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Useful Tools for DSLR Shooters: Magic Bullet Grinder

By Scott Simmons   /   Jun 1, 2010
Red Giant Software has released an affordable, very easy-to-use utility geared toward the DSLR shooter called Magic Bullet Grinder. Its purpose in life is simple and straightforward: transcode your clips from the relatively post-unfriendly native H.264 codec into something more usable. It’s geared mainly at Final Cut Pro users, since ProRes is the main choice for output. For the non-FCP users out there, you also get a PhotoJPEG option. In addition to the transcode you can also assign new timecode based on a user setting, conform the frame rate to 23.976 (handy when making slow motion from those 720 59.94 files), as well as transcode a lower-resolution offline version of the clip. You can get a bit more info on Grinder at the ProLost blog as well as check out a piece I wrote after testing a near final release version of the software. It’s quite simple to use and the startup window tells the user just how it works: There’s really no simpler way to convert DSLR footage for edit than that. This is only version 1.0, so let’s hope it only gets better. Best of all, it’s completely affordable at $49. There’s also a free demo available.

13 Comments

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  • Zak Ray

    Hey Scott, don’t know if it’s a bug with all of Studio Daily or not, but just thought you oughta know there’s something wrong with your RSS feed. According to it, this article is called “Cheap Prozac Online Cheap”.

    Anywho, nice article, though like you said on PVC, I’m not sure it’s necessary for someone with Compressor.

    • http://www.scottsimmons.tv Scott Simmons

      @zak I didn’t see that Prozac heading in my rss feed … interesting. I’ll keep an eye out, thanks for the info.

  • Nitin

    Well, there are a lot of free opensource tools which have been doing these for ages. to name the most used ones are mpeg Stream clip and avidemux

  • Mark

    Why not just use log and transfer in FCP? Already built in so no import is necessary…and it’s free.

  • Alex Dunn

    What does this do that MPEGStreamclip doesn’t do?

    • http://www.scottsimmons.tv Scott Simmons

      @Mark @Alex all valid workflows, Grinder just offers another option. It doesn’t require FCP as does the Log and Transfer plug-in, and can do a few things more simply than Streamclip. May not be better or worse, just another option is all.

  • http://rv-films.com Francisco

    Interesting… I am actually just starting editorial on a feature length doc shot on the 5D, and because of the large volume of production material we’re indeed doing an offline/online workflow from cutting through conform/DI. With compressor/fcp, matchback for such a scenario is not entirely streamlined for 5D material, though it’s certainly do-able with attention to detail as far as file naming/management. Wasn’t clear from the post or the review, so my question is does this new app tackle some of the offline/online matchback chores, say for a prores 422-hq upres back from the h264 original from a locked pro res proxy sequence?

    Thx!

    • http://www.scottsimmons.tv Scott Simmons

      @Fransicso – I don’t think it does anything more than you could do with Compressor, you just get an easy way to make those proxy files as well as a resize. Grinder give the proxy clips a unique name to recognized them as proxy so you’d probably have to batch change the names to match.

  • Les Fitzpatrick

    I don’t know about that Prozac thing but reading the feed made me quite calm for some reason.

  • http://rv-films.com Francisco

    @ Scott – Yah looks like it’s the same as compressor, and that it can only handle a batch at a time to a single destination file path which is a bummer. Would’ve been great if they could transcode to a proxy and somehow embed some kind of metadata to match back to h264 for upres on locked cut vs. transoding a high res AND proxy version (actually requires MORE hd space thereby defeating much of the advantages of offline/proxy editing on long form projects).
    Thanks!

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  • wilson

    What does this do that Compressor doesn’t? I’m not sure I need yet another piece of software that does a task that is already built into FCS.