No preview in Magic Bullet Looks Builder?

I have had a very annoying problem with LooksBuilder for a long time. Most times, when I opened LooksBuilder to edit a look from Premiere Pro, it showed a black screen, or a frame from another clip in my project. This maked using Magic Bullet Looks very annoying and almost impossible, because I had to practically edit my looks blindly and with trial and error. I looked for it on the Internet, but did not find anything helpful. Someone said this is a “Licensing Problem.”

Today when I was editing a relatively complex sequence, I finally found a trick to make this problem go away. First, Let me tell you my system specs. I’m using Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks 2.0.4 with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 on a dual display system (With different aspect ratios) running a 64-bit version of Windows 7 powered by an ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU. I have installed the latest update of MBL and my LooksBuilder looks like this:

 

So the problem is sometimes when I click Edit from the Effect Controls panel, the Looks Builder shows a blank or an irrelevant preview frame. I think it tries to load the last rendered frame from some place on the memory and often times the right frame isn’t on that part of the memory.

 

 

Whether this is the reason for showing an invalid frame or not, the problem can be solved by simply clicking on the Looks name (The name of the effect) on the Effect Controls panel, wait for the frame to render, and then click the Edit… button. It’s simple as that!

 

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