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Magic 2.2 released

Latest information from the Magic development team.
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Magic
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Magic 2.2 released

Post by Magic »

Hi everyone, I hope you are doing well. I'm pleased to announce that Magic v2.2 is now available, with some significant new features:

New search-by-name popup box for adding modules. It's in all the context menus for adding/inserting/replacing modules, under the "Search..." option. Perhaps more importantly, it can be accessed with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+A, which will either add a module or insert a module depending on the mouse position (whether or not you are hovering over a connector). When the search box is displayed, you can just start typing, and it will show all the modules that contain the text you entered, even if the text matches the middle of the name and not the beginning. When you see the results, you can scroll the list by using the up/down arrow keys or hovering the mouse over the top/bottom arrows, and then pressing Enter or clicking the one you want.

Redesigned and improved Export Movie engine. It supports more formats, has improved video/audio quality, allows higher resolutions, and is faster. New formats include Apple ProRes, Motion JPEG, and an optional x264 upgrade (the best H.264 encoder available; see note below). We will also be adding more formats in the future.

New source for modules, "Internals". This provides access to fixed internal values, such as project width/height, current audio/MIDI playback time (in seconds), current frame rate, current playlist #, etc. In particular, the current playback time should be a really valuable tool for doing things that synchronize precisely with the playback.

New Preview Window functionality that lets you preview at specific module(s) in a scene. You can select one or more modules, and then either choose the option "Preview Here" in the module's menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/Cmd+H, and only the modules you selected (and their inputs) will be rendered -- not the whole scene. This should be a really useful way to inspect/diagnose a part of a scene without going through and disabling/bypassing all the other modules. When a module is being previewed, a "P" icon will appear in the title bar.

Spout has been updated to the latest version, which should fix some bugs and improve performance. There is also a new "no-alpha" option for both Spout and Syphon.

A few important fixes for the following bugs:
- Incorrect first frame on some movie exports
- Long module chains (>32) not working properly
- Duplicate Post-processing in child scene modules
- Module menus not being displayed in the correct order on some computers
- Module next/previous replace command not working in the correct order
- Modifier MIDI Learn causes crash when source not already added
- Occasional crashes when rewinding in the VideoFile module
- Incorrect alignment on some Mac video capture devices
- A couple compatibility issues with macOS Mojave


Download it here: https://magicmusicvisuals.com/getfullversion

I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to post in the General Discussion forum if you encounter any issues, or if you have any questions/feedback about 2.2.

Thanks very much,
Eric
Magic
Site Admin
Posts: 3440
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:28 pm

Re: Magic 2.2 released

Post by Magic »

p.s., Just a quick note on x264 -- because we have to pay a significant per-unit licensing fee for it, we can't offer it to existing users for free. Therefore we've made it a separate upgrade which costs $5, and you can get it on our upgrade page at https://magicmusicvisuals.com/upgrade. We think it's very worthwhile. You will get better-quality .mp4s at higher speeds and smaller file sizes, and it supports very high resolutions (up to 8192 x 4320 and beyond, if your graphics card can handle it!).
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