Motion Media

Color effects that set the mood for your story

Color sets the mood of your story, from the gritty blue of an action scene to a hot red romance, and Magic Bullet Looks 2 redefines how you design with color. Looks 2 keeps the heart and soul of Looks 1 while upgrading to a more sophisticated interface, streamlined tools, and presets that meet your production needs. Find inspiration for your video or film with powerful new controls like Colorista II grading, Cosmo skin correction and smart scope analysis. Choose from a huge library of professionally designed presets that range from practical lighting scenarios to stylized Hollywood treatments. Looks 2 brings high end color finishing to a project of any budget.

What's New

• A revolutionary interface makes creating and customizing new looks easier and more intuitive
• Reorganized interface is cleaner and more intuitive but keeps the heart of Looks 1
• Over 64 new and updated presets for a total of over 100, all inspired by real-world projects and problems, and tested in commercial projects
• Adds Video Out preview, the #1 requested Looks feature, for an interactive single frame preview
• Includes 6 new tools, including Colorista II tools like 3 Way wheels, Ranged HSL, Pop, Hue/Lightness scope, Hue/Saturation scope
• Makes cosmetic cleanup easy with Cosmo tool for adjusting skin tones and blemishes

Reasons To Buy

• Design a look that can be used throughout post-production, from pre-vis to edit to the final master.
• Our huge library of professionally designed presets will kickstart your project or film
• Share your look with anyone who has Looks 2 in After Effects, FCP, Premiere Pro, Motion, or Looks standalone
• Perform color correction and color treatments in one place with new Colorista II technology
• A flexible upgrade policy lets you upgrade from any version of Looks or Editors at a discount
• Full backward compatibility lets you easily work with Looks 1 and PhotoLooks presets

A creative playground for every artist

With version 2, our Looks is all grown up. We've kept the tools you love, but designed a more elegant interface with features to get your projects humming. Looks 2 fits every artist, from the beginning designer who is inspired by the presets, to the hard core colorist who builds looks from scratch. Use Looks to add warmth to a wedding video shot on a cloudy day or design a palette for the next Sundance original. Bake in some Magic Bullet love and let color bring out your story.

New tools & presets that inspire you

Looks 2 lets you define the style of your video or film, and its new tools and presets open up a realm of creative possibilities. We've added helpful tools from the Magic Bullet family like cosmetic skin cleanup from Cosmo and the 3 Way color wheels from Colorista II. A professionally redesigned library of presets includes over 30 new looks to add artificial lighting, talent cleanup, a documentary feel, or the grit of a crime drama. Looks 2 has more ways to make people and projects look stunning.

Technology & design in perfect harmony

What about satisfying that inner geek? Looks 2 makes your life easier by adding the #1 requested feature, Video Out capability, for an interactive preview on your external device that updates as you work. We enhanced the CPU/GPU handling so it's easier to juggle and render large images. And the complicated Advanced I/O processing of Looks 1 has been replaced with a simpler Gamma processing that runs quickly and more efficiently. With Looks 2, you get more power and speed behind the scenes.

System Requirements

Our tests have shown that Red Giant products perform best when used with the system configurations listed below. Although many of our products will run on older or less-powerful systems, the configurations listed below are the minimum system requirements for which we will provide technical support.

Apple Macintosh

Mac OSX 10.5.8 and later*
Mac Intel
2 GB of RAM
30 MB of Hard Drive space

*Updating from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.5.2 or later will in most cases solve compatibility issues. Please update your operating system before contacting support.

PC / Windows

Windows XP SP1 or later

Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit

Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or faster (or AMD equivalent)
2 GB of RAM
30 MB of Hard Drive space

Host Applications

Magic Bullet Looks runs in a variety of host applications. Each purchase and serial number allows the owner to use the product on more than one host application but only on a single computer at any one time. Except where noted, the features are the same in all systems and host applications.

Adobe After Effects CS5.5, CS5, CS4, CS3
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, CS5
Apple Final Cut Pro 7, 6

Apple Final Cut Express 4
Apple Motion 3.02, 4

Please ensure that the host version is compatible with your operating system. Check with your application provider for specifics.

- Compatible with Host Application version

- Not compatible with Host Application version

Video Cards

Looks 2 will fall back to CPU rendering if there is no GPU or if the graphics card doesn't meet the Looks 2 minimum specs. Looks 2 performance is much better when using a graphics card, and we support a wide variety.

For ATI cards, we recommend ATI 9600 XT or greater, along with an X series card starting with the X700 series. Cards with greater model numbers and at least 128 MB of RAM can run the Looks engine better then CPU alone.

For NVIDIA cards, we support the 6600 model and higher or QuadroFX 1300 and up. Cards with higher model numbers and a minimum of 128 MB of RAM can run Looks. For users working with HD images, we require that the video card have at least 256 MB of RAM. In all cases, we suggest using the latest video drivers for your graphics card.

Please Note: All media is processed at 32 bit. For newer cards from ATI and NVIDIA, we recommend a minimum of 320 MB of RAM. For 2K projects, we recommend 512 MB or a larger amount of RAM on the graphics card.

Rendering

In most cases, the Looks plug-in requires rendering to generate final color-corrected output. With host applications like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, you can use Looks as a real-time color correction effect with the dynamic playback capabilities. With applications such as Apple Motion and Adobe After Effects, rendering is required to generate any output with Looks applied. In general, the faster the graphics card, the faster the rendering of media. NVIDIA cards are generally faster than ATI cards of the same level for HD or HDV projects.

Please Note The maximum render size in Looks is 8192 x 8192, but is dependent on the video card in the system. Most cards will support 2K media (2048 x 1536) rendering, but only the NVIDIA 8800 series cards or Quadro 4600/5600 support 8K output at time of this writing.

Redesigned for work & fun
The Looks 2 interface has been professionally redesigned with a modernized feel and cleaner tool appearance. We kept the essence of what made Looks 1 so great, but created a more polished, intuitive workspace so you can play and play. The new UI gives quick access to tools and presets while keeping clutter down so you get more work done in less time. You'll hardly notice that what you are doing is actually work.

Professional presets get you started fast
A huge library of professionally designed presets are waiting to jumpstart your project. Organized by category, the presets range from setting the mood of an interview or documentary, to practical fixes for lens distortion and lighting problems, to stylized looks inspired by Hollywood movies. Use a preset when you need inspiration or as the starting point for your own custom looks.

Colorista II grading power is here
Looks 2 borrows powerful features from Magic Bullet Colorista II so you can color grade as you design your treatments. The new Colorista 3 Way tool lets you intimately control the shadows, midtones and highlights of an image. Ranged HSL allows you to fine-tune individual colors. Using Looks for color treatments and Colorista for color correction is a heavenly match, and now you can work with them together in one place.

New tools with endless possibilities
Solve problem shots and create unique color effects with bold new tools in Looks 2, many inspired by other Magic Bullet products. Pop applies more visual contrast or smoothing and Cosmo does easy cosmetic cleanup of skin tones and blemishes. (Your older talent will love this!) Create oval selections for film-like vignettes; fix lens problems like barrel or pincushion distortion; mimic flares and stylize light leaks... the possibilities are endless.

Awesome scopes for color analysis
Four handy new scopes analyze the distribution of color in your image. Hue/Lightness makes sure your colors aren't too bright and Hue/Saturation checks the saturation and color harmony. Memory Colors confirm that key signature colors are on target, while Skin Scope displays a helpful skin recognition overlay. Together with RGB Parade and Slice Graph from Looks 1, you get serious awesomeness for color analysis.

Shout out to Video Out
Video Mirroring was the #1 requested feature for Looks and we heard you loud & clear! Now you can do a single frame preview to a Video Out device on an almost-interactive basis. We have added direct hardware support for AJA and Black Magic cards on Mac and Windows, and QuickTime Video Out is also supported on Mac for potentially any card.

Work where & how you want to
Looks 2 lets you refine and create looks anywhere, regardless of on-set conditions or where you are working. The looks you pre-visualize on set can be the ones you finish with in the editorial suite. Move your look fluidly between the Looks standalone app and Look plug-ins for popular editing applications like After Effects and Final Cut Pro. You can even open a preset in PhotoLooks, its sister Photoshop product.

Improved speed, size & resolution
Looks has improved its ability to handle larger formats and has done background work to get things rendering faster. Looks 2 can process SD, HD, 2K and 4K images on standard hardware, or up to 8K x 8K pixels with the latest NVIDIA GPU's. If you run out of video RAM for GPU rendering, use its CPU switch to handle larger files and improve render speed.

Full compatibility with Looks 1
You will be amazed with the ease of transitioning to Looks 2 from Looks 1. Continue to work with your Looks 1 projects and any of your customized presets. Don't worry about losing previous work as you enter a whole new world with Looks 2.