Magic Bullet Suite: Red Giant Software develops a suite of solutions for customizing video.

I was a longtime subscriber to the belief that film is film, video is video, and you can't make video look like film. That changed the day I met Magic Bullet Suite. The program provides a creative environment in which to customize footage for output to DVD, TV, or film. To accomplish this, Magic Bullet Suite offers a series of tools through an accessible and intuitive front end that, in turn, is accessed via Adobe After Effects Version 5.5 or above.

Magic Bullet Suite includes five tools: Magic Bullet, Looks Suite, Opticals, Letterbox, and Broadcast Spec. Together, these tools enable you to take original high-quality DV footage and de-interlace (remove the "jaggies" in interlaced footage) and deartifact (smooth out imperfections in digital video), convert to 24 frames per second, apply creative looks, prep for a film-recording facility, and ensure compliance with industry standards for broadcast TV.

Magic Bullet is designed to convert interlaced footage to 24p, as well as to de-interlace and de-artifact--all of which it does extremely well. While in After Effects, you open a New Project and import footage. Then open the Interpret Footage window, deselect Separate Fields, and make sure your aspect ratio is set correctly. Next, drag your project to Create Comp, open the Settings window, and change the frame rate to 23.976. Then, in the Effect tab, select Magic Bullet.

At this point, you'll be presented a popup window with an Auto Set-up button. When selected, the button will check and verify your comp settings and confirm that you are configured to convert the footage. Next, you're presented with the options to de-interlace, where you'll have control over Field Order (upper or lower first), Motion Detection Adjustments, and Detail Pattern Size. Here, you'll also choose whether to de-artifact. Add your project to the Render Cue, check your settings, click Render, and be prepared to wait.

A 20-minute test file being converted to 24p with De-interlace and De-artifact selected would take nearly 11 hours to process on a 2.26GHZ Pentium 4 system with 768MB of PC800 RDRAM. If you're not going to convert to 24p and only want to de-interlace and de-artifact, you can expect much faster performance. De-interlacing and de-artifacting the same test file, without converting, cut the render time to four hours. If you're just looking to de-interlace or de-artifact, less expensive solutions will provide ...