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Amazing MBL color grading
  • montagereflexmontagereflex

    Hi, In this video(

    ), the filmmaker used a Canon 7D with the neutral picture profile. In post production he used Magic Bullet Looks. The result is simply amazing!!

    My question is, how to do that with Magic Bullet Looks ?

    Thanks for your help.

    Best regards.

  • 40 Replies sorted by
  • QuickHitRecordQuickHitRecord

    I have never used Magic Bullet but this looks fantastic. It's making me miss my 7D.

  • rockroadpixrockroadpix

    Jesus, those are hipsters! Ugh

    I don't see anything so magical about the grade. It's nice... but... He/they did it it by crushing the blacks a little and bringing up the skintones. Not sure why that would make someone miss a 7d, either. The "look" was also helped along by Canon's slightly muddy/soft tone. Maybe that is why you'd miss it?

    I have MBL, Colorista and Shian's ColorGhear. This could be accomplished in any of those. Guess which one is cheapest? (Well, cheapest if you have AE already) It could also be done in Apple's Color.

  • RRRRRRRR

    +1 @rocroadpix I don´t see why one would need MBL to reproduce it, either.

  • endotoxicendotoxic

    wow, this is a new breed of neo hipsters naturalist breed.

  • QuickHitRecordQuickHitRecord

    @rockroadpix Call me weird, but I kind of like the muddy softness of the 7D (the artifacting, not so much). I bought the GH2 for it's resolving power, but now that I have it, I sometimes find it to be too sharp.

    I know that it's risking a world of hurt to post something like that on Personal-View, but there it is.

  • GravitateMediaGroupGravitateMediaGroup

    @quickhitrecord then tone the sharpness down in post

    @montagereflex crush the blacks a LITTLE, desaturate a LITTLE, and then adjust the contrast accordingly, but in a seprately added filter.

    might help to start with my preset and then tweak it up a bit http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/4943/magic-bullet-looks-presets-bmcc-look-uploaded/p1

    if you are trying to figure out how to emulate a specific grade, trial and error is the best way. just REALLY look at it and ask yourself "are the blacks crushed, is it over or under saturated, have they made one color jump out more than the rest, and so on" just experiment with it

  • RRRRRRRR

    @QuickHitRecord

    I also think a certain softness is appealing. However, I find it far better to soften up footage with either lenses or some post tweaking than to have a baked in, in-cam softness/muddiness.

    Mind, an oversharpened image is just as bad as (or worse than) a too soft one.

  • rockroadpixrockroadpix

    @QuickHitRecord - I don't think it's weird to want the softness, but as others have said just previously, you can soften after the fact. I'm fairly certain you can even muddy it up in post. My point was more to the other deficiencies of the 7d- moire aliasing etc. Liking the look of a camera is nothing strange to me. However, the other issues can take it out of the running, imo.

  • QuickHitRecordQuickHitRecord

    Yeah, the moire and aliasing on that camera were a deal breaker.

    I'll try softening my footage up a bit in post.

  • GravitateMediaGroupGravitateMediaGroup

    yeah, I bought a 6d hoping it could perform fine in the video world, but it turns out, it's just a jollo filled moire mess and now it's my "stills cam" lol after getting used to GH2 detail,it's hard to take a dslr serious. mix the gh2 detail with canons descent low light ability, and you would have a winner

  • montagereflexmontagereflex

    Hi, thanks to all for your answers!

    @GravitateMediaGroup your MBL preset is great! I use it for two weeks. Thank you for sharing! But I think in the video I posted there is a special color correction on the tones. I have tried MANY things... but no great result.

    GravitateMediaGroup, please, could you create a MBL preset like the first one to have the same color correction that the video I posted ?

    Many thanks for your help.

    Best regards.

  • mrbillmrbill

    Crushing the blacks makes things more contrasty. The blacks on this are a little set up, and there's a little bit of green in the mid tones. Easy to do without MBL

  • SuperSetSuperSet

    For multi NLE users, have you guys found that it's easier to get good color correction results out of Premiere CS6 compared to Vegas Pro? Been playing with it a while and the Vegas stuff always comes out a little darker, a little more faded and just doesn't look as good as CS6. Tried using 8-bit and both 32-bit options too. Thoughts?

  • retrospectiveretrospective

    @SuperSet Your "darker" results is probably a codec issue. Try using the same codec on Premiere and Vegas.

  • shianshian

    Shadow lift @ 50%, Steel Dirt @ 65%, and 2-stop at 80% - grade accomplished in 15 seconds. Depending on how "cool" the footage is throw in SImply Warmer at 100% and done in 17 seconds.

  • DouglasHornDouglasHorn

    It's hard to say much about a grade without seeing the source material. That said, I've worked with a fair amount of 7D footage and it usually has an odd purple/magenta cast to it which is missing here.

    Personally, I use Magic Bullet Looks or Colorista II for most of my color correction--though I've never used a pre-made "Look" that I can recall. I like the way the built-in tools work together and the scopes. There are a few things I'd like to see evolve in MBL, but overall I think it's a wonderful tool.

  • GravitateMediaGroupGravitateMediaGroup

    @douglashorn

    isn't pre-made and built-in the same thing?

    @montagereflex i'll mess around a bit and see what I can come up with. are you trying to achieve this look with a gh2 or a 7d?

  • vicharrisvicharris

    Yeah, sorry. I was out at Hipster Hike. I live in LA and they make me want to punch babies in the face some days!

  • RamboRambo

    Easily achieved in Vegas with the free 6 way AAVColorLab (www.aav6cc.blogspot.com) and Sony 3 way Color Corrector and much faster rendering too.

  • GravitateMediaGroupGravitateMediaGroup

    @montagereflex apply this to some footage and see what you think some of the filters I have on here are unnecessary, if it's not warm or green enough just tweak it, and if the saturation is too high just turn it down in one of the color filters

    HIPSTER.zip
    17K
  • DouglasHornDouglasHorn

    @GravitateMediaGroup - The way MBL works is there are a number of configurable tools that can be applied at various nodes along the render chain. These are the "built-in tools" I referred to.

    Additionally, there are several pre-built Looks which are composed of render chains that use any number of these tools in various configurations to create a pre-build effect or Look. For many, this is the main selling point of the program. For others, this is why they look down their noses at MBL for it's out-of-the-box approach, color(correct)-by-numbers approach. However, it's just as easy to use MBL as a tool suite without touching the pre-built looks. One way isn't better than the other, it depends on what you want to do.

    By the way, am I misinterpreting your message to me, or were you kind of being a dick just then?

  • SuperSetSuperSet

    @retrospective Thanks for your response, man, but I can see this even when I'm exporting a still frame from both.

    If you dudes have a few minutes, maybe you can take a quick look at my CS6 project vs Vegas project and see if you can identify the problem. The CS6 results look a lot better so I'm just trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong in Vegas. I'd really appreciate a second, or third, eye.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/kw6pgjk51lo066f/PremiereVsVegas.zip

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    @DouglasHorn Well said. Most people don't realize that Magic Bullet can be used, in its simplest form, as a means to apply one of its collection of pre-built looks. That's mostly how it was packaged up and sold as a tool that users would associate with its name, as an easy, fire-and-forget, "make it look like a movie" plug-in. But it's not that (or doesn't have to be) and didn't start its life like that.

    Before it was a product available to the public it was a proprietary set of tools developed for the color grading suites at The Orphanage (RIP). Their initial startup capital was largely based on keeping their color grading suites busy grading commercials, music videos, short films and features, at a time when I don't believe the original ColorFinesse was available. There were no options like we enjoy now for color correction and products like AE and Commotion were only just about then expanding beyond limited 8bit support.

    Then, like DD did with Nuke, like Knoll did with what became Photoshop back in the '80s, like I forget the guys name did with Commotion, the original creator partners with or sells a source-code snapshot to an actual software company to bring it to market as a an product and deal with the resulting support and customer fulfillment.

    Before that it was a custom set of After Effects techniques (since internally it doesn't do anything you can't do with ganging lots more of AE's filters and operators together and is how it was built) by Stu Maschwitz while he was still working at ILM. Its sole, original purpose was to color grade and de-artifact the DV footage he was shooting for his personal short films as a repeatable methodology that could be applied to future projects.

    There was nothing stopping people then or now from doing exactly what MB did then or does now. But most don't or can't. Shian's project is very similar in this respect, yet there aren't a multitude of people developing or using their own solutions on par with these. Not even a handful. They'll look down their noses though.

  • thepalaliasthepalalias

    @SuperSet I'm away from my editing computer right now but here is the first thing I'd check. When you exported in 8-bit and 32-bit from Vegas (and you don't mention which version) did you try all three 32-bit options? Also, what format are you exporting and viewing your still frames in?

    In my testing last year (with Vegas Pro 11) I found that Quicktime had more issues in this area (encoding and decoding) than AVIs that were neither encoded nor read using any form of Quicktime. I had the best luck (with version 11) if I encoded Vegas Pro 11 using 32-bit full-range. When I did that, the Quicktime results would be much closer to the non-Quicktime results.

  • RamboRambo

    @superset, couple of things you need to know about Sony Vegas. 1. What you see in the preview player window is not always what you get on render. 2. The scopes refect what is in the Vegas Preview player window, so they also can be incorrect. The way I handle this is I apply a levels correction to the master video bus and then do my levels and color correction using scopes and Preview window. When happy with the result, I disable the master bus correction and then export. The resulting render will be as you saw in the scopes and preview window.

    Reason this happens, Vegas is expecting computer swing levels at import but is being fed studio swing from the mts files so preview and scopes are wrong. Applying the master bus correction corrects the shift temporally while you edit. Have a read here http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/vegas-9-levels.htm#codecTable http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/colorspaces/colorspaces.html

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