Glad my comments were appreciated Nik - the timing of your cafe conversation is spooky - I think we are somehow linked, or there's a Divine suggestion that we would both benefit greatly if we were.
I hear you on FPS - I'm often at the limit because for real-time projects I tend to refine my scenes until FPS just holds up.
However, if you don't need real-time interaction, as when making a video to accompany a pre-recorded track, Magic's frame rate does not matter.
Magic records the video slowly, a frame at a time, taking as long as it needs for each frame. It's like a stop-frame animation.
The video will play at full speed on adequate equipment (perhaps not on the machine that made it!). You could even render a UHD video that plays at 60 FPS with your present machine - but it might take all night for a three-minute run time!
When designing the video you can usefully work at a lower resolution than you want for final rendered output, and get a much higher framerate. I tend to stick to 1280x720 during design, then render the final version at 1920x1080.
For complex scenes I sometimes drop to 640x360 during design to maintain FPS. More often I just power-off certain elements of the scene so those I'm actively adjusting run at full speed.
Work at the frame rate you wish to use for display. 60 FPS is great, and looks much smoother on an adequate monitor. Changing frame rate fundamentally affects any module like Trails that uses a frame buffer, so keep frame rate the same during design as you want for final output.
Note - An additional limitation to final resolution is GPU memory, and this also limits the size of project that can be pre-loaded to guarantee smooth transitions between scenes when playing in real-time.
re "Tomorrow Never Comes":
It slows down to 5 FPS on some scenes when playing real-time, even at 1280x720.
Thanks re the start. There, and in many other places, I feed waveform-based images into the input of the Starfield. They are replicated in the same way as the circles. You can feed anything in, but an image with a black surround or background works best as a Starfield input IMO. It's often useful to use LumaKey (Add>Effects2D>LumaKey) between your image and the Starfield's input. Otherwise some "Stars" get obscured by the black edges of the input scene.
As far as I recall the Mask module was not available when I worked on TNC. In some cases I had to arrange black planes in 3D space to obscure unwanted elements of an input image.
Sorry if the above isn't clear. Right now I'm in a hurry as I have clients waiting for photographs. ( You can see some examples of my photography on my website
http://www.terrypayman.com/ )
Cheers,
Terry