Vintage Looks, Stylish Titles
Because Magic Bullet Looks has become such a popular product with video producers and editors, Red Giant has begun to add accessory packs, such as “Nick Campbell’s Vintage Film for Looks.” Campbell is motion designer and photographer, whose resume includes the TV show Dexter, the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, and clients such as HBO and Showtime. The product that bears his name adds several additional presets for Magic Bullet Looks that, as the product’s name implies, adds a variety of effects to simulate old film, over and underexposed film, and distortion from cheap plastic lenses. The filters are also simultaneously installed in Magic Bullet PhotoLooks — a nice touch.
But what really makes Nick Campbell’s Vintage Film for Looks intriguing are the After Effects templates included, which simulate a strip of 35mm film, a snapshot or an SX-70 photo on a table. Anyone with just a modicum of After Effects experience should quickly be able to replace the stock photos in the templates with their own still or video images (with or without additional Looks tweaking) to jump-start a stylish title or montage sequence.
Installation Notes
Some quick notes from the installation and early use of these programs. First, in installing these applets to Windows Vista 64-bit, I found that I almost always had to disable Kaspersky’s anti-virus program during the installation process, but your mileage may vary, depending upon your O/S and A/V platforms.
Obviously, the speed of rendering the various applications is very much dependent on how much RAM your PC has, its processor speed, and the processing power of your video card. If your system meets the recommended specs for Adobe’s CS5, you should be OK, as the horsepower required to run these programs seems to grow much daunting with each new software iteration from Adobe.
Nice To Be Back In CS5
The retail price for Magic Bullet Suite 10 is $799 from Red Giant; upgrades range from $99 to $399, depending upon the previous version(s) of Red Giant products you already own.
While that price may initially seem steep to some, for those regularly produce videos for a living, whether for weddings, news, commercials, or high-end web video projects, these products fill a key niche — and those who had to work around them during the transition from Adobe CS4 to CS5 will likely be glad to welcome them back into their host applications.
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