DV Info Net - I love film look techniques

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I love film look techniques

I love film look techniques; if I weren't already married I would marry DV film look!

Anyway, my friend and I were hanging out at the prospective location of our next short, and I shot a few handheld clips. Here are the screencaps of my treated shots. I burned them to DVD-RW and it all looks GREAT on my TV set. I have yet to watch it on a 16:9 TV, but I expect the resolution will suffer somewhat. I don't have an anamorphic lens adapter. Anyway, I now feel free to focus on working on the 'professional' look (lighting, composition, audio, etc.)

http://www.brucix.com/caps/film2003_caps1.html

Comments please, show no mercy.

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Here's what I did:

Shot 4:3 using TRV-900.
N/D filter on outside, off inside.
Black Pro Mist 1/2 filter.
Pan/crop to 16:9.
Vegas4 effects roughly per Alex K. from other posts in this forum.
Render converting 60i to 24P with Vegas4 de-interlacing.
Burn with no re-encoding with DVD-A.

Cheers
[bac]

Hmm.. the inside shots look OK! Maybe a little bit too softened perhaps. What did you use? Diffusion? Blur? Or just the step-by-step tutorial from Alex

The outside shots tend to be very contrasy... This is just cos it's MiniDV where sunspots are easily overexposed whereas shadows are too dark. Perhaps you could try to decrease the gamma-curve (in After Effects?) to get rid of the heavy differences between sun and shadow?

I heard a numerous times one should increase the gamma-curve to a S-like setting. Indeed real film does have this kind of curve, but then again, film does not suffer from over- and underexposure as much as MiniDV does. So why increasing the gamma curve on MiniDV? In my humble opinion decreasing the curve looks better. in combination with Magic Bullet to add white and black diffusion and a number of other effect's the resulting image get quite acceptable for a consumer MinDV cam ;)

I haven't tried vegas yet, but I'll see what it can do ;)

The whites are way too blown out in many of the images. Learn how to balance out your exposure so that you do not have a lot of hot spots.

http://www.lowel.com/download/lowellbook6_03.pdf

Everything looks soft too, not much detail.

Don't use electronic 16:9, it degrades the image too much.

Best regards,

- don

Rather than use the in-camera 16:9, I used the normal 4:3 mode and then did a pan/scan in Vegas to get to 16:9. This was recommended on the TRV-900 webpage. I can't afford an anamorphic 16:9 lens adapter, unless someone in the PDX area has one that I can borrow/rent :)

I deinterlaced, which probably softened things up. I also just left the BPM 1/2 filter on the whole time we were wandering about, which probably adds to the softness. Also, this was all handheld.

But yeah, it's way to soft and lacking detail. Looks a bit better on my non-widescreen TV.

What would a decreased color curves look like? An inverted S?

I also can't use Magic Bullet, too expensive.

Thanks all!

I rather question if cropping 4:3 to 16:9 is really as bad as it is said. Of course pixels are indeed lost, I agree But after I did some extensive testing I figured that de-interlacing degrades image quality even more, even when a expensive plugin like Magic Bullet is used.

If you look at my other post in this subforum about de-interlacing or progressive mode, you'll see a more detailed explanation of what I mean. Comments are welcome!

I guess I mean the softness from deinterlacing shows up more in a 16x9 frame. Unfortunately I can't get magic bullet or a DVX100 (yet). I wonder if just resampling to 24P but without the de-interlacing would be a good compromise.

The TRV900 has a progressive mode, but it is only 15 FPS. I tried some test shots at 15 FPS, and I think it is way too slow for use on the short we're going to do, even though we don't have a lot of high speed action (just a bit).

I used Blend fields instead of Interpolate fields in the Vegas 4 project settings. Based on screenshot analysis, the Blend option is much softer than the Interpolate option. Next time I will try Interpolate.

Or, you could step up to an XL1S ;-)

Check out the following online demo reel from ThinkStock, shot entirely with an XL1S (and an Optura on a couple of scenes) If you ever get to see their footage in person full frame on a monitor, you should - their footage is first class film look all the way. This highly compressed streaming encode demo shows only a fraction of the quality of their image and style.
http://www.thinkstockfootage.com/showreel.html

If you are in the LA area during the week of June 26 - 28, definitely stop by the CanonDV booth at the Entertainment Technology Show at the LACC and check out the *live* film look demos by P+S Technik and Canon's own David Castillo. David was getting some amazing images with tons of perspective during his live set demos at NAB 2003, not to mention his awesome XL1S scenic reel that was shown last year at all of the different DV shows. Canon needs to put sample clips of this kind of stuff on the web so that people can see what you can do with an XL1S. I'm sure there will be a lot of sample footage to see at the ETW Show this year.

Online samples of the Mini35Digital can be found at http://www.mini35.de. Here's one sample that many are familiar with, yet many have still not seen: http://www.mini35.de/trailer1.mov and http://www.mini35.de/sampleshots.mov.

Here's some testimonials from filmmakers who use the XL1S full tilt:
http://www.zgc.com/html/p_s_technik_...gital_ad1.html

Remember, even though you are holding a video camera, wer'e still talking about a craft called Photography here. When it comes to making pictures, it's all about the glass and a lot of craft... and that time-proven Hollywood "golden rule" will never change. Think of the XL1S as the minimum acceptable standard in Hollywood.

- don

Uh, if I ever get to Hollywood I'll upgrade ;)

I think right now, -I- am the weak link in the chain, not my gear.

I know I can do a lot better than my first short, using the gear I have right now. No need to upgrade until I know I can really make use of it.

Canon 1014 XL-S Real film look

Bravo Bat!

Excellent first post! hehehe

That is some sweet footage shot with one of my all-time favorite cameras.

I haven't been to that site in some time, great site.

Here's a cool article on professional Super-8 Filmmaking by Phillip Fitzlaff:
http://filmshooting.com/filming/page0.php

- don