The Red Giant Spring Sale is on! Enjoy 24 hours of significant discounts across their wide catalogue of filmmaking and VFX plugins. Starting today April 18th, filmmaking and motion graphics software developer Red Giant is offering a 25% discount across the board for 24 hours. You can find a link to the store HERE. Red Giant Spring Sale The Red Giant Spring Sale applies to all plugins and suites, so whatever part of post-production you specialise in, you are bound to find something useful. Let’s take a quick look at some of their products: Magic Bullet Looks Perhaps the company’s most popular plugin, Magic Bullet Looks allows you to quickly add a cinematic grade to your footage. With its easy-to-use interface, it’s a great tool for editors getting started in colour grading. The software recently got some much-needed added functionality for Premiere Pro CC, and usually retails for $399. You can also get it as part of the Magic Buller Suite for $899, which includes Magic Bullet Colorista IV, Magic Bullet Denoiser III, and Magic Bullet Film among many other colour correction and grading tools. Pluraleyes 4.1 Another popular program from Red Giant is the venerable Pluraleyes, a great tool to sync footage and audio. In just a few clicks, you can import from all your different audio and video sources, sync and export a timeline in your preferred NLE format of choice, or you can use it directly within Premiere (check out my tutorial HERE). Usually available for $299, you can also get it as part of the Shooter Suite ($399) which includes a range of utility plugins to facilitate various post-production tasks. Trapcode Suite 13.1 If your thing is VFX, then you should check out the Trapcode Suite. Usually available for $999, it is a very comprehensive plugin package for Adobe After Effects that includes Trapcode Particular 2.6 for 3D particle effects, Trapcode Mir 2.1 for 3D surfaces and wireframes, Trapcode Shine 2.0 for 3D light ray effects, and much much more. The Red Giant Spring Sale will get you significant discounts from the prices listed above on individual products, as well as for the suites and upgrades. Also, the 25% discount can be added on top of the existing 50% in their academic store. To get the discount, don’t forget to add the coupon code available from the Red Giant website for 24 hours starting April 18th. For more information, visit the Red Giant site. What do you think of Red Giant products? Let us know in the comments below!

Magic Bullet Suite 13 is the latest iteration of this favorite of one-man-band editing operations and larger productions alike. Red Giant has included 7 tools that help you add or remove digital noise, correct color mistakes and add fully customizable color looks to enhance your footage.  All the details, including pricing and footage, is below:  Picture: Red Giant In the last version of Magic Bullet Suite, we saw great-looking real film stock emulsion added to the suite in the form of the “Magic Bullet Film” tool, and that returns for version 13. This time, however, Open CL support for real time playback steals the show. Real time playback works with a number of the tools included in the suite if you are an Adobe Premiere Pro CC user. As an Adobe Premiere Pro CC user myself, it is impossible to overstate the joys of real time playback, and that is certainly the standout feature in version 13 in my opinion. Nobody likes rendering, unless it is a convenient excuse for a coffee trip/sunshine break from the edit bay. There is also a new tool called “Renoiser” which – you guessed it – adds cinematic grain to your shots to pull back some of that sharp digital look coming out of many DSLRs these days. Picture: Red Giant, Colorista IV Maybe it was my ill-spent youth playing PC video games, but the user interface of Red Giant‘s production software has always been very easy for me to navigate, and that’s no different in Magic Bullet Suite 13. Much of the button navigation is built around simple lists and color wheels that are intuitive and user friendly. For me, the benchmark test for software like this, and especially with the Magic Bullet Looks tool, is how many of these Looks I could see myself using on future projects. The answer for me here is: lots, and there is always the option to tone down individual Looks using sliders in a similar way to popular social photo applications like Instagram. Picture: Red Giant, Cosmo Skin Overlay Additional Standout Features of Magic Bullet Suite 13:  Magic Bullet Looks – 50 new Looks added, for a total of over 200. Most of them look great right out of the gate, or with just a little tinkering. Magic Bullet Colorista IV – Still my favorite color correction tool to use. Very quick and intuitive, with lots of UI improvements giving you flexibility to arrange your workspace however you wish. Denoiser III – Denoiser is now sporting entirely re-built code with the help of a startup backed by fellow Indiana University alumnus, Mark Cuban. Here is a little video featuring both a grainy and not-as-grainy Mark Cuban, while breaking down the improvements in Denoiser III:   Magic Bullet Cosmo – In the past, this tool could make your talent’s skin look a little too plasticky in my opinion, but if used sparingly you can get some great subtle skin improvements.  This tool is a must in a world that includes both high resolution cameras and directors looking for closeups… Renoiser – Film looks like film because of grain, 24fps & 180 degree shutter. Add grain back in with this tool. The below video dives into many of the new features Magic Bullet Suite 13 has to offer and includes footage examples: It’s expensive if you are buying the suite for the first time versus upgrading, but the sheer number of included tools significantly reduces headaches in post and are especially great for projects with a quick turnaround time. I originally purchased Colorista, Looks, and the Denoiser tool a few versions back a la carte off the Red Giant website, though I found myself very quickly wishing I had purchased the full suite right off the bat. You can see from the below pricing structure that purchasing everything as a bundle is the best bang for your buck. Red Giant offers a free trial that gives you the chance to dive in yourself and see if purchasing the full suite makes sense for your workflow. If you have a color team with a budget to sit and stare at individual highlights for two months then this product is not for you. But for the vast majority of us this software can improve the look of our footage significantly with a minimal time investment. Price: $899.00, or previous suite owners can upgrade for $299.00 Compatibility: Adobe Premiere & Adobe After Effects (PC or Mac), Final Cut Pro X Magic Bullet Suite 13 is available for purchase or trial download HERE. What do you think? Are there enough new features in version 13 to warrant upgrading, or buying the full suite the first time? Let us know below!

Most filmmakers are familiar with the popular Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite, that offers powerful colour correction, filmic looks and image enhancements in a complete bundle of plugins. Today Red Giant released Magic Bullet Suite 12, introducing many new features and improvements to the toolset. Not only is this a major upgrade to an important colour grading software for cinematic looks and image enhancement, but for the first time Red Giant decided to include real film emulation, built from research and analysis of original organic film stock. We’ve come to love this kind of colour processing in the very popular Filmconvert app that is entirely based on said technique. Aside from film stock emulation, Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite 12 offers a number of other very useful image enhancement tools. Here’s the complete list: • Magic Bullet Looks 3 (color correction app with many preset looks) • Magic Bullet Colorista 3 (color correction plugin for your NLE) • Maguc Bullet Film 1 (Introducing film stock emulation) • Magic Bullet Mojo 2 (Isolates skin tones & tints rest of image – very handy this one) • Magic Bullet Cosmo 2 (Enhances skin, “digital makeup”) • Denoiser 2 (What could I add?) • Lut Buddy (Let’s you make custom LUT’s to take your grades on set) Academic Licenses start at $99. For more information visit: www.redgiant.com