We have tried unsuccessfully to write an 8 min video. Used MB Looks for large portion of the video. Batch monitor indicates about 5 hours to write, which seem like alot of time for an 8 min SD video. We are trying to write a web video at 800kbs. We are operating a Mac G5 Power PC with a total of 2.5 GB Ram. The card is a GeForce 6600 and the VRAM is 256MB. The host application is FCP 5.1.4. Is this a RAM issue? FCP stalls out at about 45% of the write.

Appreciate any help...need to get this video out.
Thanks,
John

I know, MB takes forever to render. I do it with uncompressed hdv and it takes awhile and I have a mac pro. Why your computer stalls though could maybe due to it wanting to go to sleep or something. How long did you wait till you decided it had stopped?

Hi there

Yes I've found that as with all rendering and encoding you must deactivate any form of screen saver or sleep function, or you'll just end up having to start the render again.

Also you need enough hard drive space for the render to take place... I've had renders stall when it's used up all the available hard drive space for the temp rendering files... After Effects and especially MB seems to use huge amounts of HD space. I find the 'Looks' render out much faster than the Deinterlace that does take for ever.

Finally to make the projects more manageable I tend to add the effects to small sequences at a time. For an 8 minute clip I'd usually divide it up into 30 second chunks. Once all the MB effects have been applied I usually reimport the sequences into PPro and render out the project for encoding. For DVD's etc I usually downscale the HDV footage in After Effects at the same time as I apply the 'Look'.

Regards
Gareth

I will try turning off the sleep mode to see if that works. It would process for a couple hours and then stop responding. It just seems like over 4 hours for SD footage is a lot of time. Maybe I need to beef up the RAM.

Thanks,
John

MB benefits of a good graphic card. If you take a look at their recommendation, you will see that realtime is possible with some Nvidia or ATI cards.

I have an Nvidia 6600 series card.

Compressor still stalls out at about 48%....we ran it through as a quicktime movie and it took about 15 min but the file size is huge...too big for web delivery. Not sure why compressor cant complete the task. ????

That 15 min render time seems a lot more reasonable—seems like maybe your problem lies more with compressor than with MB Looks, or maybe there's some weird way that they don't play nice together that we didn't discover during the beta. Have you contacted Red Giant about this problem?

-Stu

I contacted Red Giant a few days ago and no word yet from them.
Thanks,
John

I'd love to read an instruction manual on the new Magic Bullet Looks application. Is one available to download online, or can someone post it? I couldn't find anything on the Red Giant website.

The manual comes with the software purchase as part of the installation software. I can't figure out a way to copy and post it. It is in html format.

Thanks to John K at Redgiant Software for his quick response today. Here is what he suggested and it worked. Exporting the project from FCP into Compressor created the issue. We created an external project file and closed FCP and imported the external project file directly into Compressor. It took about 20-30min to compress the 8 min video but it was very heavy with MB use, primarily some film effects.

Thanks John for your attention to this today.

John

I just rendered an 8 minute video, it took roughly 4 hours.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-gk__0-xptU

Anyone want to take a look.

It was shot on a really crappy JVC Everio (to get a documentary look).

Yeah, it does take forever when rendering any video with MB looks applied. Anyway I like to render as I go, as I get done with a days work, (few min) I just render that, then I'm ready for the next day. If time is really a problem just do it over night, should be ready in the morning for you. Just my two cents... Nice video "the cellar" by the way, how did you achieve the film look?

Magic bullet takes a long time yes, but try Andrew Kramers Film Magic Pro, its like magic bullet but renders way faster

I just rendered an 8 minute video, it took roughly 4 hours.

YouTube - The Cellar short film (http://youtube.com/watch?v=-gk__0-xptU)

Anyone want to take a look.

It was shot on a really crappy JVC Everio (to get a documentary look).

You could have probably just color corrected in your editing program to get that look -- it definitely would have taken less time!

You could have probably just color corrected in your editing program to get that look -- it definitely would have taken less time!

Only if you know how to recreate the MBL setting in your NLE. Without knowing what MBL does it's hard to duplicate. That's why I might actually drop a large chunk of change on it.

It's all a price/prize equation. It's like with plumbers, if I knew how to do it I wouldn't have to hire one. Oh, wait. >Google>What MBL actually does...

Could very be the Card, MB utilizes the ram on the card and not the computer, I have 512 ram on my card. don't think its enough for alot of MB on a long clip. Ram cannot refresh unless you reboot or have one of those utilities which refreshes your ram, won't work on card. MB redgiant is helpful when you email or call. In my opinion 2 gigs is not even enough anymore in a computer, need 4, You could render into smaller clips in maybe an avi uncompressed, then put the clips together and render out the movie. it might work because MB should have resolved itself and now its just an avi clip. MB sucks power, I can't even use the stand alone for photos, its crashes my computer.

According to Magic Bullet manual if you are using a machine with good specs a complex render could take over 3x the project time. An extremely complex render (only need to have a few effects applied) can take much longer than that. That is why I prefer to use Looks in After Effects because it is easier to apply and look at and modify then do your final render upon output. In Premiere Pro I would have to render each clip to play back and see how she looks. Much more time consuming.

Vitascene from ProDad is another similar system that seems to render more quickly than MB.

I bought Magic Bullet as well and yes the render times are pretty ridiculous. I have a top of the line built PC as well. I had a 20min family Christmas video I did. When I went to output it, it said that it would take 6+hrs to export for 720p. I then downloaded Cineforms Prospect HD trial. I used the First Light program that came with it. I was able to reproduce a style that look similar to the Matrix and Arthur which has a greenish cast to the movie. By using First Light combined with Premiere CS4, I was able to view the change in real time and not have to render out in Premiere. Major plus. When I went to export the 20min movie again in 720p resolution again, it said that it would take about 1hr 20mins. Much less export time. If you are able to recreate the "looks" of MB, in First Light, I highly recommend this method. I now regret purchasing the MB software.

It's definitely hardware dependent. I'm running a fairly new machine that I built with an Intel i7 920 CPU, 12 Gb RAM and a 1Gb Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 video card. I can render just about anything in 2-3x the video length. The only thing that takes a long time is if you add film grain but I've found that any system that introduces film grain takes a real long time to render. Fortunately I don't do much with film grain though.

It's definitely hardware dependent. I'm running a fairly new machine that I built with an Intel i7 920 CPU, 12 Gb RAM and a 1Gb Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 video card. I can render just about anything in 2-3x the video length. The only thing that takes a long time is if you add film grain but I've found that any system that introduces film grain takes a real long time to render. Fortunately I don't do much with film grain though.

I too have the same setup as you; i7 920, 12GB RAM and a 1GB HD4870 ATI. for a 5 mins clips mixed with 5DM2 (after Neoscene) and EX1 (1080i) footage, applying the MB 'bufflao' look, it took me 4 crazy hours to render to 720P. During the render, I observed MB look is not making use of the multi thead, only single core of the CPU was utilized and not even 100%

Mine takes an age too, in CS4. Kept crashing on me too half way through. The way I had to do it in the end was to export pieces of a 4 minute film and re-create the file together afterwards.

I think it is a graphics processor issue. I was trying to render with magic bullet before when I had a 256mb graphics card - it takes forever. then I bought a 1Gb gp, and it cut the render time to approx 60%.

I've been having trouble with magic bullet looks as well... I think Windows 7 is the issue.

Clips stop rendering after 30 minutes of rendering time or so...

I have an inminent deadline so I said "screw this", took away the MBL effect and tried to achieve it with the CS4 effects. I was very surprised when I was able to recreate almost exactly the same look using only Levels and Lightning Effects.

Obviously in this case my footage just needed some minor touchs, but it's important to remember that sometimes we get to used to an apparently easy solution, that in some cases might not be the more efficient one...

Hi all,

I'm using MBL on wedding videos. An 8 minute sequence in Premiere Pro CS5 (Vista 64) will typically take 4 hours to export 1080i to 1080p. That's using the 'warm spot focus' preset on every clip in the timeline for example.

I'm running an Intel i7 950 @ 3.2GHz with 12 Gig RAM and a nVidia 470GTX with 1.5 Gig RAM onboard.

I think that's just the way it is - MBL takes an age. :-( It doesn't take advantage of the nVidia horsepower. It doesn't use all the RAM and it sure doesn't use all the cores. So, you can imagine how long this lot took to render:

Carillon Video: Professional Videographer for wedding videos (http://www.carillonvideo.co.uk/folio_johnston.php)


Regards,

Andrew.
Professional Wedding Videographer and Wedding Video Production Services in Bolton, Manchester and all over the UK (http://www.carillonvideo.co.uk)

Do u guys think like me that the OLD MAGIC BULLET editors were pretty more quicker in render tie that nowadays MB LOOKS?
I think so.....

Interesting.

MB Looks is a real-time effect for me in Avid. I do my looks, sometimes up to 10 effects, go back to my editor, and hit play. Plays right out. Render times don't seen extended beyond the normal either. I am using Win7 Pro on a Dell 8 core (8GB RAM) with a Quadro FX4800.