We’re always busy coming up with new ways to keep our software up to date, add in the support that you’re asking for, and ensure that bugs you’ve been telling us are getting fixed – roll that all together, and you get Magic Bullet Suite 11.1, the latest incarnation of the suite, with these great additions:

Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 for Vegas Pro

To quote a great man, “It will be available soon. Yes. You heard me. Soon.” Well, soon has arrived – download the latest Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 installer to grab Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 for Vegas Pro. This release has all of the great Looks 2.0 features working in Vegas Pro 10, in both the 32 and 64 bit variants. We are also actively working with Sony to ensure Looks 2.0 will work perfectly in the upcoming Vegas Pro 11 release. So, grab it now for Vegas Pro 10, and get our thumbs up on a seamless transition when you upgrade.

Magic Bullet Colorista II 1.0.4

One of the bugs we’ve been hearing about the most in Colorista II is an issue in Premiere Pro CS4, CS5, or CS5.5 where you end up with an error dialog stating, Error: “Unable to get a suitable preview frame for the keyer dialog”. We’ve found the solution and are including this fix in the Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 release.

Introducing Red Giant Link 1.0

One of the toughest computer maintenance issues everyone has is ensuring that you’re running the latest versions of the software you rely on daily. For Red Giant customers, this has meant checking our website for updates or perhaps hoping you didn’t miss the blog post or newsletter that mentioned the update you’ve been waiting for. We’ve identified that hole in our software delivery process and are introducing Red Giant Link 1.0 as the solution. Link is a simple piece of software that will let you know when updates are available to fix issues or add functionality. For the full details on Link, read all about it here.

Grab the full Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 installer here.

In case you missed it, we recently shipped Trapcode Form 2.0. Never content to just sit back, we spent some time post-release fixing up a few issues that we discovered and wanted to share the fixes for those issues with you today (as well as a bonus fix for Lux!). The issues we have resolved:

Lux 1.2.1:

• If the spotlight was pointed at 90 or 270 degrees to the camera, you end up with a single line of transparent pixels.

Form 2.0.1:

• A crash with opening some projects with OBJ models containing texture coordinates.
• Added support for point cloud and vertex only OBJs.
• Fixed an error when keyframing fractal field parameters.
• Catch and return AE error when using multi-processing with low memory, now returns an error dialog instead of rendering blank frames.
• Fixed world transform being double what it should be.
• Added Invert Z option for OBJ models exported with a z axis opposite to that of After Effects.

You can grab the latest Trapcode Suite 11.0.1 installer here. The suite installer contains the fixes for both Form and Lux.

Episode 61: Working with Looks Presets in Magic Bullet Looks 2

If you’ve worked with Magic Bullet Looks, then you know how ridiculously awesome it is for both using the huge library of preset looks for quick results, and for creating your own looks as well. But you’ve probably come across the situation where a look you absolutely loved didn’t quite work with your footage.

Well, In this episode of Red Giant TV,  Simon Walker will go over the presets in Looks 2 giving you tips and techniques for getting the most out of them, while working faster, and he’ll also look at some of the new features in Magic Bullet Looks 2 to talk about how you can use them in this process to get even more out of this powerful tool.

Watch it HERE.

LIA – Lab Inter Arts, (based at the University Mozarteum Salzburg, Austria), is a performance-oriented workshop headed by Prof. Helmi Vent, in which projects on various themes are developed together with the participants on location through improvisational processes. When the group took their performance work to India recently, they faced more than one or two challenges.

From the outset they knew that financial resources for the documentary would be limited and coupled with environmental issues (monsoon season); it was not going to be a straightforward project. The story of this documentary is enlightening in every sense of the word and we asked Martin Gerhard Hantich, the Technical Director at LIA, how Magic Bullet Looks gave definition to some of the more color challenging shots.

Martin told us: “We had to travel light (in overly crowded trains), so there were no lights, bouncers or a larger crew; it was me together with an Indian camera assistant who had a lot of other duties to handle, like discussing with officials or translating. I was capturing sound and video material at the same time while chasing our performers through the crowded streets of Mumbai. The relatively high humidity and heat, coupled with the spontaneous nature of the project, made it quite a challenge.

“Most activities were chosen on a day-to-day schedule at many different locations, so there was hardly any time for thorough planning, manual white-balance or all of the other amenities you have when you’re shooting feature or in a more ‘controlled’ environment. It was more like ‘this performer will start the performance there and whatever will happen – we’ll see’.

“I knew from the beginning that this rather ‘instantaneous’ way of working will require some adjustment in the post, also because the light situation at that time of the year in Mumbai was far from ideal with a hazy smog dome covering the city most of the time.

An example of the footage before and after Magic Bullet Looks

“Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks gave me the power to easily adjust the overall look and give the documentary the ’16mm’ appearance I wanted, set highlights where there were none and tweak the entire picture. Without Looks, it would have been way harder to achieve all of that while maintaining a small production budget.”

Before Magic Bullet Looks

After Magic Bullet Looks

Learn more about the documentary HERE.

Every once in a while I like to put Netflix aside and look for a good short film on Vimeo (I have a Roku box, so I can watch Vimeo on my TV). There’s a lot of great stuff there, from a lot of talented people. In fact, I recently found a film called Unemployment, that was just so wonderful, I wanted to share it with you.

The hilarious, well shot, well-acted, and well written film is co-directed and acted by Chris Crutchfield and Austin Herring, two very talented guys who who’ve done a lot of great work together over the years. Trapcode Particular and Magic Bullet Suite, which are both part of Chris’ and Austin’s filmmaking arsenal, were used in Unemployment.

From Austin: “Trapcode continues to blow my mind every time they come out with a new plug in, and its no surprise that Magic Bullet is quickly becoming THE color grading software of choice for guerrilla filmmakers like us and high end Hollywood professions too. I use those on pretty much every single project I work on.”

From Chris: “Red Giant products have been a crucial tool in my arsenal. It’s like having a Swiss army knife of plugins, where there’s always something I can manipulate or modify, with relative ease and speed, that will allow me to achieve whatever look or effect I’m going for.”

I’m not new to Chris and Austin’s work. I actually found their stuff a couple of years ago, when they were working together at IMIGpro, where they created a series of “educational” videos to explain the various facets of our industry. I never realized how little I, and the rest of Hollywood, actually knew…

Ok, maybe they’re not educational, but they’re seriously funny – and there’s a bunch more, so check ‘em out. We’re glad that our products help such talented people tell their stories.

Check out more of Chris Crutchfield’s work HERE.

Check out more of Austin’s Herring’s Work HERE.

“Stop being a wallflower – your neighborhood wants to dance.” is the spirited tagline to a 2-minute film by CA-based Micah Moss. And what started off as a muse about streaming vs. DVDs and the physical act of walking to a mailbox to drop off a DVD, has turned into beautifully simple mini-masterpiece.

‘The Latter’ was shot entirely using an iPad 2 in Highland Park, CA. and edited with Movie Looks HD. With one or two other options available on the App Store we asked Micah why he chose Red Giant’s Movie Looks HD for this engaging short.

Micah told us “”When shopping around for a coloring app, I settled on Movie Looks HD for several reasons. First of all, Red Giant (the developer) is just that – a GIANT in the world of post-production; they’ve been developing sophisticated editing / coloring tools for years for the biggest of Hollywood productions, so I knew their touch would come from years of expertise – that was a no-brainer. After testing the app, I found it to be easy and intuitive, with a couple nice little unique features to boot. You can trim the length of the clip before processing with easy-touch sliders, and (my personal favorite) you can specify what keyframe you want to use when sampling effects. Very handy (especially if you were still calibrating your exposure for the first several frames of each clip).

Micah continued “The filters are beautiful and complex, and aren’t so “one-note” as many other coloring apps; if you’re looking for a distinct visual tone above the “anything-but-subtle-current-mobile-8-MM-fad”, then Movie Looks HD will allow you to deliver on your vision. Cold tones, warm, bleached, cross-processed, diffusion – they’re all there and more, and they’re just a starting point. Once you’ve found a kindred “look” you like, you can adjust the “strength” and “brightness” of the process (again with easy-touch sliders – everything was made with the touch-screen in mind), and even select “full or half” resolution in case you want to do a smaller, quicker test on the footage. All in all, Movie Looks HD is incredibly powerful, sports a clean, minimalist interface perfect for the iPad, and is a total steal for a couple bucks.”

iPad Creative Magazine called ‘The Latter’ superb and we’d add it’s utterly charming and clever and certainly not to be missed.

Check out more of Micah’s work HERE.

‘The Latter’ has also been entered into the Original iPhone Film Festival, so we wish Micah all the best with that. If you’d like to enter your own film do check out the site, there’s about 6 weeks left for entries.

Hey folks – in case you missed the news from IBC, we’re bringing Magic Bullet Looks back to Sony Vegas Pro. You can read the press release HERE, but let me boil it down and give you a little more info:

1. We’re showing it right now at IBC.
2. Magic Bullet Looks 2 integrates seamlessly with Vegas Pro, offering the same rich toolset in the Looks interface as in every other version.
3. It will be available soon. Yes. You heard me. Soon.

So why are we adding support back into Vegas Pro, after we dropped it just a few months back? In short, because we love you. No really. That’s why. The Sony Vegas users were extremely passionate about our stance on Looks 2, and we love passion. It’s what drives the creativity in our industry, and it’s what drives us to make better tools. And once we saw your commitment to getting the most out of your editor, we started working directly with the team at Sony to get you what you need to make that happen.

Hey – A little bit of passion goes a long way.

So… to sum it up, Vegas users… See you soon.

Love,

Red Giant

Episode 60: Creating Light Effects with Trapcode 3D Stroke

In this episode of Red Giant TV, Owain Street shows you how he created the beautiful and evocative light effects from a series of commercials for Demonfort University using Trapcode 3D Stroke. Keep your eyes open for great shortcuts and techniques.

Watch it HERE.

Congratulations to Tom Howe, winner of the Senser Video Competition.

Back in March UK band Senser, who have been described as Rap Rock, Industrial hip hop and even Rapcore, announced a competition to produce a video for their new single ‘2 3 Clear’.

The band made green-screen and live footage available for the track and gave the general public full creative license to do with it as they wish. After much debate and deliberation, Tom clinched the first prize with his minimal but clearly defined use of effects, amazing sense of space and depth and brilliant dynamics. And Tom was pretty excited to win.

“Magic Bullet Looks is effing ace. Since installing it, I’ve discovered a whole realm of different ways my footage could look in the time that it would normally take to find one half-decent look using a bunch of standard FCP effects crammed on top of each other — and the results are a hundred times better! Now I can create shots that look fresh out of Hollywood! Well, almost… Can’t wait to get my mittens on more Magic Bullet products!”