Magic bullet is slow as heck, no doubt. Zenote is faster. I've got a 48 track cartoon composite Cheno did for VASST that is taking 3 hours to render 25 seconds....pretty amazing though. All generated media.

I wonder if rendered network would help if it is distributed over 2 or 3 PCs? I suppose it wouldn't reduce the mpeg2 render time but it should significantly reduce the Magic Bullet render time. Is my assumption correct? Has anybody tested this?

Magic . . . . Snail? ~~~~~~~~~~~ . . . .. .. . . . . . ~ ~ . . . ..

You'd have to render it out as an AVI using network rendering, and then render that on 1 computer to a MPEG file since you can't do MPEG's on the network render

Hi Grazie. It's about as fast as those bullets in The Matrix, so I guess the name is correct.

Richard Hunter

Thanks - But in all seriousness, AND I know the Magic Bullet stuff is rather beautiful . .. . has anybody come close to doing something similar with Vegas' own home grown FXs AND timed the differences in rendering? Are they that apart? Are the "effects" that better? . .Only a thought . . .

Grazie

Grazie

You should be able to get similar results using the plugins already available in Vegas. Have a look at the film looks plugin from JetDV, he's included a couple of presets that are a mix of video filters to get an idea of how to create your own looks. I do like the magic bullet effects but wish you could tweak them to fit my footage, I think you have to pay to be able to do this. But I'm just as happy being able to get exactly what I want using what's available in Vegas for free.

Martin

but I understood that you can render the file on networked PCs (since the rendering output is a DV-file) but the MPG encoding is done on one (the main) PC. True?

>>> has anybody come close to doing something similar with Vegas' own home grown FXs<<<

Yes I have and you can download it with JetDv's FIlm Look script. I would have thought you would have already gotten this Grazie - yer usually on top of these things. :)

I used the Bistro look recently on a clip shot outdoors on an overcast day. Very flat and plain looking. Bistro brought up the colours and the contrast, but took 7 hours for a 00:02:45 clip on my AMD 1800+ with 768MB DDR.

So, I thought I'd try to recreate it using just Vegas FX. This is what I did:

On the original clip, I upped the brightness by about 6%, then added a saturation filter that boosted the low end (makes sense to a Vegas user).

I also copied the original clip to another track. To this I upped the brightness and contrast until only the brightest points remained. I then added a glow filter to soften it out. I then compositied this track over the original at around 18% opacity

I still need to do some tweaking to get an exact reproduction, but it is damned close. Probably the biggest differences are in the depth of the shadows - Movie Looks make them seem deep but not muddy, and in bring forth some of the fleshtones and facial details.

And the whole thing renders in about 15-20 minutes, including 2-pass VBR to a video stream

filmy, yes you are correct. I do know of, bi=ut have not tried the script - yet! I play with FXs CC and chroma keying plus soften/sharpen black and white and contrast .. and the like. I wanted to hear and have some real world experience thrown into this one. . . and that's exactly what .. . guns1inger has done.

guns1inger - nice work! 15-20 minutes sounds good to me was that on the same 2:45 minute clip? Gotta be better than 7 hours . . least ways ypou get to see it in a toime that you could review and make adjustments.

So what does Magic Bullet give you over and above Home Cooked Vegas FXs chains of separate fxs? And you get to manage the chains as presets .. . plus you get to finely adjust each and every one of the FXs . . Interesting to find out why Sony would "bundle" this with Vegas? Hmmmm... what would be the theory here?

Grazie

It has a name in the industry that is worth being associated with, and adds some percieved value to Vegas over the competition (so long as no-one mentions how slow it is).

To truely recreate the effects that even the cut down version can produce may sometimes take some out of the box thinking. For people on a deadline, or who don't usually play around much with the FX, this might be a viable solution. I can hit one button, and sure it may take 7 hours, but I could also spend that much time playing around try to get an extact copy of the output. The method I used was based on similar techniques I have used to recreate effects like specular bloom for CG footage. Without this previous experience, I probably would not have been able to get as close as I did.

If you don't have time to experiment, it's a great (albeit slow) solution.