has anyone here used magic bullet before? my friend got me the plug-in and I was wondering if it really does give the film like effect. I can't wait to try it.

magic bullet sucks. well, it works great but the render times are absolutely horrific. i've worked it out to a little around 1 sec for each frame. 24 frames in a second, so thats 24 seconds to render one second of video. On high end computers, it'll take 30 hours to render a 60 minute video. I use other plugins and filters to get the desired effect and it doesn't take any where near 30 hours to render.

You could always get vegas and follow this tutorial or atleast it has always worked for me. As for the render time I have not rendered anything over 5 mins long on it, but those 5 mins finished in about 10 minutes. good luck.

Ive heard nothign but good things about Magic Bullet on the DVX forums. Most of the 'pros' use it. I am trying to get my "hands" on it...

magic bullet looks great, but it takes FOREVER to render. plus, its a lot of money for something that can be done pretty easily in about 10 minutes with a combination of effects.

are you on a PC or a mac?

On a PC

Guys, keep in mind that we don't allow discussions related to pirating software on this board. So watch it.

no worries.

Magic Bullet is definately a great color correcting program to have if you know what you're doing, have a fast computer, and have good footage to work with. Don't expect it to give a "film look" to footage that was terribly lit.

Wow you guys think 60 minutes is a long time to render?

My friend did a title sequence in After Effects that took about 16 hours to render. He said sometimes it can take a day or two to render something really long, like a completely animated video with all the effects and compositing.

That's just what happens when you use one computer.


On a better note, I've met three people that work for the Orphanage in the last few months, I'm going to try to intern there. It'd be awesome.

yeah, a SINGLE FRAME graphic I did took 18 hours, often 3d animation takes several minutes per frame. i just rendered an NTSC legal in FCP that took 8 hours for each hour of video.

The magic bullet pass I did for the twenty minute short, The Wallet, took over sixty hours to render.

It all depends what you're doing. But some of the Motion menus I've done for DVDs take a ridiculously long time to render. When you've got thirty or forty layers, some in 3d space with motion blur or frame blending and a whole mess of filters and particle generators, three minutes of rendering per second of video is hardly something to complain about.

I think Maget Bullet would be good for my film, althuogh I just bured 20 copies of the DVD so ill probably wait to use it for my next film, hopefully by then ill have it.

While this topic is up, does anyone know the best place to get Magic Bullet from? I know it's about $300, but what about academic discounts and stuff? I also heard MB 2.0 might be coming out soon, so maybe I should wait.

Magic Bullet for Editors is only $249, Academic. The Magic bullet SD edition is about 500. Red Giant Software exclusively sells Magic Bullet (I believe), so that's where you need to get it from.

Non-academic SD version costs $1K.

i didnt say 60 minutes was a long time. i said that 30 hours was.

Excellent, thanks Joren!