What is Magic Bullet Colorista II?

Magic Bullet Colorista II brings the power of high-end color systems directly to your desktop. You get a revolutionary new system for professional color correction inside your favorite editing applications. Colorista in Spanish means 'painting', and our hope is that this tool lets you paint the right colors for your video or film footage.

Colorista II is designed to make color correction straight-forward and fast, with tools that let you dial in subtle changes and generate the proper output. Its easy-to-use interface is equally good for quick adjustments on a deadline or finessing your footage without limitations.

Colorista is very much like a high-end color correction system and uses a similar color engine to produce natural-looking results. Colorista’s system can augment or replace color correction tools that are built into host applications like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. It offers a true Lift/Gamma/Gain correction system and both a mask and keyer isolation tools that are not available in the native color correction tools. Whether you are a color expert or an aspiring colorist, Colorista II will redefine how filmmakers everywhere do color grading.

 

 

Three powerful stages for correction

You will find a multitude of tools to correct and fine tune images with three stages of color correction: Primary, Secondary and Master. The concept behind our new 3-Stage system in Colorista II is this: More often than not, stacking multiple layers is necessary for a professional level of color correction. It's extremely handy to be able to contain all of the color correction from one shot inside one plugin. Instead of doing multiple color correction passes, which is time consuming and requires many layers, your entire color treatment can often be done with a single instance of Colorista II.


The three stages are:

 

 

An incredible upgrade from Colorista 1

If you are already familiar with Colorista 1, our original release of this product, then you are in for a treat. You will truly appreciate the new features and power of Colorista II, since it is almost a completely different product than Colorista 1.

To create multiple levels of color correction in Colorista 1, you had to add multiple instances of the plugin to your footage layer. This was effective but cumbersome. Colorista II is built around an incredible three stage system that replaces the default need for multiple layers and passes.

More features include: A powerful new Keyer that allows you to adjust individual colors or ranges of colors. A new HSL picker lets you change Hue, Saturation and Luminance across nine color ranges. Two Power Masks (instead of one) to qualify an area for a specific color change. We replaced White Balance with an Auto-Balance that does both black and white balancing with one click. RGB Curves for film-like contrast adjustments. A Pop slider for more visual sharpness or, conversely, smoothing out skin. Choice of GPU or CPU acceleration, and much much more.

Technical Note: A project using Colorista 1 will not open in Colorista II. This is because the Colorista II controls are so radically improved and different. We will provide support for your use of Colorista 1 so the product remains operational and useful.

 

 

Float-based Imaging

Underlying the Colorista II engine are sophisticated color-correction algorithms that are similar to those used on big-budget productions. The underlying model uses floating-point calculations for all functions, and Colorista is built for absolute best quality output no matter what format the footage is stored in. What this means in practical terms is that the engine always upconverts any incoming image to floating point representation, offering much more precision than color tools that only offer 8-bit-per-channel quality.

We support the highest bit depth possible — 32-bit floating point per channel. For projects that run in standard 8 bit or 10 bit mode, Colorista automatically and transparently upconverts the video to floating point format, performs all calculations with the highest precision and then returns the video to the import format. This guarantees the highest fidelity for your final output. This is exactly the way that high-end color systems from Discreet, Apple, Da Vinci and other purpose-built systems operate.

Workflow Note: The Colorista controls may sometimes react slowly, but for a very good reason. Unlike most color correction software, Colorista II is giving a real-time preview when you make a change. Every time you scrub a number or move a color dot, you get real-time update of its effects in the Preview Window of your host application. All the pixels for that operation are recalculated and all the operations above it are recalculated as well for a very accurate update. Of course, you can preview and work faster if your resolution is set to half or lower.

 

 

GPU accelerated and CPU supported

As with other Magic Bullet tools, the whole set of Colorista II controls works in floating point color and uses the GPU to accelerate playback AND final rendering of results. This functionality greatly speeds the output process. For users who are working with larger than 4K plates for IMAX output or need to use a CPU-based render farm, a simple CPU switch will use multiple cores on the CPU to render final images. This is ideal for a single workstation or a giant render farm.

For all users, a Render engine flexibility means that you can use the tool wherever and whenever you want. High-end GPU-equipped workstations will provide the best render speed but even users running on laptops or CPU-only render farms can use Colorista II with confidence.