David Fincher Colours
 

Howdy,
Does anyone know of any good ways of getting that green/blue look that David Fincher films always seem to have (Fight Club, Panic Room....). I also see it in other films but I am using his as a reference.

I have Magic Bullet 2 for AE but it renders far too slow on my P4 with 2 gig of RAM. I am looking for maybe a colour correction plugin that has presets. Except Film Magic Pro, that is good, but the presets are a little over the top and complicated to manualy change.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

IJ

You're right up against processor power and RAM vs. rendering time, I'm afraid.

I've tried it on P4s before, and since that time have had to switch to dual cores with more than 5GB RAM, etc., due to deadline issues.

Still not fast (need 8-cores for that) but hey, the rendering times before now used to be in weeks, not in days, so maybe you just render while you're sleeping and live with it until you can move up?

I think that most of the programs/plugins will work much the same way - in the end you're processing a bunch of frames and storing them someplace else, and the raw processing time on a P4 would seem to be the bottleneck here.

HTH, YMMV etc.

Doesn't Magic Bullet use the video card for rendering? If so, the pathetic VPU that comes with most computers is less than worthless.

Also, what sort of OS can use 5Gig of RAM? The hardware you guys are using sounds like it runs Windows.

There's a processor sharing program called QMaster that Compressor and other programs running under OSX can use, and when you have a multiple core or duo processor you can set up an internal rendering farm. When you do this, RAM and HD space can affect the issue.

Halide should run at a pretty fast speed on a P4.

Learn to use basic correction tools.. anything that can be done with magic bullet can be done by hand/eye. There are glow/diffusion looks which require you composit layers, but in terms of COLOUR there is absolutely nothing you can do with magic bullet that you can't do by hand

For reference, all of our videos on www.thehold.co.uk were graded in vegas. typically with a Colour Curves effect which tones the colour (red/green/blue curves tweaked by hand, probably a dozen points). Note that stopping one or more curves from reaching their max (ie top-right of the graph) is an important tool... then a HSL (hue/sat/lum) to get the overall saturation where I want it, then another Curves but this time altering the luminance (rgb combined), to get the contrast where I want it.... (important that the contrast/gamma is altered after the colour, otherwise the colours will shift as you alter the contrast)..

Hope that helps a bit- really, learn the basics, 3-way colour corrector is industry standard and works for a lot of people too (personally I use it less than I used to, but it's entirely valid).

check out the site http://www.marlathemovie.com They white balanced to orange cards to get a green/blue color cast in camera and then adjusted the levels to get that look which is quite close to what you're looking for...and it was shot on a GL2 with a 35mm adapter made from an old camera with the eye piece reticle screen replaced with Ground glass and a goofy camera mount that placed the GL2 vertically in relation to the 35mm camera.

Creativity at its' best!