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What is wrong with this clip?

Please have a look at the first 5 seconds of the below video in full 1080p HD repeatedly. Regarding that 1st five seconds with the character walking, I have taken that clip and using After Effects, did different color correction applications and film grain application etc. and still cannot seem to make it look even close to film-like, as a real movie shot. I know it was perhaps filmed with a digital camera and not a film camera, but the clip looks so fake. Even with professional color correction etc. I believe it would still look fake.

What in your opinion makes this 5 second shot look non-film like and looks like an amateur filmed it with an HD camera? There is something with the movement of the character, I don't know how to explain it but watching that clip tells me straight away that it was not from a shot in an actual film, but straight away it tells me that it was shot by an amateur. It is something I see with a lot of videos on youtube and straight away one can tell that it is a cheap amateur shot. I mean, some people post clips online from actual movies and one can tell straight away that those clips came from professional feature films. So, apart from color correction and lighting, what would you say makes this 5 second shot look fake and 'un-film' like? I even believe that with best color correction and better lighting, there would still be something cheap about the look of the film - because motion wise and how the movement flows, it looks cheap.

I hope you understand what I am trying to explain. Thanks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCj8BkfpZU4
 
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Somehow, it looks like it was shot at 30fps rather than 24fps, but certain cameras will do a better job of producing true 24fps than other cameras, as I have come to discover.

The image quality, at 1080p, is not very good. Depending on what camera you used, you could get a more crisp edge on the objects in frame, especially if you would have shot in 4k and downscaled it to 1080p before exporting: which crams more detail into the same 1080 size. Might want to add an unsharp mask effect to it to pull out more edge detail since you can't go back and re-shoot it.

For color correction, I would suggest taking your blacks down even further around those trees in the back, bringing up your whites so that they aren't capped off at their current level, brightening up your actor with a power window (aka an animated mask on an adjustment layer), pulling out the blues in the sky and your actor's shirt, and then adding some warmer orange and golden tones to all of that tall dry grass in the foreground to make it feel like a more legitimate sunny day. You could even go closer to red at the very bottom.

The film look requires dynamic range to look right, which you don't have enough of, and often a strong presence of purposeful color is important as well, even though plenty of films look filmic with very desaturated visuals: like the Revanant or True Grit. Right now your footage just looks very flat and my eye isn't being pulled to your actor naturally, even though I know I'm supposed to focus on him. This is why you need to pull him towards us more by brightening him up some and maybe adding a very broad faded vignette around him.

Hope this all gets you a better result. :)
 
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So, apart from color correction and lighting

That's a big part of it.

That big harsh direct yellow ball of fire in the sky isn't doing you any favors for making great looking shots. Diffuse that light, raise up the mid tones and it'll look a lot better.

Framing and blocking make a world of difference. The shot is boring. Nothing is really happening. The lack of foreground can make the picture feel like it lacks depth. The movement is also unmotivated. The lack of color contrast also hurts. It's up there with the typical, "Alarm clock wake up shot". There is no atmosphere (music, sound design) accompanying your shot to create a feeling, so you're left with a dull, boring, poorly filmed, poorly exposed shot.

It doesn't help that the backgrounds don't match the foreground.

I'm not a DOP. You'd be better off talking with a great DOP to why this shot looks bad. They'll know a hell of a lot more than me on the subject.

You want to know why it looks amateur? Because it is.
 
There's a number of factors at play here, which all add up to this looking a lot more 'amateurish'.

I'll try to break down some of them.

First and foremost, the shot is obviously from a camera that uses high compression and lower bit-rates. The trees are just a blurry mess of green, the foreground grass similarly has no definition around it, and it looks like there could be an amount of in-camera sharpening coupled with a cheap(er), soft(er) lens, so you're sharpening a soft(er) image to begin with.

You've got a limited dynamic range - with large areas of the background trees black, and parts of our subjects hoodie getting into over-exposure territory. In addition, his face (the part we're drawn to) is severely under-exposed. We need a light or some bounce to get in there and bring it up a bit.

The natural colours of the scene are quite nice, but how do they fit in with the colours of our subject there? His costume design looks like it's his own choice which doesn't help, especially with the white stripes. How does the satchel fit in?

We also have quite a deep depth of field, which could be due to the sensor size of the camera, the stop of the lens or something else.

I personally think simply lowering the camera just a touch, moving camera left a bit, then moving a few feet back and using a longer lens to get a shallower depth of field (and/or an ND) would help immensely. Couple that with some creative grading and you'd be well on your way.

Shoot with a higher bit-rate, less-compressed camera, with some nicer lenses, put some thought into your costume choice, turn in-camera sharpening off, shoot with a log gamma or flat profile to get maximum dynamic range, and use a deeper depth of field and you'd be looking at something significantly nicer.

The compression artifacting may also be very much due to compression for YouTube, so it may not be quite as bad on the original masters.

Certainly you can still get non/less 'amateurish' footage out of a cheaper, higher compressed etc. camera - it's just harder to get it to where you want it to.
 
Wow jax_rox, I have learnt a lot from this; thank you!. It is good when a pair of experienced eyes can offer their input, so others can learn.

In terms of bit-rate and compression, I assume these are unique to a camera and cannot be adjusted and therefore they are fixed values? Hence, the only way to have a different bit-rate and compression is to choose a camera with the desired bit-rate and compression?
 
Another factor I feel is that the mountain is very crisp. If you look at the trees behind him, they are beginning to fall out of focus and as mentioned above, the compression is taking over. The fact that the mountain is looking pretty clear at a focal plane much further back also does it for me.
 
The reason it looks cheap is because it was done by tilting the camera from up to down.
If they used a crane to go from high to low it would look cinematic. Crane > Tilt

My crime thriller uses a crane to open and it makes it look really exciting and much more professional than a lot of the crap you see on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo5Yl9kyn8k
 
In terms of bit-rate and compression, I assume these are unique to a camera and cannot be adjusted and therefore they are fixed values? Hence, the only way to have a different bit-rate and compression is to choose a camera with the desired bit-rate and compression?

It's hard to give a definitive answer on this as it really depends on the camera and the system the camera and manufacturer uses.

Some cameras have different modes with different compression rates, some have different bit-rates depending on resolution, others use different codecs which are better or worse.

For example, with a Sony FS5 you can record 10-bit footage in 1080p HD, but only 8-bit in UHD 4k. Sony uses their own codec, XAVC, which compresses differently to a standard H.264, so it tends to look better than H.264.

The best way to discern what you're after is to test the cameras you're looking at, and see if they give you what you want, as looking only at the specification of the compression rate, it doesn't necessarily tell you much about how the camera will respond in a real world situation.

Another factor I feel is that the mountain is very crisp. If you look at the trees behind him, they are beginning to fall out of focus and as mentioned above, the compression is taking over. The fact that the mountain is looking pretty clear at a focal plane much further back also does it for me.

It seems that they wanted a deeper depth of field, because maybe it was too hard to put a mountain in, and then adjust it to match an out of focus plane (or maybe they weren't thinking about that and were just confronted with a sunny day), so it's possible that they've stopped down to f/22 or similar on a cheapish lens to get the exposure they're looking for, and there's now lens diffraction in addition to everything else
 
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