Additional Resources & Downloads

This page lists several useful resources not included in the main Magic installation, as well as a variety of third-party links and acknowledgements. Most things on this page are either free or have excellent free options. Please let us know if you'd like something added to the list. And if you're a software developer, be sure to check out our Module Development Kit.

VJ Loops/Clips

Our friends at DocOptic have created an amazing variety of high-quality VJ video loops, including a beautiful collection of free loops available for anyone to download. They also have many advanced loop sets and packs available for purchase, giving you an instant world-class upgrade for your VJ arsenal.

Be sure to download your loops in the GPU-accelerated Hap format for the best playback in Magic.

Magic NDI Modules

Lynn Jarvis of Spout fame has graciously provided his time, effort, and expertise to develop native NewTek NDI modules for Magic. To get these modules, head to the MagicNDI GitHub repository, and download either the binary builds (in the Releases tab) or the source code. If you find these modules useful, please thank Lynn for his hard work by donating to his ongoing development.

Expansion pack for GLSLShader module

One of Magic's awesome users, LSC9, has compiled an extensive collection of GLSL shaders for the GLSLShader module. If you haven't played with the GLSLShader module, you're really missing out! LSC9's compilation adds 383 new shaders that provide a wide variety of effects.

Download GLSLShader Expansion Pack

Most of the shaders in the expansion pack, and most of the shaders included in Magic, were obtained or derived from the amazing GLSL Sandbox.

Interactive Shader Format

Magic supports the Interactive Shader Format (ISF) and includes many ISF filters, as described in our User's Guide. ISF was developed by Vidvox, and there is a lot of great information for developers on their ISF blog page. You can also go to interactiveshaderformat.com to find new effects, play around with them directly in your web browser, and download them for use in Magic.

FreeFrame 1.6 plugins

Magic's Performer edition supports the FreeFrame 1.6 plugin specification (FFGL), allowing third-party plugins to be used as Magic modules. The FreeFrame 1.6 web site can be a good starting point to learn more, but it is not well-maintained. For a more up-to-date discussion, visit our forums, where you can do a keyword search for FFGL, or check out this thread for a user-contributed list of plugins.

Magic Tutorials

Our Tutorial Videos page has some quick and easy introductory videos for Magic. We also have a dedicated Tutorials forum that we update regularly. Our other forums provide hundreds of answered questions, extra effects and projects for downloading, and a dedicated community of users. Please join us!

Useful third-party stuff

There's a lot of great software (and hardware) out there in the world that makes Magic even more useful and interesting. Here are a few things that we like.

VB-Cable (Windows) and Soundflower (OSX/macOS) are utilities that allow you to send audio to Magic from other applications on your system.
LoopBe1 (Windows) and MIDI Patchbay (OSX/macOS) are utilities that allow you to send MIDI to Magic (Performer edition) from other applications on your system.
VirtualDub (Windows) and Avidemux (OSX/macOS) are good video encoding tools for image sequences exported from Magic.
The Elgato Game Capture HD is a USB box that lets you capture real-time HDMI video. It's intended for use with XBox and Playstation, but it works just as well for Macs and PCs. Note that two computers are required. We strongly recommend this kind of hardware recorder over software-based capture utilities (such as Fraps or QuickTime) because your system's speed won't be affected.

Open-source libraries

Some of Magic's modules use open-source libraries. Here are a few acknowledgements for all the hard work put in by their developers.

Image support is provided by code from the FreeImage open-source image library. See http://freeimage.sourceforge.net for details. FreeImage is used under the FreeImage Public License, Version 1.0.
Video playback support is provided by code from the FFmpeg open-source library. See http://ffmpeg.org for details. FFmpeg is licensed under the LGPLv2.1, and its source can be downloaded here.
Mathematical expression support is provided by Arash Partow's ExprTk library. See http://www.partow.net/programming/exprtk/ for details.