Applying Magic Bullet film looks to still photos?

[nzo]

I take quite a few still shots with my digicam. I've fallen in love with Magic Bullet's Film Look filters for video and wonder what might be the best way to apply some of these filters to a still image.

Bring the image into an NLE and do it from there? What do you think?

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

That is pretty much the only way as Magic Bullet doesn't run in photoshop. The NLE's that it does run in will all allow you to output a still image anyway.

As nice as MB filters are, you can replicate pretty much anything it does using various combinations of primary and secondary colour filters, contrast, blurs, glows and other bits and pieces. Not so important for still images, but when you have to wait perhaps days for a few minutes of footage to process. . . . .

So yes, drop your still onto the timeline, apply your MB effect, then render it out as a still. Just make sure your project settings are set to a high enough resolution so you don't sacrifice quality by downsizing then upsizing your image.

[nzo]

Thanks once again guns1inger

With video rendering using Magic Bullet filters being so slow, I'm wondering just what the pro folks use to do their Magic Bullet number crunching. I imagine a 1.5hr movie would take days or longer.

[guns1inger]

I guess a dual_CPU dedicated just to MB processing and nothing else would take around 12 days to do a movie at video res. At film res it would be several weeks. I know my XP 1800+ takes around 11 hours to process 2.5 minutes of PAL res footage. I have started to replicate some of the bullets I use most as FX chains in Vegas because they process a hell of a lot faster. But it does take a lot of time to get it right in the first place. One thing that MB does seems to do well is self adjust to cater for different balances in different scenes and still output something pretty consistent. FX chains cannot do that.

[nzo]

11 hours to process 2.5 minutes of PAL res footage

At film res it would be several weeks

Yikes! One wonders if there's some way of keeping the already rendered MB footage in case of a power cut during the 12 days :

I'd imagine some production houses would use banks of PCs just for this purpose.

How much are supercomputers these days? LOL

By film res I'm assuming you mean footage that would eventually be shown in cinemas.

[guns1inger]

I don't know if you can use MB on a render farm, but you can always render to still frames, then compile it all back together again afterwards.

MB has been used to deinterlace and otherwise treat a number of video sourced films that went on to cinemas as projected footage. Jackass the Movie is a dubious early claim to fame.