It's an obvious fact, but digital video is exactly that - digital. You won't get those charming projection artifacts, splotches or subtle grain, just crisp featureless video. If you're unlucky, "damage" in digital video will appear as ugly compression artifacts distorting and rendering the video unplayable. The film damage effects of Magic Bullet lets you damage your digital video by introducing the kind of misfires associated with film.
Once installed, Magic Bullet displays under video effects in Adobe Premiere Pro. From here you can drag and drop the various MisFire effects to clips on your timeline:
These self explanatory effects add more varieties of film damage than I'd thought possible! Incidentally, registered users of Premiere 1.5 may recognise the highlighted Movie Looks effect shipped with Premiere 1.5 - more on these Movie Looks later!
You can either combine the separate effects as necessary, or simply add the top MisFire effect for the full monty! It's difficult to demonstrate the film damage effects with images, but below are screenshots of a few examples used on that ubiquitous wedding ceremony scene:
this is our standard clip with no effect
the grain effect adds that old stock effect
.. and the vignette is the final effect that shows on static shots where the tone fades towards the corners.
Once you've chosen your effect(s), and dropped them onto your clip(s) on the timeline, each one can be fully customised and keyframed in the effects tab to achieve varying degrees of damage:
If you're not fussy and want a quick stock effect, simply drop the top MisFire effect onto you clips to apply all the separate effects. Again, each effect can then be individually tailored to suite and the options available for each effect are exhaustive (ranging from the obvious such as the number of scratches, right down to their colour). I've encoded the different effects for you to preview:
