Make my video look like... video...
 

I have a problem. . . my dv852 footage looks too much like film. I shoot my dog running around, or a car driving by, and then I play it back on t.v. and people want to know what movie is playing! It is nuts. Anyone have any tips on what to do, or some software that will make it look like video? I tried turning all the lights off that I could, and it just made it look better...

I nominate this for DVInfo.net Thread of the Year.

[I might suggest adding white noise to your signal, but with your luck your audience will take it to be film grain.]

I'll bite. What would make it look more like video? Are the colors not sauturated enough, not enough contrast, not enough sharpness? How old is the monitor your viewining the video on?

Whoa! If that's true, I'm sure Canon or Sony will gladly buy it off you for 10x what you paid for it, so they can reverse engineer it and figure out why it looks like film!

Another possibility is that you camera just puts out a really nice picture, and the people judging it as looking like film don't have the technical background to properly make the distinction between the two.

This thread has my vote too for thread of the year :)

Blunt lighting (all from above) might help as well...

This kind of thing is so rare around here that I'm tempted to leave it up for a couple of days, heh.

Hey Eric-- what you need is the kickass new plug-in suite called Tepid Bullet (tm) from Ronco Morpheus Engineering! Though it's still in beta for Windows XP there's such wild interest that they're selling test versions for the budget price of $995.99-- worth every penny. All that bothersome cine look will be gone forever with this supremely powerful tool! Bring on the hash!!


Best,

Michael Pace, Crackpot

Fantastic! Thanks Michael... I will give it a shot!

In all seriousness both Digieffects and The Foundry make After Effects plug ins for a bad TV look. I think they may go a bit over the top (sort of like filming your video on a television screen). My suggestion is to make VHS dupes of your video, until you finally get to the generation loss that you deem appropriate aesthetic-wise. This technique is a bit more subtle. You could even throw in bad web compression to your taped output for stylistic measure.

Hey, you asked...and there's always some sort of solution for these things.

For film look, I recently seen a brief discussion over at 2-pop regarding low-cost hidef sources, like this one--

http://www.pixelink.com/products/600.htm

I'd definitely like to get some opinions over here regarding the viability of using this kind of setup. Obviously sound would have to be DAT'd or minidisc'd separately.

Eric,

Leave on your autofocus, auto-whitebalance and auto-exposure. Under no circumstances clean your lens ever. Next go into the menu, if you have one (might have to use Tepid Bullet if not) and adjust settings until you have completely crushed your blacks and clipped your whites.

Remember to vigourously hosepipe your camera about the place with utter disregard to composition, and for good measure liberally and frequently zoom in and out!

It may still not produce a true video look but something near and that's what matters.

Regards.

p.s use the cheapest tape possible and record in LP mode!

Film That Looks Like Video
 

.... and a lot of other things.

I saw the trailer for "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" the George Clooney flick about Chuck Barris.

It had a very different look to it, especially the portions that were supposed to be a 60's TV show. My guess is that they shot it straight, and then had a lot of fun in post pushing the sliders here and there.

The trouble is with the PV-DV852/MX8/MX1000* is that it's the best 1 CCD cam out there. Like it's too good to be true. Anyways, I suggest shooting in very, very low lighting. That'll get rid of the film look.

*PV-DV852 - North American model
MX8 - the PAL version
MX1000 - the Japanese NTSC version of the MX8 and DV852

Another approach is to use a different cam.... Sharp or Hitachi one chipper, and definitely bottom of the line. That way you will achieve the true video look and save money as well. Unless you just want to spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen working to degrade what may have been judged as good video to begin with.

Nick

... about the pixelink link above ...

it would be fastastic if this device would work, but unfortunately it says that at 1280x1024 you get a max framerate of 14fps. This would mean that at 720p (i.e.1280x720 frame size progressive) you'd get something like 20fps. Shame!

Kailee.

You could always use a program like Twixtor to bump it up a few frames. It redraws in between frames that don't exist.

Hmmm...I'm wondering....might be a viable option....you'd have to lug a laptop around for a hard disk recording device...that might be a cumbersome task.

What's the longest firewire cable made?