Color Grading Plugins

Thinking about buying Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks at the discounted price before tomorrow. Also I keep talking myself out of buying FX Factory Pro for $399. Any thoughts on either? I can't find very many reviews. Worst case i guess Looks has a 30 day money back guarantee, I just figure manually i could get most of the color grading done even though it will take more time. Thanks and I LOVE this site. (i'm new)

I bought the Looks 2 yesterday. I think it's a great coloring tool and has some decent presets. There may be a slight bug with it when used within fcpx 10.0.3 according to what I've been reading on their website, but Red Giant will address it, I'm sure. It works outstanding as a standalone application for stills and within fcpx on your video (places a control icon in your video frame that takes you to the application). I tried the icon on video method a couple times and once it did crash fcpx.

I was considering the FX factory pro but did not buy it. I did purchase a few effects and transitions within the FX factory group and so far have been pretty satisfied.

I'm using both, and Magic Bullet Looks is way better. It has more tools, much better UI, everything is easily accessible, and fast. FxFactory is like a bag of tools from a thousand people, some effects are good, others are bad, you constantly have to search for the desired effect and there are a bunch that you'll never use and they will only clutter your effects browser. And the main problem is that every one of them are much slower to preview or render than default effects or MBL.

I've been pretty happy with some of the FX Factory stand alone plug-ins but never got the whole kit—personal taste. I did purchase the Magic Bullet Looks 2 at the 50% off price and look forward to working with it.

Here's a question for those with MBL2 experience. In terms of workflow, should I go through my shots and color CORRECT in FCPX first and then jump in to MB to GRADE? Or just go right into MB first and do it all in MB? Normally, I start with exposure/vectorscope but the work flow in MB is different. Advice here appreciated.

Well, a lot of people will answer this question differently according to their experience and preference. I would simply do the color grading in MBL2 and that is now what I do. Sometimes I expect I would still use the color board for simple adjustments, but I can't see a compelling reason to use both methods on a clip. Just my opinion.

Hi Guru,

Sorry to hear you are unhappy with the FxFactory platform.

When comparing FxFactory to Magic Bullet Looks (which is an amazing product) it is important to note:

- Magic Bullet Looks is one color correction product made by one company.

- FxFactory is a platform for visual effects products. A little bit like the App Store, you can get very different types of products from different developers. Products cover everything from titling, transitions, keying, stylization, stereoscopic 3d workflow solutions, color correction, theme generators etc... When it comes to one category: Color correction, there are a bunch of different, separate FxFactory based products that tackle that topic. To name a few:

1. Yanobox Moods
2. Nattress Levels and Curves
3. PHYX Color
4. and a bunch of gems inside FxFactory Pro

Please note that you can easily activate/deactivate the individual products so that only the effects you want show up inside your host applications.  See the following tutorial:

I'm experiencing VERY long render times with Looks, running a brand new iMac with 16 gigs of RAM. Looks like it's not uncommon on some other platforms, didn't know if FCP X was plagued by this also.

Looks should run fine with your iMac and render times should not be very long based on what you have. My suspicion is that you may have other tasks running or otherwise may have additional projects and events open forcing fcpx to exhaust its' resources.

On a reasonably sized clip of 1 to 2 minutes, any applied Looks2 effect I have tried renders extremely quick. Something else is going on.

I decided to get MB Looks today; the discount code is still active BTW.

Seems like a pretty intuitive piece of software, and is working well with FCPX.

Probably FX Factory would be next on the list; but I was under the impression that not all of it is FCPX compatible (yet)?

FX Factory is free, and gives you access to all the plugins they sell, from a dozen different developers. With the FX Factory app you can turn on/off the various modules, most of which have trial versions, and can purchase and register them directly from in the app.

FX Factory Pro costs money, and is only necessary if you want to develop your own plugins.

I have to say, the Pigment collection from CoreMelt is very, very awesome to have, also, as is PHYX Cleaner are two that FCP X users need to seriously look at.