Hey folks – today Red Giant released Magic Bullet Arsenal – a new kick-ass Portfolio app for the iPad. Arsenal is a mobile, connected portfolio for showing and sharing your creative work. Arsenal makes it easy to create rich, customized portfolios of the images and movies on your iPad, on Dropbox, or FTP—and share them with anyone. Get Arsenal at the iTunes Store for just $4.99.

Here’s a A quick overview on using Magic Bullet Arsenal to create and share your portfolios:

Get Arsenal HERE.

And for those of you that prefer to read about it, here’s that fun marketing stuff that tell you all about it:

For any professional who uses photos and video to communicate, Magic Bullet Arsenal is an iPad app that creates and shares creative work. Unlike other portfolio apps, Arsenal can show a simple, gorgeous presentation on an iPad, and then share that Arsenal Collection with built-in options for Dropbox, FTP or email. Arsenal is more than a localized portfolio, as it seamlessly syncs Collections with folders in the cloud, and a free Arsenal Reader app lets anyone view the Collections. While other iPad apps are a way to bring assets together, Arsenal connects your creative work to clients and colleagues.

Learn more HERE.

Well… it happened. Plot Device won the Webby for best editing.

I’ll keep this short, because we are all, honestly, stunned. Not that we didn’t think that director Seth Worley’s fantastic cutting/storytelling wasn’t worthy of an award, but when you go up against the kind of competition we had, you kind of just say “It’s nice to be nominated” so you can sleep at night.

The team at Red Giant is ridiculously proud of Seth and his crew (a crew I consider myself lucky to have been a part of). But, frankly, even without the award, we were already proud. We know Seth is an amazing storyteller, and he works with some of the best and reliable people you’ll find anywhere. This morning he sent an email to the team, and I thought I’d share a few of his words:

“This project was fortunate to have some of the most talented, hard working, and gracious people I know working on it. Those kinds of projects are special, and don’t come along every time. Thank you for your work.  know you’re going to roll your eyes at this, but I don’t care: congratulations on this cool award. We made a really cool thing together and we’re blessed to get to see the outside world appreciate it and derive joy from it.”

I could not have said it better myself. One thing is for sure – we are not resting on our laurels. We’re near completion on a new film, and in fact, the night of the Webby’s, Seth, Neil and I will actually be away filming something new in Portland.

Thank you all for your support. Stay tuned.

Hey folks – yesterday Adobe announced CS6, and committed to a release within 30 days. So now you’re thinking, “I’d love to get on board, but what about my plug-ins? I can’t MoGraph without Trapcode! I can’t cut without Magic Bullet!”

Well, if you’re ready to jump on CS6, I’ve got good news. 3 pieces of good news, actually:

1. Red Giant Products will be CS6 compatible on the day of the CS6 launch.
2. All current CS5 & CS5.5 compatible products will be updated to CS6.
3. All CS6 updates will be FREE for existing users (so if you already own the product, or want to buy it now, you’re covered).

Yeah, we got your back.

Learn more about how we’re here for you by checking out our unmatched Red Pledge.

Here’s a brief Recap of some of what we showed at NAB: Magic Bullet Arsenal and Knoll Light Factory 3. Neither is available yet, but will be soon.

Not to worry – If you buy the current version of Knoll Light Factory now, you are eligible for a free upgrade to 3.0 when it comes out.

More info coming soon.

Well, that was fun! As you may have seen already, a recent update to FCPX ended up causing a bug with Previews in Magic Bullet Looks 2.0. We jumped right on getting a fix in place and are happy to say that the fix is ready to go! So, go ahead and update FCPX, update Looks to the latest (2.0.7) and you’re good to go.

Many thanks to the team over at Apple for helping us out on this one!

To get the update, either use the Red Giant Link updater already on your system or you can download the latest installer here.

We didn’t want to hold back a couple of other fixes we had in the pipeline so the full details on this Magic Bullet update include:

• Looks 2.0.7 fixes the Preview issue (image inversion and/or doubling) when used after updating to FCPX 10.0.4.
• It also fixes “hands on” mode in the Magic Bullet Looks application on OSX.
• Sony Vegas users will also notice we have fixed the issue with Looks not respecting the “assume Linear Gamma” setting.
• In all host apps, the Hue/Saturation tool is now available in the Subject category as it was meant to be!
• In other Magic Bullet news, we also took a look at Grinder and fixed the issue many users have reported where Grinder would crash on launch on OSX 10.5.8 (Leopard) systems.

Enjoy, and thanks for your patience while we fixed this up!

IMPORTANT: The new FCPX 10.0.4 update breaks the preview functionality for Magic Bullet Looks & some other non Red Giant plug-ins.

Do NOT update IF YOU ARE USING LOOKS. If you have already updated, we currently don’t know of any way to roll it back to a previous version. Here’s some more info:

In the latest release of FCPX, Apple fixed a bug  in FCPX 10.0.4 that makes it clearer to plugins about the orientation of the video. However, because of this bug fix, you’re now seeing a flipped image in Magic Bullet Looks. Here’s why:

We already knew about the issue  a long time ago. To make sure you never experienced any problem, we put work-around for the bug in MB Looks. So you never saw the issue, because we already had it covered. However, the work around we created isn’t compatible with the latest bug fix from Apple, so it ends up causing a flipped image.

Here’s the  good news:

• We’re on it and will fix it ASAP
• It does not affect renders, it’s only in the preview.

Again, our recommendation, for now, is that you do not update to 10.0.4 – if you are using Looks. As soon as we have a fix, we’ll let you know.

There are days you wake up and know it’s going to be a good day.  And then there are days where life really surprises you. Today was one of the latter.

This morning we found out that Plot Device, a short film we helped bring to life, was nominated for a Webby Award. I’m not going to lie to you… It’s a big fricken deal. The Webby’s are basically the Academy Awards for Internet content. And while it’s my nature to be humbled by recognition like this, I’m not really comfortable even saying that, because, in reality, this award isn’t really about Red Giant. It’s not for us to be humbled. But we are proud…and extremely excited.

The nomination is for Best Editing – something that can be attributed entirely to Seth Worley, the film’s director.  Seth is an amazing storyteller and, while the nomination is a surprise, the fact that a storyteller as talented as Seth is being recognized for his ability to tell a great story, is not.

Also – I know I said that we’re not feeling humble, but I totally lied. Me and the rest of the folks at Red Giant are actually quite humbled at this moment – Humbled and honored that a film we helped create is considered notable among the fantastic content being produced by the community of visual artists, for whom we work so hard to support.

It’s one thing to make software that your customers love and use in telling their stories. But it’s a whole other thing to tell those same creative people a story and have it pass muster. We’re totally floored by the reaction you’ve had to Plot Device.

I’m not a fan of telling people to rock the vote, and I’m even less a fan of when people email, asking me to vote for a creation in a contest without even considering that there may be someone who is truly more worthy of the win. But if you believe in the importance of acknowledging great work, then head over to the Webby Awards and check out all of the nominations. If, after that, you think Seth deserves the award, great – vote for Plot Device. If not – vote for someone else that worked hard and deserves the recognition that editors so often don’t get.

In the meantime, you can watch Plot Device right here:

Hi Folks -

At the end of last year, we removed Magic Bullet Denoiser from our website, discontinuing version 1 from our product line. At that time, we promised we would release a new version of Denoiser that would be more stable and free to current users of Denoiser 1. And as of today, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Magic Bullet Denoiser II is here!

Here are the quick points:

• We’ve developed Magic Bullet Denoiser II from scratch (completely new code) to bring you the quality of Denoiser 1, but with more stability. Red Giant owns this code 100% – which means the product is not going anywhere.
• We have spent lots of time developing the default settings for Denoiser II to give you the best possible look as soon as you apply. There’s is always room to tweak setting, but often you won’t need to.
• Currently Denoiser II is only available for After Effects, but it will support multiple host apps in the future (read THIS FAQ for more info).
• Denoiser II is a Free Update for all Denoiser 1 and Magic Bullet Suite users. I repeat: If you already owned a license of Denoiser or bought the Magic Bullet Suite after Denoiser was discontinued, you get Denoiser II for FREE.

If, as described above, you’re entitled to a free update to Denoiser II, you can grab it by downloading the latest Magic Bullet Suite Installer. If Denoiser is new to you, you can get it HERE.

Here’s the FAQ full of great info on the Denoiser II update that should answer any and all of your questions.

As always, we’re committed to giving you the best software, the best user experience, and the best support in the industry. We’re always listening to your questions and concerns and will always be here for you. Reach out to us if you need help.

Special thanks to T. J. Baurain and Joe Pollock for filming the vast majority of the clips in the above video. Other clip credits include:

• Vincent Laforet & Stu Maschwitz (Nocturne)
• Eric Escobar
• Seth Worley (Plot Device)

Last week, I was a guest on Digital Production Buzz with Larry Jordan & Mike Horton where I talked about my job as Director of Communities, our Red Pledge Guarantee, Looks for FCPX, and why you folks (the community of filmmakers, editors, VFX and MoGraph artists) are the most important thing about what we do as a company. If you missed it, you can hear my 7-minute interview right HERE.

Or if you have an hour to spare, you can listen to the whole show HERE.