What’s wrong with the video?
Maybe you make a living shooting videos, doing corporate work, TV documentaries, or commercials. Maybe you are a film student or a keen fan. Regardless of what you do with video, chances are you want to make movies, even if it’s just for yourself and your friends and family. If you’re new to video production, then the idea of a ‘film look’, in other words, giving video the look of film may seem quite new to you. If you’re new to the idea of a cinematic look, or just know that you want your video to look like a movie, then it can be a daunting task trying to figure out what you need to do to make your video look like that. It was shot on celluloid.
Looking for a ‘movie’ look!
The term ‘film-look’, or filming (as wikepdia calls it) is a generic term that has been applied to many processes, some physical, some chemical, and now many digital. Celluloid (film) is expensive, wasteful and time consuming to develop, not to mention risky – destroying film footage is too easy! Tape is cheap and easy to use, and the quality of video cameras has improved a lot in recent years. With the advent of digital video, almost any camera can record video of acceptable quality – analog cameras were generally not suitable for the film look unless they were of a high-end professional nature. Now, with DV, HD, and HDV, it’s now easier than ever to make a high-quality movie that looks like a movie.
DV, high definition and ‘film look’
It’s important to realize that the higher the quality of the camera you shoot with, the better your filmed piece will appear. Not only the quality of the camera is important, but also the format it uses. DV or digital video is the lowest quality format to use. Ideally, you want to shoot in HDV: a highly compressed high-definition version of DV, or a professional HD variant.
So what creates a ‘cinematic look’ in a video?
Have you been to the theater recently? Film looks very different than raw digital video. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most basic and obvious concepts are the different nature of a film camera and a video camera, and most importantly, that film is a chemical medium, while video is a chemical medium. digital/magnetic medium. The chemical nature of celluloid ensures that it registers color similar to our eyes, has a much greater brightness range, and does not clip shadows or highlights. Digital video stores image data in a finite range, and brightness is stored in a linear fashion, very different from how the human eye sees it. Motion is different too, with much less motion blur in an image.
The Evil Legacy of Analog Video: Interlaced
One of the telltale signs in the video is the jagged sawtooth like edges that are produced by the interlacing process. In short, interlacing refers to the display of half a frame of video. Each frame is divided into odd and even lines, which are recorded and displayed out of time to increase the amount of motion recorded. This means that still images have a higher resolution and moving images have more movement (although less resolution).
Creating an authentic film look requires the use of a 24p camera or other progressive format or a deinterlacer to make the interlaced video progressive (or single frame). This progressive frame will not exhibit motion artifacts caused by interlacing, assuming it has been deinterlaced well.
Color correction / Graduation
Much of the look of the film comes from grading/coloring. Video is given a more film-like appearance by using Gamma and Contrast adjustments. The most common way to give an image a more film-like focus is to use a curve tool to create a smooth s-like curve. The s-curve simulates the way film responds to brightness, non-linearly, compared to the straight line of video.
Color correction is used to reduce the excessively bright and saturated appearance of video. Color correction is also used to stylize the piece; this often helps with the look of film because film cinematography is often much more complex than video lighting, where lighting is the foundation of exposure.
The flashing of film footage and color synchronization, which is done in the development lab after shooting, can be easily simulated in software and contribute greatly to what most audiences subconsciously recognize as the look. from a movie.
Tricks of the trade: Advanced laboratory processes
Filmmakers often use some form of processing in the lab to achieve a particular look. Movies like Saving Private Ryan and Munich use a process known as bleach bypass. This increases contrast and reduces saturation by leaving silver halide on the negative; it is usually washed out to show the newly developed image. Essentially, the bleach skip can be simulated in Adobe After Effects and similar packages by blending a black and white version of the image over the original color image. However, if you want an authentic-looking bleach bypass, you’re better off considering well-known film-looking software as a plug-in for your post-production system.
Other key indicators of film-based production are optical filters, such as diffusers and neutral density filters. These alter the quality of light by softening, darkening, and blooming specific parts of the image. Diffusers work by affecting specific sections of the tonal range, such as shadows and highlights. Neutral density filters dim overly bright skies and have resulted in the kind of sunset shots seen in many Bruckheimer and Simpson films of the 1980s and 1990s.
Depth of field: the shallower the better
For those looking for an authentic look, there are a few other issues to consider. The first is depth of field. Depth of field refers to how much of an image is in focus and how much is blurred. A camera can only focus on a single point in an image (in terms of depth) and anything closer or further from the lens will get progressively out of focus. How quickly the image loses focus with distance is described by the depth of field. A narrow depth of field has only a narrow focal depth, and a deep focus lens keeps most of the image in focus.
Focus is directly related to the size of the image receiving device, whether it is a digital CCD/CMOS sensor or a collection of halide grains on a piece of celluloid. To achieve film-like depth of field (which is relatively shallow), a large sensor is required. While some cameras, like the Panavision Genesis, have 35mm sensors, these video cameras are expensive. Cheaper professional and prosumer cameras have much smaller sensors, creating a much greater depth of field than your film camera.
To achieve true film-like depth of field with any camera, you will need a lens adapter that allows you to create a film-like depth of field. A highly recommended 35mm lens adapter is the M2 from http://www.redrockmicro.com.
Film grain: a non-digital artifact
Film grain is actually very small. We only tend to consciously see it in the theater where the picture is big. When shown on TV, the film grain tends to disappear and this has become a tell-tale flaw in the cinematic look. Said failed attempts involve using some sort of noise generation in your NLE or later suite to simulate film grain. Said noise not only doesn’t look like film grain at all, it’s also too big.
Simulation of grain should be avoided at all costs, except for an aged film appearance.
Cinematography
capture as much tonal latitude as you can, compressing highlights and lowlights into a visible range where detail is preserved. Then you’ll zoom in again in your movie look plugin, but while shooting it’s imperative to capture as much detail as possible.
Also consider creative lighting: why light for video, perhaps emulating the lighting style of your favorite movie. As much as possible, try to stay away from 3-point lighting, which is better suited for a quick setup than a creative image. This article cannot hope to cover the wide range of lighting techniques used by cinematographers; actually, you should read everything you can about it, so research is the key here.
Finally…
If you’ve been creative with lighting, tried to create a shallow depth of field, and wisely used a film look system like Halide: Film Look System ([http://www.ambervisual.com/halidedemo.asp]) should have a good movie look. Getting the perfect cinematic look isn’t easy and takes practice like any other discipline in filmmaking, but it can deliver phenomenal results, and despite what some may say, audiences respond better to narratives that have cinematic qualities, video is too associated with the news. and reality TV.