How to make film feel by using DVCpro50

[hadtodo]

I am using the sequence that shot by Panasonic DVC Pro SDX 900. It is the 4:2:2 sampling rate and compressed slightly. I was shooting in front of green screen and will composite with simple color background. I try to make it as film, so does anyone know the best way to do it.

[FLGB]

What do you mean exactly by "making it as film" or "the film feel"?

[hadtodo]

sorry for my bad English. The thing is that I dont like the digital feel, so is any good way I can do it in shake to make it looks like film.

[FLGB]

The visual differences beetween a digitized film image and a video image are on these main points :
- Different gamma curves. (The film medium reacts differently to light than a CCD)
- Film is usually more grainy.
- Depending on how the film has been digitized, it can have a slight gate weave.

So if you want your video to look like it has been shot on film try these operations :
- Grade your shot so it has a strong contrast and a strong saturation.
- Then you can add a slight grain filter
Thaty should mimic the basic look of film.

My definition of "film look" is based on the medium not on the way of capturing images. Some people make a confusion on this term and think that just because you shoot with a film camera you'll get a special look right out of the box; and if you film with a video camera you'll get crappy results like the guy filming his family playing with the dog. You can make film look like video and video look like film. It's just a matter of having the good persons knowing how to get good pictures out of their camera whatever it is film or video.

[N8]

Originally Posted by moonmoon

Grade your shot so it has a strong contrast and a strong saturation.
Then you can add a slight grain filter
Thaty should mimic the basic look of film.
thx.

The blacks should never be 100% black. But close. And I disagree with the "Strong Saturation" Video is more saturated than film I would say. So I would go with less saturation. The grain is good. Always add grain to a comp even if your not going for the "film look". It just helps a lot to marry the elements together. If your video was shot at 30fps then field merge (or deinterlace) the clip and speed it up to 125% and change the frame rate of the clip to 24fps. Then after the comp is done add 3:2 back in or just let the editor do that. That helps a lot too.

-N8

[buttachunk]

differences;

speed/image
video is interlaced. NTSC is 60 fields per second (half-frames interlaced every other vertical line). film is approx. 24 frames per second with a 180 degree shutter (1/48th). you can convert 60i to 24p in shake.

gamma
as mentioned above, there is a different gamma curve to film. film is 'softer' as far as the gamma. you can mimic this lok with 'lookup'.

color
film carries the spectrum of color on 3 layers (RGB). Video is (generally) converted to YUV space, and compressed to 4:1:1 or 4:2:2. This means that color information is less detailed than luma. you can blur the UV (see DV keying tutorials), and there is a plugin becoming available shortly for this in Shake,,, which is not a chroma blur...

noise
film is softer than video as far as detail as well. one way to achieve this in shake is to blur the footage (approx. 8 pix for NTSC), then apply a mix operator, and mix the blur with the original... around 50%. also, video is noisy and it's 'grain' character is more harsh and has more variance in size. i would recommend denoising the video, then adding a small amount of (softer) film grain.