adjust a project's tones and colors to simulate the appearance of classic films, or to duplicate specific production conditions such as bleach bypass — a look once only available by tweaking the chemistry of a film during processing.
“With the advent of 24p production, producers started to move to ‘look’ software to replicate the appearance of popular film and TV,” says Eric Escobar, filmmaker at Kontent Films (www.kontentfilms.com) in San Francisco.
In a similar move to some high-end color-correction tools, MBL can also be used on set to show how a scene will look with any of the some 85 filter effects included with the app. For anyone who has done production, MBL's approach will seem logical, Escobar says. “It starts out with the things that you can do in front of the camera — apply different filters, change the lights — and then moves on down the chain,” he says.
In web spots Escobar created for Visa, another MBL effect saved the day. “The producers had wanted to use a swing/tilt lens attachment to achieve a certain narrow depth-of-field effect,” Escobar says. But to pull it off, they needed both another rental and extra crew, which didn't fit time and budget constraints. “I said, ‘I have just what you need.’ I knew I could pull off a similar effect to the swing-tilt effect in the software. Once they saw the result, they were ecstatic.”
