Red Giant releases Magic Bullet Suite 14.0

Red Giant has released Magic Bullet Suite 14.0, the first major update to its suite of colour grading tools for After Effects and Premiere Pro in over four years.

The Looks plugin gets a new LUT browser, Channel Mixer and interesting Color Remap and Huenity tools; while the Colorista plugin gets new LUT and presets browsers, and a revamped render engine for HDR work.

However, the updated plugins do not currently support Apple’s Final Cut Pro X or Motion, following changes made by Apple in macOS 11.0 Big Sur, and in the apps themselves.

Looks 5.0: new Color Remap, Huenity and Channel Mixer tools,

The update is the first to Magic Bullet Suite for some time, version 13.0 having shipped in 2016.

Color correction tool Looks gets the longest list of changes, with Magic Bullet Looks 5.0 featuring a set of new utility and colour editing tools.

They include Color Remap, which Red Giant describes as a “first of its kind”, enabling users to map any colour to any other in footage, seeing the results in a 3D colour cube.

Suggested uses include conforming shots to colour charts, or matching them to palettes supplied by a client.

The other major new tool is Huenity, with simplifies the colour palette of footage it is applied to by unifying similar hues, particularly for skin tones.

More conventional tools include a new Channel Mixer, which makes it possible to feed information from one colour channel into the output of another: for example, to correct colour casts.

The update also introduces a self-descriptive new LUT Browser and Preset Search system.

Colorista 5.0: new HDR grading engine

The Colorista plugin also gets a sizeable update, with Colorista 5.0 revamping its render engine for HDR grading work.

The update introduces new Highlight and Shadow Region controls, a new Clarity control, and a new Highlight Boost control for converting standard footage to HDR.

There is also a new Saturation EQ system, which makes it possible to adjust colour saturation across “different ‘bands’ of lightness or saturation” in foorage.

As with Looks, Colorista also gets new LUT Browser and Preset Browser.

No support for Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Motion yet

At the time of writing, neither of the updated plugins are compatible with Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Motion, both previously supported in Magic Bullet Suite.

Red Giant puts this down to changes made in macOS 11.0 Big Sur, rolled out last week, and to the apps themselves, both of which have moved to Apple’s new Universal platform, enabling them to run both on older Intel Macs and Apple’s new M1 chips.

The firm says that it is “working with Apple to resolve the issue”.

The other plugins in the Suite – colour correction tools Mojo and Film; Renoiser and sister app Denoiser; and skin-editing tool Cosmo – haven’t been updated this time around.

Pricing and system requirements

Magic Bullet Suite 14.0 is available now. The price is up $100 since the previous release, to $999. It also no longer seems to be possible to buy the plugins individually.

Updated: Plugins are no longer available individually. If you have an existing individual licence, upgrade pricing is available, but you will need to contact the sales team at Maxon, Red Giant’s parent company.

All of the suite’s component tools are compatible with After Effects 2017+ and Premiere Pro 2017+ on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Individual tools are also compatible with DaVinci Resolve, HitFilm, Media Composer and Vegas Pro. For a complete list of compatible versions, visit the product website.

Read more about the new features in Magic Bullet Suite 14.0 on Red Giant’s blog:

https://www.redgiant.com/blog/2020/11/17/new-magic-bullet-suite-14/

Source: Jim Thacker/CG Channel