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Magic Bullet Looks

Looks Drawer

When you enter the main Looks UI from the ECP, you’ll see your selected clip displayed in the preview window and the Looks Drawer open. However, because you haven’t clicked on a preset yet, the Tool Chain will only show input and output blocks, both of which default to sRGB. (We cover input/output in this guide’s Tool Chain page.) The Tools Drawer is closed at this point to reflect how Looks emphasizes (but does not require) starting the look workflow with a preset.

As with the Tools Drawer, Scopes pane, and Controls pane, you can hide or reveal the Looks Drawer by clicking on the word LOOKS in the bottom-left corner. This will close the drawer and allow the preview window to fill more UI space for easier viewing (see image below). If you mouse-over LOOKS, the Looks Drawer will reopen but then close when you move your pointer away from the UI’s bottom-left corner. Clicking LOOKS will lock the drawer open until you click LOOKS again.

Finding a Look

The Looks Drawer contains over 200 preset looks, and the default view displays all of them in one continuous stream in the drawer. (You can return to this unsorted view by clicking LOOKS at drawer’s left edge, just under MOST RECENT.) It can be a lot to take in, so we recommend a few sorting tricks.

Mouse-Over Previewing

First, you can get a quick glimpse of how a preset appears on your clip by mouse-overing the preset thumbnail. This will outline the thumbnail in white and apply the look on your clip in the preview window. You can also see what tools comprise the look on the Tool Chain, although these will appear grayed out.

Using Folders

You can narrow your preset search by digging into a specific folder, such as Analog Tribe or Modern Romance. To view the contents of multiple folders at once, you can Cmd + click (Mac) or Ctrl + click (Win) to multi-select folders in the Looks Drawer.

Searching Keywords

Next, you’ll notice a search field atop the Looks Drawer. Presets are tagged with searchable keywords, and these include colors and moods. However, there are many more keyword possibilities than there are actual tags, so some searches may come up empty. Fortunately, Looks presets often have creative, memorable names like “Fungus Farm” and “Rubber Seoul.” (Any Beatles fans out there? Anyone?) For instance, if you fancy Fungus Farm, you’ll find it forthwith by feeding “fungus” into this field.

"Favoriting"

You can “favorite” preset looks from any category, including custom folders. To do this, mouse-over a preset’s thumbnail and click the empty star in its top-left corner. The star will then fill with white, indicating its favorited status. The first time you do this, a new Favorites folder will appear atop the list of Looks Drawer folders. All favorited presets are listed here. You can un-favorite a preset at any time by clicking its star icon. If you un-favorite all presets in your Favorites folder, the folder will vanish.

Most Recent

Just below the Favorites folder, you’ll find the Most Recent folder, which contains exactly what you’d expect: thumbnails of all your most recently viewed presets. As with “Most Recent” tools in other applications, this can be a handy shortcut, but casually skimming through presets will fill this folder quickly.

Resave as Custom

This is a bit of a cheat. Magic Bullet Looks lets you save any from-scratch or modified look under a new preset name. These new presets appear in the CUSTOM LOOKS section at the bottom of the Looks Drawer folder list. However, you could select any preset in the Looks Drawer, click the Save Look icon (located at the bottom of the UI as shown below), and give the preset a new name you’ll more easily remember, and you’ll know to find it inside your own custom folder.

Note that you can import Looks presets from other sources (e.g., other machines or other users) by first selecting the Import button ( ) at the top of the Looks Drawer. Then navigate to the wherever the look is selected and import it from there. The look gets stored in the Custom Looks folder.

Managing Custom Looks

Beyond being a shortcut for renaming/regrouping presets, creating custom looks and making them presets is a powerful time-saver for capturing a look with the exact feel you want and having that look available for easy recall later. You can create a custom look by adding or modifying tools within the Tool Chain and then clicking on the Save Look button.

As shown above, the Save Look button will open a dialog prompting you to name your look and choose a destination custom folder. By default, all saved custom looks add to the CUSTOM LOOKS folder. If you select New Folder in the Folder Name drop-down menu, you can create a new custom subfolder with any name you please.

You can also add a new custom folder in the Looks Drawer by clicking the "+" icon next to CUSTOM LOOKS near the bottom of the folders list. You can then drag and drop your custom look presets between folders. If you ever want to rename a custom folder or preset, right-click on it and use the pop-up menu to rename or delete the item

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Where to find Looks Drawer presets

Looks in Magic Bullet Looks are saved as .MBLook files. Knowing what these are and where they reside can be very useful for post-production teams. If someone creates look that could be used by an entire workgroup, that person would want to save the look as a custom preset, access that .MBLook file in the appropriate folder, and then copy/attach it to teammates. Recipients would then take that file and paste it into their own custom presets folder.

To access the custom preset folder, click on the options wheel (just to the left of the Info Bar) and select View Presets Folder... A new window in Finder/Windows Explorer will automatically open and direct you to the custom preset folder.

On the Mac, these preset files reside in two directories. By saving presets to your user library, your look presets are functional in an admin or non-admin user account. The locations are:

For Windows, the locations are:

You can import presets by using the Import Looks Presets button, located immediately to the right of the presets search bar.