Yet another way to color grade: Magic Bullet Looks

Red Giant had just released the Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 a while back and I was contemplating buying the upgrade since it's still not 64bit. I was helping a friend with an editing job and was trying out Cosmo on a different edit (think Imagenomic's Portraiture for video) and decided to load up the 60D clip to play with since I'd been slacking on this. I decided to finish up on the video portion of my review of the 60D, and work with a new way to color correct.

With Magic Bullet Looks 2, the presets don't work well at all for underwater so I went into the various custom settings. On this video, I used the following:

SUBJECT: Colorista 3 Way, Curves,

LENS: Lens Distortion (gets rid of barrel or pincushion distortion quite well.

CAMERA: Neg Bleach Bypass (Kills saturation and gives that "air" look!)

POST: Pop (works for small screens) but kills resolution with bigger screens. USE WITH CAUTION!

I put it in a subtle transition so you can see the change in grading. No points for guessing which part is graded.

[vimeohd]33684361[/vimeohd]

The finished render looked nice but Vimeo somehow makes it look terrible. I tried another version but Vimeo looks terrible. If I have time, I'll attempt to leave the 1080p file on the Vimeo server.

Overall MB Looks is nice and powerful and does remove distortion which is awesome. BUT it renders slowly, never utilizing more than 40% of available processors. Still I'm upgrading.

Titles got my wife a bit seasick. Cool. Especially like the contrast between :38-52

Been using Magic Bullet Looks since its inception, not all that frequently but the upgrades are pretty good. Once a look is applied you can then customize the settings within, but, you're right, for UW use, I don't use it much. Just downloaded Cosmo today to do a review and it really, at first glance, seems like Digital Anarchies Beauty Box. Really haven't played too much with it yet but it will smooth out those wrinkles fairly well. Have had Colorista 2 for some time but am having a hard time getting my head around it. I should study the Red Giant tutorials more closely.

SD

A couple of questions from PM (?!?)

Yes I applied distortion throughout the entire sequence, even in the ungraded portions. I didn't have time to key in/out the plugin.

No I'm not recommending Magic Bullet over Resolve or any other software. It works on the sample principle of RGB correction. It's just another way to go. Once one understands the physics, it's a matter of correcting for it. Adobe PP CS5.5 tools can do the same color grading, with different plugins. It's about stacking.

Drew, thanks for the example. What grading plugins would you recommend for basic color grading of underwater footage in Adobe CS5.5 and/or FCPx?

Just stack a bunch of 3 ways and RGB curves to taste. Or just use Resolve Lite... which is free.

Is it possible to post uncorrected video for comparison?

Jeff there is uncorrected mixed with corrected. I purposely mixed it so people could see the subtle changes. Is Vimeo that bad? I haven't watched it again but it was pretty bad @ first viewing.

OK thanks; think I see the changes.

Opps looks like Vimeo cut the upload off and processed it... Sorry. Will try to upload AGAIN!

Ok it's uploaded and playing. Clear your cache!

You can also d/l the 1080p version.

Not sure what I am looking at: the beginning of the video is color graded and the end is not?