Looking Like a Real Film

The lighting is the most important thing for the "film look"...period!

The reason the "film look" looks the way it does is that there is tons of time, effort and money dumped into everything but the camera...then, expose carefully so your whites don't blow out, but the image isn't too dark (make sure to fill the shadows with light).

Spend time on set design, costume, makeup, lighting and getting actors who are really good at what they do.

In post, if you shoot correctly, you shouldn't have to do much at all to the footage. If you're really careful about your lighting and getting consistent results...you can nest your sequence into another master sequence and apply a color corrector to the over all edit (depending on your software, you may have a different procedure for this step...mine's for FCP) dropping the blacks slightly, raising the mids slightly and nudging the whites up just a hair.

Search the forums for "film look" to see more in depth posts addressing this topic.

Agreed..

There is no magic film-look button you can push in the NLE. There are several factors that help achieve that look. As knightly said, lighting is probably the most important. Good actors help, thoughtful composition of your frame is a HUGE factor (in a "real film" there is nothing in the scene that wasn't intended -- aside from large outdoor shots that are otherwise uncontrollable) Also, framerate plays a part.

Thanks for the help, I'll work on the lighting!

Also for FCP/ or Final Cut Express users, is there a way to merge all clips in 1 so when you apply widescreen, it applies for all shots?

Thanks,
Jeremy

Assuming you're working with 4:3 footage, the easiest thing to do would be to create a letterbox template image in photoshop (or a similar program) that has the bars on top & bottom with a transparent center image area.

After you get your edit set, just add this image as a new layer over the top of all the existing footage, and drag it out to the length of the project. The nice thing about working this way is it will give you the option to adjust your framing a bit, if your shot was a bit too high or low for the widescreen image. Yes, it does decrease your resolution (I know someone will probably comment on that) but to be honest, it still ends up looking very good.

I've watched standard definition footage masked out to 2.35:1 in this manner projected in a theater and it looked great.

Doesn't the HG10 already shoot a 16:9 image natively though? I thought it did...

knightly said:

The lighting is the most important thing for the "film look"...period!

Click to expand...

I absolutely concur with everyone on this.

I've shot 4:3 at 60i but used film-style lighting techniques and regularly am asked if it's film.

Even more important than the look of the video, in my opinion, is the quality of the sound. Nothing says "amateur video" like sound recorded through the camera's built-in mic.

to widescreen, make a new sequence, place the old sequence in the new one, apply a widescreen filter to the new sequence.

You can then adjust headroom as necessary in the old sequence by shifting the individual clips up or down within the mask's boundaries.

2001 Productions said:

I absolutely concur with everyone on this.

I've shot 4:3 at 60i but used film-style lighting techniques and regularly am asked if it's film.

Even more important than the look of the video, in my opinion, is the quality of the sound. Nothing says "amateur video" like sound recorded through the camera's built-in mic.

Click to expand...

yes and yes...I've also seen stuff shot on 35mm that looks like video. Video that looks incredible and sounds like crap is unwatchable...video that looks like crap with amazing sound and has a compelling story is still a great watch!

Ive found that the most important steps are lighting, correct use of depth of field/blur, and color. But good actors are in that list too. I recently took my old miniDV camcorder, and just shot some stuff and put it into after effects. (This camera is pretty crap, dont use it anymore after i got my XL2) And this camera has no manual blur adjustments and what not. So i put it into After effects after and added a fake DOP look, and added some warm color to it, and a sky replacement and noticed it was a somewhat film look.