Our Story

Born At The Orphanage

Magic Bullet made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001. The year before, Stu Maschwitz and Jonathan Rothbart left Industrial Light & Magic to fulfill their dream of making movies and founded The Orphanage, an effects house in San Francisco. Their objective was to tell interesting stories using simple DV cameras and Adobe After Effects software without shooting a single frame of film.

The challenge was that DV cameras lacked the high-end production quality and the organic look and feel of traditional film. After many late nights, Stu developed the complex algorithms that could enable DV video to get the frame rate and the 'look' of a movie shot on film. He called it Magic Bullet. The Orphanage used Magic Bullet technology on their first short film, which debuted at the Sundance film festival in 2001.

A Bullet becomes a Suite

Magic Bullet Suite 1.0 was released in November 2002, and The Orphanage partnered with Red Giant in 2003 to help with distribution and development. Almost immediately, customers wanted to use the toolset directly inside the tools that they used the most: their video editor. This request led in 2004 to a second product, Magic Bullet Editors, which gave the ability to create looks inside host applications like FCP and Premiere Pro.

Magic Bullet users asked for a color correction tool that was fast, easy to use and high quality. In December 2006, Magic Bullet Colorista debuted to rave reviews, featuring a 3-Way color wheel interface and powerful masking features that confine correction to a selected area. In 2007, Magic Bullet Looks came onto the scene and shook the industry by delivering simple, beautiful color treatments and grading tools.

Nine products make a family

Magic Bullet Suite keeps changing the game as it has expanded into a true family of products.

Mojo was released in 2009 to provide popular Hollywood color treatments. Grinder was developed for easy DSLR/HDSLR video conversion to edit-friendly formats. Colorista II was reinvented in 2010 to become a full featured 3-stage color correction environment. Cosmo came out in 2011 for easy skin smoothing and cosmetic touchup, and Looks 2 was updated with new presets and production tools. In 2012, we replaced the original Denoiser with a faster, steadier Denoiser II, and updated PhotoLooks 2 to match the Looks 2 features.

Magic Bullet Suite 11 currently ships nine products that will rock your world: Colorista II, Looks 2, Mojo, PhotoLooks 2, Denoiser II, Cosmo, Grinder, Frames and Instant HD.